Whether you are a new insurance agent or operating a well-established business, your focus is always on the customer and ways to improve and nurture your customer relationships. Customer management relationship (CRM) platforms are a valuable tool that can help you improve your customer relationships, boost productivity, and streamline your sales pipeline.
However, even the best CRM software can only work as a tool within an implemented CRM marketing strategy. Here we look at some of the best CRM strategy examples that can help your business meet your goals.
Key Takeaways
- Define a CRM strategy
- Understand the benefits of implementing a CRM and CRM strategy
- Learn how to create a CRM strategy
- Explore different CRM strategies
Top 7 CRM strategies to get the most out of your CRM
In order to get the most out of your CRM, it is best to follow these top CRM strategies.
1. Customer engagement and tracking
A CRM marketing strategy’s most important goal is to get to know your customers and their needs. CRM software can give you a much clearer picture of your clients and potential audience. When you establish a client database within the CRM, you can track important information, such as how you acquire leads, how they interact with your business, when your last engagement with them was, what policies and services they are really looking for, and how much they spend.
Once you have this information collected, you can get a much clearer picture of exactly what works and what doesn’t. You can learn valuable information, such as what ads promote engagements, whether or not leads open marketing emails, and which social media platforms lead to the most beneficial engagements.
2. Continuous, tailored, and targeted marketing
Taking full advantage of your CRM will allow you to boost your marketing capability by creating continuous, and often automated, marketing campaigns that target specific segments of your client database, eliminating the one-size-fits-all marketing strategy that rarely provides the results you desire. These three tips can help you create a tailored marketing strategy that will prove more effective and lead to more conversions.
Personalization
Almost everyone wakes up to an email inbox filled with an assortment of bulk marketing emails. The goal of an effective email marketing campaign is to make sure that your contact opens up and reads your material. This is where personalization comes into play. In fact, an Experian email market study showed that emails that included personalized subject lines had a 26% higher open rate than those without any personalization. This can be achieved through your CRM and, while you are still using bulk email campaigns, each email can include a personalized touch when created within the CRM.
Customer segmentation
Once you have personalization in place, you need to consider what messages you are sending, and which customers will respond best to each message. Marketing with a one-size-fits-all approach rarely works, so you need to tailor your marketing campaigns to the needs of your clients. With a CRM, you can segment similar clients into groups, allowing you to send specific marketing messages to each unique group, increasing your response rate.
Get straight to the point
In the busy world that we live in, no one has time to sit and read a marketing email that dances around the message they are trying to get across. When creating your email marketing campaigns, get straight to the point and be specific about the products or services you are trying to promote.
3. Regular database management
As your business grows, so will your contact list. As your list grows, clients will experience changes in their life. For example, couples may divorce, and other clients or leads may pass away. Staying on top of these changes is essential to show your clients that they are important to you. Regular auditing that includes client profile updates and the purging of contacts that are deceased or that you no longer have contact with helps keep your database current and allows you to focus and personalize your marketing efforts better.
4. Value-added content
Chances are you know the importance of adding valuable content to your website and social media platforms to appeal to new and existing clients. But how do you know what information to include? A CRM can connect with your website and social media accounts and, through data analysis, can monitor keyword trends, review past social media post performance, and assess engagement levels with previous content on both social media and your website to help you see what works and what doesn’t. Once you see what type of content engages potential clients, the CRM can help you create, schedule, and publish the right content at the right time.
5. Loyalty and rewards programs
Retaining existing customers is essential to any successful business and a CRM platform can help you show your customers that they genuinely matter to your business. Whether you are looking to provide customers with a special policy anniversary discount or connect with them every year on their birthday, setting up loyalty and rewards programs are easily done within your CRM. A quick look at your dashboard allows you to see who your most loyal customers are and reward them with discounts and special loyalty offers to let them know their value to your business.
6. Complete team integration
Chances are you have had interactions with companies where you call to voice a concern or inquire about your services and are bounced from employee to employee having to reexplain your situation to each individual. This can be frustrating and shows that you aren’t necessarily a priority to this particular company. You do not want your customers to have this kind of experience and a CRM system can help.
With a CRM, every member of your team has access to each customer’s profile, enabling them to see the customer’s data in real-time, as well as previous interactions with other team members. This enables a team member to provide quality service without having to have the customer repeat information over and over again and shows them that they really are a priority.
7. Team empowerment and boosted productivity
Helping your team members feel empowered and productive is essential to fostering a quality team that can reach your business goals. A CRM strategy in place that promotes a quality customer experience, inspires team collaboration at all levels of the business, and utilizes automation helps to promote a quality working environment that allows team members to focus more directly on the customers and facilitates business growth. For example, setting up various administrative tasks with automation in the CRM gives team members additional time where they can focus on direct customer interaction and closing new deals.
What is a CRM strategy?
A CRM (customer relationship management) strategy is a plan implemented by your company as a way to improve customer relationships and customer satisfaction while also increasing revenue. This strategy utilizes specific CRM technology and specific actions in order to help better understand your customers, improve communication, and increase business productivity through the use of automation.
Benefits of a CRM tool for your business
CRM refers to both the strategy you implement and the CRM software you are using to implement this strategy. Implementing a CRM tool and strategy into your business can provide a wealth of benefits, including:
- Gain greater insight into your customers
- Eliminates delays in communication and missed opportunities
- Provides a clear view of your sales funnel
- Provides team guidance for engaging with clients
- Boosts client retention through better insight and engagement
- Enables team collaboration
- Provides sales forecasts based on specific data
How to build a CRM strategy
Once you have decided on CRM software, it is time to build your CRM strategy. As you work to develop your strategy, it is important to consider each of these steps.
1. Define business goals
In order to build an accurate CRM strategy, you must first define your business goals. Without these goals, it is impossible to create a strategy that funnels customers correctly. Identifying your goal will allow you to create the correct strategy. For example, if your goal is to double policy sales in the 4th quarter, your CRM strategy should focus on what that would require, what is needed to meet that goal, how to boost referrals, etc.
2. Identify ideal customers and your customer journey
In order to create a successful CRM strategy, you must first identify your ideal customers. Creating an ideal customer profile will provide an overview of the market you are looking to target and base your marketing strategy on those potential customers and where you will best find them, such as online social media platforms. This can be limited to one customer persona for specific markets, or you may develop multiple customer personas and create a strategy for each specific one. In order to do this, you will need to collect data on your current clients, such as age, gender, location, technology use, preferred social media platforms, profession, and more.
3. Map the sales pipeline
Once you have determined your target audience, you want to map out your customer funnel in your sales pipeline. Taking a closer look at your current client’s journeys can help in this stage. Does your target customer typically need four touchpoints before they are likely to purchase a policy? Will they respond to ads on social media platforms (and which ones) or are you better to use targeted in-person marketing?
4. Organize your internal processes
Once you create your CRM strategy, it is essential that every team member understands the CRM strategy and how to use the software in order to effectively implement the strategy. CRM technology allows your team to effectively increase lead generation, reduce email bounce rates, improve customer retention and customer loyalty, and automate many different marketing and contact strategies, as well as allow for team collaboration between multiple teams, such as your marketing and sales teams.
Implement the CRM strategies that work for your business
While these CRM strategy examples are a great place to start, creating CRM strategies that match your business goals is essential. In addition, the success of your CRM strategies also depends on having the right CRM platform in place that offers the tools you need to implement your strategies.
Better Agency has the Insurance CRM designed for you
The insurance industry comes with unique needs and requirements, and you need a CRM platform that understands those industry needs. Our CRM was created by insurance agents that know exactly what tools are essential to your business success. To learn more about how our Insurance CRM can help improve your customer relationships, enhance productivity, and boost your bottom line, schedule a call with us today.
