CRM (Customer Relationship Management) refers to the management of relationships with customers. A CRM strategy is a corporate strategy aimed at maintaining and managing positive customer relationships to generate continuous revenue and secure profitability. In today's market, where similar products and services are abundant and competition is intense, it can be difficult to maintain or increase revenue solely by acquiring new customers. Therefore, it is essential to acquire not only new customers but also repeat customers who make continuous purchases. A CRM strategy must be implemented as a marketing activity that provides an appropriate approach to each individual customer to build strong, lasting relationships.
Benefits of a CRM Strategy
A CRM strategy offers various benefits, such as gaining a deep understanding of customer needs, enabling data-driven business operations, and facilitating personalized customer approaches. By implementing a CRM strategy, companies can execute effective marketing centered on building strong customer relationships.
Gain a Deep Understanding of Customer Needs
Adopting a CRM strategy allows you to understand customer needs at a deeper level. Customer needs can be categorized into those that are apparent through behavior and those that are less visible. Identifying latent customer needs is challenging, as customers themselves may not be aware of them.
Since competitors can also identify surface-level needs, addressing only those will not lead to differentiation. By implementing a CRM strategy, you can analyze data such as purchase history, website behavior, and customer attributes to uncover even the latent needs that the customers themselves have not yet realized. Understanding these individual latent needs allows you to engage customers from a perspective that sets you apart from competitors.
Enable Data-Driven Business Operations
Traditionally, sales and marketing efforts have relied heavily on the experience and skills of individual sales representatives. However, in the modern business landscape, the importance of data-driven operations—leveraging the various data collected and managed within the company—is gaining significant attention. Relying solely on individual knowledge and experience provides only a partial view of the customer. In contrast, data accumulated within the company includes not only attributes such as industry, business type, and organizational structure, but also product purchase history and feedback information.
By implementing a CRM strategy, you can centrally manage and analyze all this customer data. By utilizing vast amounts of historical data to analyze purchasing trends, you can identify customer needs with high accuracy. When decisions are based on data analysis, there is no longer a need to rely on individual intuition or skill when determining the direction of marketing initiatives. This allows for highly efficient marketing activities based on reliable analysis derived from extensive accumulated data.
Implement Personalized Customer Approaches
As mentioned above, by adopting a CRM strategy that enables a deep understanding of needs through customer data, you can tailor your approach to each individual customer. By delving into and analyzing individual attributes, usage history, and after-sales service records, you can grasp exactly what the customer is seeking.
Customer data allows you to analyze trends across large groups while also examining individual data in detail. By analyzing individual history, you can identify specific needs, allowing you to narrow down and customize product or service proposals for an optimal approach. This historical data can be utilized not only for sales outreach but also as a reference for support interactions.
Improve Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is widely considered a critical metric, as it leads to an increase in LTV (Life Time Value). It is generally understood that acquiring new customers costs significantly more than engaging repeat customers who have already purchased your products or services. Because you can reach satisfied repeat customers with lower costs, you can improve sales efficiency.
Utilizing CRM allows for the centralized management of customer information, enabling seamless data sharing across marketing, sales, and customer support departments. Every department can view, update, and store various records, from initial outreach and purchase history to support interactions. By nurturing customers through optimal approaches and campaigns based on this accumulated individual data, you can expect a significant improvement in customer satisfaction.
[Reference Article] What Is CRM Marketing? An Easy-to-Understand Introduction to Strategies and Benefits
How to Promote CRM Strategies
To advance a CRM strategy, follow steps such as confirming goals and objectives, defining the target audience, and designing the customer journey. After implementing the tool, the process is completed by reviewing KPIs and verifying the results.
Confirm Goals and Objectives
First, it is essential to clearly define what you want to achieve through your CRM strategy. Consider why the CRM strategy is necessary and the current challenges you wish to resolve, clarifying the gap between your current state and your goals. Goals should be more specific than broad objectives like "increasing profits." For example, if your goal is to "increase profits by nurturing and retaining repeat customers," you must break this down into more granular objectives such as "reactivating dormant customers" or "converting existing customers into loyal customers." It is important to set quantitative goals, such as specific figures for order values, customer counts, or average transaction values, along with concrete solutions and the extent of their implementation. To achieve these goals, the content must be shared beyond specific departments. By widely sharing and thoroughly communicating the decided goals across relevant departments, each team can collaborate and act toward achieving them.
Set the Target Audience
Next, define the customers your company will target. Setting a target allows you to narrow down the audience with whom you should actively communicate, enabling you to build deeper relationships with customers. To enhance the effectiveness of CRM in improving customer relationships, you must develop strategies with each individual customer in mind. It is recommended to set targets based on information from people who have already used your company's services or products. Segment targets in detail—including attributes such as industry, business type, and office location, as well as organizational structure, specific business operations, and financial status—and create personas to represent these customer profiles. Use these personas to conduct analyses that clarify customer needs, which will lead to the development of effective strategies based on the analysis results.
Design the Customer Journey
After setting the target, design a customer journey that visualizes customer behavior and thought processes. When creating a customer journey map, divide the user's actions into phases, such as "Awareness" when the customer first encounters the product or service, "Comparison and Consideration" of the product to purchase, and the "Purchase" itself. By incorporating the thoughts and emotional changes at each phase into a framework, you can complete a customer journey map that provides an overview of the entire flow. When the map visualizes customer behavior and thinking at each phase, it becomes easier to appropriately judge which approach is effective at any given point. Designing a customer journey helps streamline the planning and review of marketing initiatives.
Implement the Tool
It is effective to advance CRM strategies by leveraging tools. By implementing a CRM tool that can store, centrally manage, and analyze customer data, you can drive your CRM strategy forward. While implementing a CRM tool involves costs such as initial fees and running costs, it is essential for utilizing customer management in the formulation of marketing initiatives.
Using a tool allows for cross-departmental information sharing regarding customer data. For companies where customer information has been fragmented—with different departments like marketing, sales, and customer service holding separate data—the introduction of a CRM tool that allows for the sharing and verification of the latest data at any time leads to various benefits.
From customer purchase history to records of sales activities conducted for each customer and post-purchase follow-up data, information that previously resided within individual departments can be accessed immediately by utilizing a CRM tool. Points to note when using a CRM tool and detailed selection methods will be discussed in depth later.
Consider KPIs
After deciding on a CRM tool, you will set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). It is necessary to set KPIs to verify through numerical data whether the introduction of the CRM tool is effective. KPIs include "inflow to purchase pages," "number of sales meetings," "lead conversion rate (CVR)," "number of orders received," "average customer spend," and "repeat rate." Since the optimal KPI varies depending on the nature of the business, it is important to set appropriate KPIs by comparing them with the goals set in advance for your specific business.
Verify Results
The numerical values of the set KPIs are used for analysis to confirm whether the CRM strategy is yielding results. By configuring the CRM tool's features, such as dashboards and reporting functions, to allow for regular monitoring of KPI analysis results, you can easily confirm important outcomes.
In a CRM strategy, it is also necessary to verify and improve initiatives to understand how much progress is being made toward your objectives. By utilizing result verification to help validate initiatives and running a PDCA cycle to improve them, you can efficiently achieve results.
Points to Consider When Introducing CRM Strategy Tools
CRM strategy tools do not necessarily yield immediate benefits such as increased profits upon implementation. When using CRM strategy tools, it becomes possible to accumulate, correct, and utilize a wide variety of customer information. Because tools make it easy to analyze customer data, it is important to perform data analysis repeatedly over the long term and check the achievement status of your initiatives. After introducing a tool, effects may gradually increase by continuing to improve the necessary measures to enhance relationships with customers over a long period.
To utilize a CRM tool strategically, customer data must be properly collected and accumulated. Depending on the field operations of each company, even basic customer data such as industry, business type, or office address may not be accumulated in order to simplify data entry. In cases where data is insufficient, it may be difficult to perform analysis based on your own company's data. If your internal data is limited, you can supplement missing information by utilizing a database with information enrichment features, such as "uSonar".
When a CRM tool is introduced, there may be cases where it is difficult for employees who are not comfortable with IT tools to adopt them. Since there may be resistance to using the tool from employees who are not comfortable with it, it is important to notify the company of the importance and benefits of introducing CRM. It is also necessary to conduct training so that employees do not struggle with how to use the tool.
How to Select CRM Strategy Tools
When choosing a CRM strategy tool, it is necessary to pay attention to the tool's functionality, usability, integration capabilities, and support structure. Rather than focusing on a single point such as features or usability, choose a tool that meets the criteria required by your company from various perspectives.
Selecting by Functionality
CRM tools include features such as opportunity management, schedule management, customer information management, customer analysis, and marketing support. Since the features and details vary depending on the tool, it is important to confirm in advance which functions your company needs. Some tools have features that automatically create reports for customer analysis, and others are equipped with features that automatically extract target segments to provide marketing support. While comparing multiple tools, choose one that is equipped with the functions necessary to address your company's challenges and achieve your goals.
Selecting by Usability
When choosing a tool, you must also pay attention to its usability. Even if the tool is feature-rich, it may not be utilized in the field if it is difficult to use. The operational burden on staff to learn how to operate it will also increase.
If a tool is easy to operate, it becomes easier for employees to use, and adoption in the field will be smooth. Since many CRM tools offer "free trial versions," it is recommended to check the user experience before making a selection.
Selecting by Integration Capabilities
CRM tools can further streamline operations by integrating with external tools. It is important for each department to share the latest customer information. If you can integrate with other tools currently operated by your company, you can use the data from those existing tools for analysis as is. On the other hand, if integration with existing data is difficult, you may need to perform tedious tasks such as converting data to CSV files every time you use it. To improve operational efficiency, it is important to check integration capabilities before selecting a tool.
Selecting by Support Structure
CRM tools are important assets that will be used for a long time after introduction. When there are points that are unclear regarding operation, there are often cases where you will need to check with support. It is recommended to choose a tool with a robust support structure, as they can answer questions and resolve issues regarding operation methods, doubts, and utilization methods. While some support services are paid, it is reassuring to request support if the fees are not excessive.
[Reference Article] What Is the Necessity of CRM in Marketing? Points for Product Comparison and Selection
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