Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM for Marketers)

At the first marketing consulting firm I worked for the agency's lead consultant believed that the database was the lifeblood of the company. This still rings true today. The cleaner data that has gone into it over its lifetime, the better able you will be to evaluate a customer's lifetime value (CLTV) and identify potential customers that meet the same specifications.  Likewise if your data migrated from one CRM system to another but only retained the past year of customer data, there will most certainly be knowledge gaps about those customers.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) databases have long been used by salesforce-driven companies to store datasets such as customer/vendor/partner contact info, purchase history, product interest, product registration, and occassionally market research data on individual customers. It has only been last five years that all this data has been coming together for small-to-medium sized businesses with emerging web platforms that enable sales professionals and marketers to better target their optimal 20% (The Pareto Principle suggests 20% of customers produce 80% of revenues).

Relationship marketing is primarily focused on customer retention and satisfaction rather than the achievement of sales quotas using sales-related promotional methods.

A themed viral marketing campaign, for example, would target existing customers and also:

• be supported by a microsite, YouTube, Facebook, and/or Twitter
• encourage customers to "Like" the page, ad, or video or Tweet it to their friends
• aimed at a specific demographic segment appropriate for the offering
• could include a loyalty program to help customers save time and/or money on future purchases, e.g., season pass holders for the local symphony could be automatically subscribed to receive alerts

A campaign's success depends on how customers perceive these types of interactions with a company, its products, or its brands.