There are four main types of CRM. Operational CRMs automate processes, freeing up the team to focus on their expertise. Analytical CRMs collect, store, and analyze data so you can act on trends to improve customer experiences and therefore drive conversions.
Collaborative CRMs manage engagement data so team members know how and where to best engage with prospects. Finally, marketing CRMs offer data-driven campaign management tools.
Operational CRM
Operational CRM helps align teams across marketing, customer service, and sales through automation. By doing so, you enable these functions to work together using a customer or lead view, ultimately delivering a seamless and positive experience as you drive leads from awareness to conversion and beyond.
Its automation capabilities free up your team members to ditch repetitive and tedious tasks, so they can focus on tasks that only humans can do.
Marketing tasks that operational CRMs help automate include the design, distribution, and tracking of email campaigns and sequences.
Examples of sales automation and customer service include sales forecasting, tracking customer conversations, ticketing systems that assign complaints to experienced reps, task assignment, chatbots that receive complaints, and the automated delivery of helpful content to respond to. customer questions.
For example, a customer might interact with a website chatbot to complain about a product defect. From there, a ticket is created and sent to a sales representative who specializes in solving the problem.
Once the assigned sales rep resolves the issue, the conversation with the rep triggers a follow-up email with a survey to ensure the issue has been resolved to your satisfaction, along with a coupon code to entice the customer to buy again.
analytical CRM
Analytical CRM is data-centric. Collect data about each customer or prospect, then provide analysis of that data so salespeople, sales reps, and other functional members of your business can better serve their prospects or customers. Example data includes potential customer and customer contact information, preferences, behaviors, and interaction history with your brand and its representatives.
More specifically, analytics CRMs first collect customer or lead data, then store that data in a place where all internal stakeholders can see it. Finally, analytics dashboards highlight data trends, such as how customers are interacting with your website or where they are located.
This data is available on a customer-by-customer basis or as an overview of a large customer base. It reveals patterns that your internal teams can use to improve the customer journey.
For example, the data may show that 25% of customers in Valencia searched for a particular product during the beach season. They even put it in their carts online. However, 50% of those users did not buy but instead abandoned their carts.
This information can help you know how to offer them personalized marketing campaigns that convert, such as flash sales sent via an email triggered when a cart is abandoned.
collaborative CRM
Collaborative CRM enables teams within and around your company to work together more seamlessly to create better customer experiences across all customer touch points with your brand.
Such teams include internal teams such as sales, customer service, technical support, and marketing teams. It also often streamlines communication between your company’s vendors, technical support representatives, vendors, and distributors.
To help businesses manage interactions, a collaborative CRM stores all interactions between customers or prospects and your business. It does this by pulling data from all channels, including website, email, phone, social media, and even face-to-face interactions.
From there, the data is analyzed to tell your team how and where to best engage with customers and prospects for the best customer experience.
For example, your sales representative sold a hot tub to a customer. In that interaction, your team member learned that the customer prefers to interact with your company through text messages and notes it in his CRM.
So when it’s time to sell a new accessory or schedule a regular maintenance visit, your marketing or support rep will know to also text to engage with your customer through their preferred channel.
Marketing CRM
Marketing CRM, like other CRMs, collects data about your customers and gives you a holistic view of each customer. But they go further with marketing tools that help you target and automate campaigns.
Then, tools like blogging, SEO, ad tracking, social media, and video production tools allow you to respond to the data collected by giving you insights into the preferences your customers want in campaign content and marketing bids. products.
Tools like landing page and form builders allow you to collect customer data and segment customers. Then marketing automation tools help you nurture leads and customers to convert or buy again.
All behaviors and preferences related to each customer or lead are captured in the marketing CRM, allowing all team members in their departments to know where the customer is in the conversion journey and then seamlessly nurture it from over there.
For example, your data may show that a potential customer made a first purchase and became a customer. In response, you can use your CRM’s marketing segmentation and automation tools to nurture that customer into a repeat buyer. Simply segment the customer into a category by specifying their “new customer” status and their interest in the product.
Then, create and run an email sequence to automatically nurture more sales from that customer and others like it.
