Social CRM: How to identify and target your key customers and prospects?

Brands and retail professionals recognize the strategic importance of improving and personalizing the experience of their customers and prospects. However, very few of them actually invest in a Social CRM strategy.

This type of strategy is essential to establish more fruitful, more consistent and more intimate relationships with clients and prospects. Social CRM also contributes significantly to improving performance by increasing the company's business volume and improving the conversion rate of leads into sales.

CRM is short for customer relationship management. Social CRM includes both supporting practical and conversational marketing on social networks, but also the use of data collected on these networks for the purpose of maintaining customer relationships. The benefits of adopting a social CRM strategy are simple.

1. Obtaining a complete map of the customer's journey and all the points of contact.
2. Optimizing customer profiling to ensure a better experience and relationship with the brand
3. A better alignment between all the departments (sales, communication, customer service, etc)

The adoption of a Social CRM strategy is particularly important in the retail sector . Collecting data via your e-commerce site, your other digital channels, and physical stores will allow you to have an operational overview of your actions. Also, these indicators can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns and to implement many actions dedicated to customer relationship management.

Adopting a Social CRM Strategy

Brands and retail professionals recognize the strategic importance of improving and personalizing the experience of their customers and prospects. However, very few of them actually invest in a Social CRM strategy.

This type of strategy is essential to establish more fruitful, more consistent and more intimate relationships with clients and prospects. Social CRM also contributes significantly to improving performance by increasing the company's business volume and improving the conversion rate of leads into sales.

What is Social CRM?

CRM is short for customer relationship management. Social CRM includes both supporting practical and conversational marketing on social networks, but also the use of data collected on these networks for the purpose of maintaining customer relationships.

Today, in the age of the consumer, the client leads the customer/business relationship, especially as the line between online and offline becomes blurred. This implies that brands must carry a constant dialogue with consumers through different channels; from the brick and mortar store to niche online forums.  Furthermore, consumers increasingly expect more personalized messaging, offers, and services. According to the 2016 Salesforce study “State of the Connected Consumer,” 69% of customers consider the personalized customer service influences their loyalty to a company.

What are the benefits of adopting a Social CRM approach?

1. Obtaining a complete map of the customer's journey and all the points of contact.
2. Optimizing customer profiling to ensure a better experience and relationship with the brand
3. A better alignment between all the departments (sales, communication, customer service, etc)

The adoption of a Social CRM strategy is particularly important in the retail sector . Collecting data via your e-commerce site, your other digital channels, and physical stores will allow you to have an operational overview of your actions. Also, these indicators can be used to create targeted marketing campaigns and to implement many actions dedicated to customer relationship management.

Strategic processes

It’s impossible to integrate Social CRM naturally as a digital marketer without careful strategic planning. The reason has already been mentioned: Social CRM depends more on processes than on technologies and tools, which will come later.

This strategy must follow a precise pattern in six phases :

• Listening and monitoring of online conversations related to the target audience.
• Analyzing conversations to highlight certain consumer profiles.
• The correlation of this information with the data already present in the traditional CRM system.
• The selection of the activity reference parameters: the classic CRM on one side, and the social listening on the other.
• Creating workflows, differentiating those that require human intervention from those that are automated.
• The publication of online comments and responses, based on flow planning in integrated dashboards.

Once these phases are completed, it is time to implement some measures to make Social CRM operational.

How to make the Social CRM operational:

To implement your Social CRM strategy, it is imperative to create real-time measurement and alert dashboards. This way, the different departments of your company that are concerned can select the types of interventions and the most appropriate contents to make their actions more effective.

Social listening enables consumers to be better informed through a number of indicators such as the key themes and concepts that come up the most, the weight of the different channels, the actors linked to the activity (influencers, ambassadors, detractors), the interests of Internet users , Socio-demographic data, users' opinions and comments, and trends and developments related to the sector.

All these measures are cross-referenced with the key data of the traditional CRM system: transactions, average order value, purchase history, comments and reports.

Once the Social CRM data is integrated with traditional CRM data, you will have reliable and thorough knowledge of each of your clients in order to offer a personalized and effective customer relationship at all stages of the customer's journey.

How to take advantage of Social CRM:

Retailers can easily detect buying behaviors, location of relevant conversations about their brand, and distribution of loyalty programs across all territories, allowing them to offer promotions to nearby consumers. The goal is to facilitate the shopping path by playing on the proximity .

For example, retailers can encourage ambassadors linked to specific shopping behaviors such as organic, vegan, or gluten free to speak for their brand.

To begin with, we must identify these brand ambassadors and then assess their level of profitability (focused on consumers who can add more value to the product or the offer) and then offer them personalized experiences such as adapted content support services, exclusive access to in-store events, and promotions based on their level of activity (comments and recommendations published online).

Finally, note that the Social CRM activity can be optimized by web measurements and satisfaction surveys.