Digital upskilling

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the process and associated technology of managing relationships and communications with your customers. The goal should be to provide value to your audience. It can serve many goals such as:

1. Encouraging purchase and repeat purchases.
2. Providing free value.
3. Informing them about their product/service.

Typically, the method of communication that a CRM platform will materialise in is email and or SMS. Having a well structured CRM platform is critical, especially for the longevity of your brand and revenue. The first party data that you own is a gold mine for both insights as well as a tool to use in paid advertising channels for future campaigns.

Common platforms

• Klaviyo
• Hubspot
• Salesforce
• Mailchimp

Which platform is right for you? If you’re a small business and are simply looking for a way to talk to your audience, then consider Mailchimp or Klaviyo as a starting point. Whilst all available options will offer the basic functionality of communicating to your customers, keep things simple until you have a requirement for all possible inclusions that a more expensive system may use.

Segmentation

Within your CRM software, you will have the ability to segment your customers based on their attributes or behaviour. Investing time in this is very important. For example, if you sell shoes online to men and women, then you wouldn’t want to email everyone about a sale you’re having on female specific designs.

Other segmentations include people who have added to cart and not checked out with automated card recovery emails.

Consent upon collection

It is incredibly important to gain consent from your audience if you intend on utilising their data in any way. Upon first purchase or if you’re collecting their data via another first-party-data capturing strategy, it is essential that you allow them to opt in and opt out at any time.

Check out our short video covering CRM.