How to unlock the power of CRM | 5 actions to enrich your data

Customer data is incredibly useful, for marketing, for driving conversions, and for informing your business’s road map, but if it’s not managed and organised appropriately, it can be intimidating and essentially useless – an underutilised resource that could, if only it was properly managed, hold the key to making serious business gains.

That’s where Customer relation management, or CRM, comes in. It’s the process of gathering and organising that data, and utilising it to more efficiently optimise interactions, retain business, and drive sales.

Here are 5 actionable strategies you can start using today to enrich your data, and use CRM to unlock your business’s potential.

1. Conduct a data audit, a data cleanse, and unify your databases

To harness the true potential of customer relationship management, it is crucial to start with a comprehensive data audit. Review and clean up your existing data to ensure accuracy and eliminate duplicates.

Unify your data sources, whether this is in a master spreadsheet, or better yet, uploading it all into a purposely designed piece of CRM software. Being able to see the “whole picture” when it comes to your customer data is essential when it comes to using it efficiently.

2. Integrate your CRM within your marketing automation process

Achieving synergy between your CRM and marketing automation processes will significantly enhance your customer engagement efforts. By integrating the two, you can streamline lead nurturing, automate personalised campaigns, and track the customer journey more effectively.

This integration empowers you to deliver targeted and timely messages at scale, yielding better results, faster.

3. Use gamification to better understand your customers and your audience

By incorporating game-like elements into customer interactions, such as Quizzes, Surveys, challenges, or contests, you can incentivize customers to share more information.

Engaging customers in a playful experience helps them commit fully to a process, and makes them far more likely to engage with your content, and far more likely to submit or opt-in.

You can easily customise pre-made game engines on the Drimify gamification platform, and as well as being able to export data based on in-game actions (such as answers to a Quiz or to a Survey), you can include contact forms where you can ask for personal information, and invite users to opt-in to your marketing. You could include direct links to such games in email receipts or invoices, or on QR codes at physical locations, giving you more data to work with in your CRM efforts.

4. Use Data Enrichment tools

Data enrichment tools provide additional layers of information to ensure your CRM data is as accurate and up to date as possible.

They crawl various data sources, such as social media profiles, public records, and demographic databases, to check against and add to your existing databases, in some cases adding additional fields which may help you when segmenting your data for more personalised interactions.

5. Use predictive analytics to get a step ahead

Predictive analytics tools allow you to anticipate customer behaviour and make data-driven decisions. By analysing historical data, statistical modelling, and utilising machine learning, you can identify patterns, trends, and potential future outcomes, and as such, make informed strategic decisions for your business.

This kind of foresight enables you to proactively address the evolving needs of your customers, and stay one step ahead of your competitors.

Key takeaway

To make sales, you need to appeal to and convert customers. This has been how businesses have thrived since the dawn of capitalism. Given advances in technology, businesses, from SMEs to global giants, are able to collect more customer data than ever before, and that data can carry the blueprint to business success and business growth in the long term.

An effective, strategic and evolving approach to customer relationship management is how you maximise the potential of that data and succeed. The 5 strategies listed above are a repeatable starting point for any organisation, no matter the industry.