Client Relationships Management (CRM) software is a great tool for interacting with your clientele and analyzing their buying/interaction patterns. To the inexperienced eye, a CRM might look intimidating, but it is an absolute blessing for an experienced marketer like me. CRMs are ideal for automating your sales process, keeping customers and prospects in the content loop and often dealing with the day to day tasks in your company.

I have a couple of handy pieces of advice for how to approach CRM systems that should be helpful for your business and you can use to increase your brand’s customer loyalty and responses.

• Stay up-to-date. This is the basic rule that a lot of new CRM users miss. Keep your contact list up today. You should frequently update your customer list; new information with the client’s preferred form of communication, email, phone number, address etc. It is also essential that you clean up your list at least one or two times  a year (at a minimum) to get rid of misspelled, incorrect or unmarketable contacts as well as bad email addresses. This “purging” will help your email deliverability rates.

• Use the Automation. Most CRM software nowadays has an option to set up custom workflows that can be programmed and tailored for your needs. It is often a herculean task to personally answer all your customer’s emails, send out thousands of “thank you” or “welcome” emails and wait for a client to sign up for a form without using automation. Use them wisely!

• Use Templates. Work smart, not hard. You need to use templates for the media in CRM’s. This will save you time writing thousands of similar-looking emails, congratulatory letters and blog posts. More time saved on needless bureaucracy – more time you have for something more important. Templates will also help you diversify your responses to appropriate client groups without increasing your workload. Last, it is easier to use templates for the new or inexperienced workers at your business.

• Collect and analyze. CRM’s are perfect for collecting useful information about client’s interactions with your content. You can check out email open rates, click-through rates, prospects interactions, customer conversion and customer retention rates. These are really important to understand how good your marketing efforts are performing.

• Talk to Support. I bet you didn’t expect that. Yes, a lot of CRM users do not speak with the support available for the software. That is a grave mistake that newbies and experienced marketers make! Talking with support will save you a lot of nerves and help you resolve ANYTHING that can go wrong with the software. Customer support exists for a reason!

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