Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Adding Personalized Value with CRM Software

In a recent piece for Destination CRM on the benefits of personalization within marketing, Marshall Lager wrote that “personalization provides marketing communications with the means to deliver real value to customers”. Lager cites recent research suggesting that although CMOs understand this potential value of personalized marketing a majority are having troubles putting it into practice.

As the CMO for a CRM software company, this article seemed especially relevant to discuss. At Concursive, it has always been a focus of ours to make software that will help maximize the value of relationships - starting from the beginning of a sales cycle. For our software, personalization is a goal in every stage, especially when marketing to new leads.

This is the approach we had with ConcourseSuite 5.0: to increase value in the sales cycle, our tool aids in capturing information from multiple sources, including websites/contact forms, and drop it right into the Leads Management module. Then using the integrated Marketing module, we can create groups based on granular filtering of various criteria and message in a variety of formats.

We’ve also worked to make it easy to build complex email campaigns that generate specific messages based on certain responses, timelines or behavior patterns - i.e. using intelligence and rules to automate the personalization.

The tool also provides for the delivery of surveys to ensure feedback is being captured and used to refine messaging, etc. the next time around - closing the loop and ensuring each cycle is better than the last.

To put it simply: ConcourseSuite helps take out the difficult organization and cumbersome time required to personalize each lead and deliver real value to every potential customer. The more personal interactions you have with customers, the more customers will feel actively involved in the message you are communicating and the greater connection they will feel with your organization. Once you can make that valuable connection with your customers, your customers will become more valuable to you by being more loyal, buying more products and spreading word of mouth.

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