A Marketers in Demand company

CRM and Customer Retention

Jacob Brain

Author

Data matters.

That might sound obvious, but from our experience not everyone fully understands how important data can be to your marketing and retention efforts. Much of advertising falls into the “spray and pray” mentality of traditional media. With digital media, the core advantage is the collection of thousands of data to allow you to critically evaluate your customer behaviors.

In this current age of marketing and advertising, if you are not reviewing and analyzing your data, you are losing. The technology today allows the local barbershop to mine its data with the sophistication that was once only reserved for the largest corporations. With these powerful tools at your disposal, decisions need to be made in light of data.

It’s the marketer’s version of the scientific age. Every decision we suggest to our clients comes from data, and our “collective experience” at New North, comes from data analysis too.

Once you get started with data, it will be easy to see that the more data you have the better your decision making process will become. With a proper threshold of data you can actually go from historical review to predictive analysis. Actually foreseeing what your customers will do in light of an event.

Can you imagine knowing the return on every piece of marketing you do before you pull the trigger? This is the why data should matter to you.

Choosing a CRM

Now that you understand the importance of data, how do you go about collecting it? The most popular and recommended way to do this is with a Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM. Your CRM should allow you to not only collect information on the demographics of your customers, but also on the historical behaviors of your customers.

This is the driving factor in selecting a CRM. Does it allow you to track more than just demographics, but allow you to track the relationship, reaction to marketing, or customer service? The selection of a CRM should contain the sophistication to allow you to bring Website, email, and offline data into the record as well. The more complete picture you can get from your records the better.

Using a CRM for Retention

With data collection in place you now have a platform for tracking and making decisions about retention. By keeping data on your customers, you now take control in the relationship. If you have enough data you should be able to see patterns, allowing you to see what might happen in a churn case, and allow it to not happen again.

Many CRMs focus on sales funnels, but there is a retention funnel as well and you are in control of how wide open you make that funnel. Data collection is the first step in creating a predictive model for churn, and one you have that set you can start looking for outreach to combat it.

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