Unlock Better Audience Engagement Insights With CRM Data

Sales and marketing teams rely heavily on customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to stay organized and manage customer interactions. CRM platforms contain a wealth of customer data, which you can use to refine your marketing strategy and build stronger customer relationships. 

But how do you actually harness that CRM data and turn it into actionable marketing insights? Here’s how to use your CRM to learn more about your audience. 

CRM data is a goldmine for audience insights

Modern CRM systems collect a ton of customer data beyond just names and basic contact information. Many platforms, especially enterprise-grade tools like ServiceNow, track deal progress, email open rates, and other customer engagement metrics. Today’s CRMs also allow team members to add meeting notes, which is a great way to collect qualitative data.

As a result, CRM data captures the full scope of the customer journey, from discovery through to post-purchase. This provides a rich foundation for analysis and insight to help your organization grow.

When interpreted correctly, CRM data often reveals what’s working and what needs improvement in your marketing and sales tactics. This data can also help you pinpoint where engagement is falling off in your sales funnel, helping you nurture leads more effectively.

With this information at hand, you can make informed decisions about your future marketing strategy, rather than just cycling through ideas to see what sticks.

The link between CRM insights and customer experience

A Salesforce study found that 88% of consumers say the experience a company provides is just as important as its products or services. By improving your customer experience, you can generate more revenue for your brand.

CRMs collect a wide range of both quantitative and qualitative information about customer behavior patterns. You can apply these insights directly to the customer experience.

Say your software brand offers optional onboarding webinars for customers for a flat fee. CRM insights might reveal that customers who attend these webinars are 60% more likely to become long-term customers. 

With this information, your team can fine-tune the onboarding process to retain more customers. You could push a bundled plan with onboarding included or promote the webinars in your marketing messaging, knowing that it will likely lead to a higher customer lifetime value and more revenue in the long run. 

Benefits of relying on CRM data for engagement insights

By making data-driven marketing decisions, you can boost engagement and conversion rates. Over time, you’ll pull more prospects through the sales funnel to become loyal customers.

By grounding your customer engagement strategies in data, rather than assumptions, your organization develops a strategic advantage over competitors. You can feel confident knowing that you’re targeting proven pain points and addressing real problems that your customers encounter.

For example, your sales team might note in your CRM that customers are regularly asking for a specific service or feature that’s not currently on the market. Sharing these insights with your product team could drive new innovations that help your organization pull away from competitors. 

CRM data can also help improve cross-team alignment, which is a major challenge for many organizations. A 2022 study found that 80% of respondents experienced siloed teams at their organizations.

CRMs centralize your customer data in accessible dashboards for team members across various departments, helping sales, marketing, and customer support teams stay aligned and proactive. 

Common challenges teams face with CRM data

CRM data offers actionable insights you can use to transform your marketing and sales strategy, but many teams face challenges when it comes to extracting and interpreting this data. Here are some of the most common hurdles marketing teams run into with CRM data analysis and how to fix them.

Siloed or incomplete customer data

Ideally, your CRM should serve as a hub for all of your customer data, storing information from your sales calls, enterprise marketing campaigns, and customer service platforms all in one place. Unfortunately, many organizations use several disconnected tools to store data instead.

If you keep your email and social media engagement data stored separately, rather than importing it into your CRM, this makes it difficult to see how your engagement metrics are connected across platforms. Your email campaigns could correlate with an increase in sales calls, but you won’t see the link between the two in your CRM data.

A lack of shared visibility leads to missed signals and customer insights. To prevent this from happening, centralize all of your customer data points in your CRM for easy access.

Lack of context or meaningful insights

Reading your CRM data is one thing, but for it to make an impact on your business, you’ll need to understand what the data means about your customers. If you don’t have context for your data, it’s difficult to put it into action. 

So you’ll need to cross-reference CRM data with information from other platforms and collaborate across teams to get context from different parts of your organization. 

For example, you can use CRMs to store helpful qualitative data, such as customer survey responses or social media interactions. But you’ll need to pair it with quantitative sales data to provide context about where these interactions fit in your sales cycle. 

Over-reliance on vanity metrics

When evaluating CRM data, many organizations focus on surface-level data points rather than more valuable engagement metrics. Things like email open rates or sales call volume are easy to calculate, but they don’t tell you much about customer preferences.

Instead, focus on quality metrics that are more closely tied to your sales funnel, such as email reply rates or conversion rates from sales meetings. These metrics highlight valuable customer actions and touchpoints and are more likely to result in insights that can improve your marketing efforts.

How to use CRM data for engagement insights

Once you’ve collected data from your CRM and you’re ready to dive deeper and learn more about your customers, here’s how to actually leverage that CRM data for engagement insights.

Segment your audience based on customer data

Even if your business caters to a specific niche of consumers, your audience isn’t a monolith. Consumers might interact with your brand differently based on their demographics or stage in the sales funnel.

Identifying different segments of your audience can help you better meet customer needs. You might segment new leads based on the digital content they’ve interacted with and tailor your future communications based on that content to make them feel more personal. 

Use information from your customer profiles to separate them into groups such as “new,” “engaged,” or “dormant.” Look at factors like engagement volume or time since last engagement for accurate customer segmentation.

You can also use segmentation to separate customers by intent or even product usage rates. Loyal customers who use the platform frequently would then receive different email sequences than customers with low usage rates and a high risk of churning. 

Identify opportunities for re-engagement

CRM data is particularly helpful for indicating when and why customer engagement has dropped off, allowing you to launch timely re-engagement efforts to prevent at-risk customers from dropping off. You might launch new offers, send personalized follow-ups, or create compelling educational content.

When developing your engagement strategy, focus on quality, rather than volume, as this is more likely to drive revenue and customer retention. A high email open rate doesn’t mean much on its own, but a high response rate is indicative of genuine interest.

Spot patterns that predict outcomes

When assessing your CRM data, look for patterns that are tied to specific outcomes. You might notice that a history of email engagement leads to a higher customer lifetime value or that the frequency of support ticket requests is correlated with lower renewal rates. 

Solutions like Tenon help marketers visualize these patterns and take action when needed. With Tenon, you can create detailed customer journeys based on engagement patterns, automatically triggering email or SMS communications at the right time. 

Tenon also offers lead scoring to help you assess potential customers based on their behaviors and characteristics. 

Best practices for getting more value from CRM engagement data

When used strategically, CRM tools provide invaluable information about who your customers are, what they like, and what you can expect from them. Use the following best practices to get the most out of your CRM data and optimize your marketing strategy.

Maintain clean data

Many CRM platforms have automated features to streamline the data entry process and prevent errors. But this isn’t always enough if your team isn’t maintaining clean data for the CRM to process. 

To make sure you’re generating clean, valuable data, your entire team needs to commit to accurate and consistent data entry. This is especially important when it comes to activity logging and tags.

Consider conducting monthly reviews of your engagement fields to ensure that important metrics don’t slip through the cracks. When data reports are complete, conduct audits to find potential areas for improvement in the future.

Personalize customer communication

Personalized communication can have a powerful impact on your audience. In fact, 96% of consumers are likely to make a purchase when brands send personalized messages.

Consider tailoring your marketing messages based on buyer personas or stages in the sales funnel. You can use CRM data for even more granular personalization in your messages, like sales offers based on the specific products, services, or features a customer uses most to increase their chances of engaging. 

When communicating with established customers, you can also tailor messages based on past interactions to make them feel more like a conversation. Automated follow-up messages after a customer support request could address the concerns the customer had, provide related resources, and include a quick survey on their experience.

You can use CRM data to make your messages feel relevant and personalized. This data can help you pinpoint the right timing, tone of voice, and content for your communications, which can increase your chances of generating engagement.

Use tools to surface trends and identify engagement gaps

If you’re only conducting manual analysis of CRM data, you might overlook helpful patterns or even warning signs from your customers. Use data analytics tools to process your raw data and help you flag gaps or concerns automatically. These tools can also help you create clear reports to communicate trends to stakeholders. 

Turn CRM engagement insights into a competitive advantage

Your CRM holds a lot of information, but insights don’t necessarily come from collecting a higher volume of data. Instead, you’ll need to focus on the context behind the data to find patterns and build more personalized engagement strategies.

Tenon makes this a reality by unifying and enriching your CRM data from ServiceNow. Built on ServiceNow, the solution fills in a missing piece of the CRM puzzle to help you improve outcomes at every stage of the customer journey. 

Tenon helps your entire team stay on top of tasks, build campaigns, and automate communications to maximize your reach while operating efficiently. It’s a centralized spot for planning, executing, and reporting, all with user-friendly visualization. 

Book a demo with Tenon today to level up your marketing campaigns with CRM engagement data.