CRM: “Customized Relationship Marketing” or “Continually Representing Me”. Michael Tyman of Professional Success, Inc. shares his views.

The CRM is a “customer relationship management” tool that works as a large repository of customer information, but it can be so much more powerful if you unlock its true potential. To turn your CRM into a remarketing powerhouse, think of ‘CRM’ as standing for “Customized Relationship Marketing” or “Continually Representing Me”. This means that you need to transform the inert information stored in your CRM into dynamic data that you can use to measure metrics such as email, cell phone and address capture rates, quality and utilization. Ask yourself these three questions:

1. What is the contact information capture rate?
2. What is the quality of this contact information, and how current is it?
3. How can you use this information to further enhance capture rates, contact information quality, and the use of contact information to stay in touch with customers?

Being able to address these questions using your CRM will result in a more dynamic and agile remarketing strategy.

Event triggers in the sales, service and parts lifecycles are another particularly useful kind of customization. Optimize when you contact or follow up with customers by timing your contact with them during periods where they are more likely to make a purchase or return to your dealership for service and parts assistance. The alternative is sending your entire CRM database to a third-party vendor, which can be an unsafe and unwise practice, especially if they do not give you any meaningful metrics to record responses or direct interactions. Preserve control over your own CRM database, and use it to manage your own customer relations.

A third way to unlock your CRM’s potential is by recording and measuring the success of content you send out in email marketing campaigns. Use the CRM as a tool to gauge answers to such questions as “what content is being sent out to customers?” and “how successful is the content at driving visitors to specific locations of our website?”. Only by measuring the effectiveness of deployed content can you then make any necessary adjustments to maximize the returns on your email marketing campaigns. The CRM, if customized to capture and display useful metrics pertaining to your remarketing efforts, can thus become a highly effective tool to interact with your customers.

For more information about Michael Tyman and Professional Success, Inc. visit his company website, linkedin profile and facebook page at the links below:

http://www.professional-success.com
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-tyman/8/770/89a
http://www.facebook.com/michael.tyman