Customer Retention Whitepapers by Marketing_Fusion

Best Practices of Digital CRM

Best Practices of Digital CRM

For too long digital marketing and CRM have been two separate disciplines. A lot of digital solutions are focused on prospecting; e.g. SEO and PPC, even activities like retargeting focus on website visitors, not your customers. CRM focuses on your customers as it is often the case that the top 20% of (regular) customers can provide 80% of revenue.

In the past, there has been a lack of solutions that provide the link between a physical customer and their web behaviour unless you have an impressive budget. In this article we discuss our new solution WebFusion which provides this link allowing us to include web behaviour within your Single Customer View enhancing CRM capabilities for both planning and targeting, also to understand all the touch points prior to a sale giving you a superior tracking solution.

We call this process Digital CRM.

Like all good digital solutions to get started with Digital CRM, you will need some tech. Here we use our tool WebFusion.

WebFusion works like google analytics we implement a few lines of code on your site, this allows us to do several things:

  1. Track across domains – great if you have multiple sites
  2. Track across devices
  3. Track your social media campaign impressions
  4. Identify the actual customers
  5. Take a data feedback into your SCV

Many digital teams struggle with the first four points and do not request customer database linking (whereas CRM teams do). Being able to capture this data enables us to support digital teams with two common objectives; attribution and customer journeys.

Attribution

Most clients we see still use last click attribution. By holding all the data we can move to first click or model the outcomes weighting each channel. If you are currently using econometric modelling this data can help provide ROI’s on smaller spends and explain the base.

Customer journey

Tools like Google analytics have inbuilt customer journey reports. These work really well for top-line figures or smaller sites. For larger sites, we need the ability to segment customers and go a little deeper. Having access to the raw data makes this possible.

Like all good marketing solutions WebFusion provides a solid data set to analyse and provide a better understanding of what is going on. In this case, for CRM, we can provide browsing and impressions data on each individual within the SCV to enable better targeting.

With access to the raw data, we can build reports, models and segmentation to provide structure. This develops a deeper understanding of how your customers are interacting with the site.

Below is a table showing how we can enhance the application of traditional CRM models with web data:

Marketing tool New application
RFM Using the web data we can understand the recency and frequency of a person. Rather than monetary values that only apply to a small proportion of visitors we can use engagement as our value metrics; how deep does the user go into the site, how long etc
Next, best action Understanding what a person has seen as well as what they brought can help you understand what they are likely to buy. For instance, does the visitor keep coming back to look at the same product?
Risk of lapsing Depending on the company a drop in activity, or increase for someone like utility providers, can indicate whether someone is likely to lapse.
Trigger-based There are a few standard trigger packages out there that focus on things like abandon baskets. But what about abandon browsing or when an old prospect comes back to the site?

Each model can be enhanced with 2-3 times more information than you would normally collect offline. As experienced analysts, we know that more data can lead to better models.

Whilst digital teams and CRM teams will always have different purposes and objectives. WebFusion can provide that link between the two disciplines enabling a level playing ground for sharing insights and information.

Whilst digital teams are still the (comparatively) new kids on the block, the years of refining CRM processes and building structure still has its value and can now be shared within the digital space.

If you would like to know more about WebFusion get in touch via email: info@fusion-analytics.co.uk or call 0203 287 5 387