How CRM Can Help Your Small Business?

If you own a business, online or offline, you cannot simply ignore your customers. That is the reason why you can't ignore CRM as well. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is no longer the luxury of medium and large enterprises. If you own a small business, CRM can help you grow at a faster pace. In this article I will walk you through about how CRM can help your small business in 2024?

No matter what your company size is, you will always have some clients and some customers. Using CRM tools, especially customer database and management apps like Zendesk, Zoho, Salesforce etc., you can track your customers, their purchases and their connection with your company.

A women working on laptop for her small business. Article: How CRM can help your small business in 2022?

How CRM Can Help Your Small Business?

If your business is well planned and is customer centric, CRM apps can effectively boost your customer retention. My company (Gatilab) works with several small businesses and we have been suggesting them to use CRM apps for a decade now. We have seen a continuous improvement in their profit margins, customer retention and sales.

Let's see how CRM can help your small business and what exactly you need to do to ensure better results:

CRM can help you retain your customer data

As discussed earlier, CRM can boost your customer retention. But how can it do so?

Whenever a customer onboards on your websites or makes the first purchase in your local store -— all you need to do is to add his/her data to your records. There are several ways to do so and the best is to use a CRM app or a customer database software.

I still know a few clients, mostly small business owners, who use pen and paper to do so but I wouldn't suggest you do that. They spend hours and hours collecting and maintaining non-essential data. That is a thing of the past. CRM apps are the future as they provide cloud backups, real-time collaborations and dozens of marketing tools with effective pricing.

This way you can know your customers well, keep records as old as your business and connect with them using digital means, like WhatsApp and SMS.

How CRM can help your small business Featured

CRM can help you get to know your customers well

Data is a priceless resource. CRM apps can help small businesses manage their data well by providing unlimited options to assign to every contact in their business, not just the customers. Using top CRM apps, you can even integrate several social networks, email marketing tools etc., to fetch latest data like their email addresses, photos and phone numbers.

This information is vital to your business's success and growth as you can plan marketing campaigns and send those to your customers in easier and more effective ways.

In 2017, one of my clients had over 1400 regular customers. My team maintained their CRM and helped them improve their marketing strategies based on their consumer base. In 2019, the number of their regular customers increased to 2700 but most importantly we retained over 1280 of their old customers.

We sent the regular customers exciting offers based on their recent purchases. In 2017, Facebook wasn't that effective but we still asked them to follow our pages, join Facebook groups and whatnot. When the time was right, we planned marketing strategies and executed those in segmented campaigns. We gave every customer a star rating to know their allegiance to our products and a number to give them a monetary value.

This way we were able to do proper customer retention while moving forward with growth. Everything above was made possible by using the CRM setup (One CRM App + One Customer Relationship Manager) we had created.

Growing up is important but you should always keep your old prospectus in check. CRM apps can help you in doing so.

In short, CRM can help you get to know your customers better by:

  1. Collecting as much information as possible in an organized way.
  2. Connecting their personal information with their purchases.
  3. Putting a value to the customers.

CRM can help you gain more leads and customers

Most CRM tools come with integrated onboarding and lead generation tools. You can use these tools to create landing pages and generate leads by running web-campaigns or ads. Since CRM apps integrate with these pages, you won't have to worry about going through each entry.

All you need to do in the end is to approach those leads and convert them into customers. 95% of the brands that I know are using these CRM apps to gain such leads. There are several guides online to tell you about how you can generate leads using the CRM apps, like this one.

CRM can help you plan your marketing campaigns

As discussed, using data from CRM apps you can plan your marketing campaigns and get the best results. You can approach your regular customers to gain some more sales or add more customers to your consumer base.

With sufficient data, you will be able to identify the most profitable customers and geographical areas where your marketing campaigns are going to get the highest success rate. This eliminates the need for extra marketing efforts made in non-converting sections.

CRM can boost sales

Now, as CRM helps you do everything right, it obviously can serve the ultimate goal of your business: get more customers and thus get more revenue. With all the marketing done right, you can strategically approach more customers, improve conversion rates and even increase profitability per customer.

By tracking your customers' purchasing habits, you can identify opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell other products and services. This way you can maximize the profits.

CRM can save a lot of time and money

CRM apps are cost effective. Some are even free. Plus these are easier to use. So, using CRM apps, you can save not only money but also time and human resources. Most of the apps cost less than $20 per month and come with dedicated support.

Conclusion

In addition to customer data management, CRMs also provide options like data onboarding, lead generation, customer support, ticketing, invoicing and online payments. Everything has gone online, and these seven are very essential for any business's online or offline growth.

The best CRM apps take full advantage of cutting edge technology and marketing tactics to ensure the highest quality CRM experience so that you can grow easily. If you are still not using a CRM tool, whether self-hosted or subscription-based, it is high time you did. COVID-19 has made such tools essential for every business, no matter how micro, small, medium or large. If you are looking for the best CRM apps to choose from, I have this list of the best CRM apps for small businesses.