A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a tool for collecting and managing the information and interactions your business has with your customers, sales leads, suppliers or other businesses.

It can help you with:

• Tracking the success of your marketing activities
• Identifying and following up on prospective customers
• Maintaining relationships with loyal customers
• Grouping your customer's types to develop personalised communications
• Seeing which customers have signed up for your marketing lists
• Understanding which customers have responded to your offer or promotion.

Benefits of a CRM

Customer relationship management may mean keeping track of your customers to provide personalised service. For example, you may choose to send your customer a special offer on their birthday.

Benefits of a CRM can include your ability to:

• Develop personalised and targeted marketing activities that have a better chance of creating a sale
• Identify the best time or most effective marketing activity that your customers respond to
• Collect and store customer feedback to help you improve and innovate
• Track customer behaviour, interactions and purchases of your products or services
• Store and follow up on customer leads to help you find new customers.

What info do I collect in my CRM?

The information you collect in your CRM will depend on the individual needs of your business, and the marketing activities that you undertake. The data you decide to collect can help you build a complete customer profile and may be useful when evaluating the success of direct marketing activities, such as e-newsletters.

Examples of info you may include in a CRM;

• Customer details such as name, address, contact details, date of birth and preferred contact method.
• Customer purchase information including when a customer purchased from you, what they bought, the time and value of the purchase.
• Engagement information on if, when and how your customer responded to your marketing campaigns or promotions.
• Feedback information including any feedback on your service, or if a customer made any complaints or returned their products.