Why your CRM platform is your greatest marketing tool

The majority (if not all) of membership organisations have a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to help keep track of their customer data, but your CRM is a treasure trove of data and is in fact, your greatest marketing tool.

When you have a centralised system holding your member data, you have a wealth of both data and opportunities that you can use to great effect. Whilst data minimisation should be your guiding principle when collecting personal data, it is likely that even the basic information you collect for processing membership will give you insights into your members and their behaviours.

Dependent on the information you have collected, you can slice and dice this in multiple ways to support your marketing and membership objectives.

There are many ways to segment your data: demographically, geographically, behaviourally…

If it is appropriate, you could segment by gender, age or location – for example, you could contact people who live in a certain location from where you are based, with a bespoke offer if they visit you between certain dates.

You could also reengage with lapsed members or those who fit certain criteria, such as having children of a particular age.

If your CRM is updated correctly, you will be able to see all the customer touchpoints associated with a profile.

This then allows you to get in contact with individual members based on time elapsed since their last engagement or on key dates such as their birthday.

You can also use this information to get in touch with members before their renewal date to encourage them to resubscribe or upgrade their membership.

By creating audience personas, you can segment your members more broadly, without getting too granular.

For example, it might be that your audience broadly fits into categories like young families, those with an interest in history and culture or newly qualified graduates.

Splitting them down more broadly means you can create bespoke messaging, tailored to address your audience’s needs and concerns without having to do it for thousands of contacts.

By using your CRM system to its full potential, you are also able to report on the impact of your sales and marketing activity. When your systems connect seamlessly, you can see that Joe Bloggs opened an email about ‘the value of membership’ on 15 September and renewed his membership with you on 23 September for another year.

Your marketing is only as good as the data you are using, so regular training, and data cleansing is essential.  

Check for duplicates regularly – this is one of the issues we often see when we work with membership organisations, someone misspells a name or email address and then the system cannot find them, so a new record is created. 

By creating a process that regularly looks at potential duplicates and common errors (joebloggs@gnail.com rather than joebloggs@gmail.com for example) you can keep your data as accurate and up to date as possible.  

This ensures that you are not contacting people who have previously passed away, unsubscribed or are frustrated by hearing from you. 

The key thing to remember? Keep it consistent! Make sure that anyone inputting data is using fields consistently. This means that you always have first names listed in the first name field, rather than mere initials.