Customer relationship management (CRM)

Developing a lasting relationship with your customers not only helps to retain existing customers and improve repeat business, but it can also help to attract new ones through recommendation. To achieve this you need to treat your customers as individuals and look after them over a period of time, rather than just through the initial sales process.

Effective customer relationship management (CRM) relies on building a database to gather information about your individual customers and visitors - email addresses, physical addresses, demographic information, ordering and enquiry history all provide valuable data.

This data can then be utilised in the following situations throughout your relationship with a customer, ensuring that they can be dealt with in an individual manner, such as:

• dealing with problems or enquiries from customers
• targeting groups or individual customers with specific offers
• delivering targeted communications to remain 'front of mind' or to add value to you offerings.

This information can also be used to analyse your customers' behaviour and demographics, evaluate marketing campaigns, analyse trends and make forecasts, giving your business the intelligence it needs to improve its offering and service.

Some issues to consider

Deciding how to provide customer support as part of your Internet marketing strategy is a key part of CRM. Providing FAQs, email and telephone support can all make use of the intelligence you have gathered and can be integrated together to provide the customer with improved support and your business with better efficiency.

To do this, you need to consider such questions as:

• How can you obtain personal information from you customers or visitors in the first instance?
• What type of database are you going to use and can it be integrated with your website and other systems?
• How can you deliver effective customer support via the Internet?
• How can you use the information you have gathered to add value and improve your offering?

How The Web Marketing Workshop can help

We can provide a number of services to help you provide effective an CRM strategy, including:

• consultancy on how to make better use of existing customer data
• identify new ways of collecting customer data in a permissions based way
• support the database development process, using our own expertise or recommended suppliers that specialise in this field
• create individual email marketing campaigns and newsletters in support to support your overall CRM strategy
• propose ways to make integrated use of both your website and offline support to provide your customers with a better range of services and support.

If you would like to discuss your CRM strategy with us, please contact us now. Alternatively, you can request our FREE 30-minute marketing report to find out more about the online marketing opportunities for your site.