Growing your customer base through Content Relationship Management (CRM) software is key to nurturing your clientele and growing sales. 

Starting out

To track your customer list, you can start with a spreadsheet. Anyone else feel triggered by just seeing that word? Don’t run away just yet! It can be as simple as including customers first and last name, email address and physical address, if applicable. Keep it simple, but be sure to track! As your client base grows, however, it is beneficial to use CRM (Client Relationship Management) software. This allows you to take more of a hands-off approach to managing client data, keeping your customer information secure and easy to access. Benefits also include analytics, email marketing and simplified list management for personalized outreach.

Software Solutions

CRM tracks your customer contact information and helps you reach out to segments of your audience all at once in bulk.

Large companies

There are big CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot, which are for larger companies with big databases (think hundreds of thousands of subscribers) and a steady stream of content delivery. These are awesome, robust CRMs, but you will end up paying for features you do not yet need as a smaller business.

Medium companies

With tens of thousands of monthly email subscribers, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, AWeber, Drip and Keap are great options for businesses to look into. These platforms aren’t free, but offer functionality that will benefit your slightly larger audience, with room to grow.

Starter CRMs

For startups and small businesses, MailChimp, Constant Contact, or Vertical Response are fabulous options. They are affordable, scalable, and generally offer a free plan to get up and running. You can always use your database to export it and move it to another platform as you grow.

Figure out how many emails you want to be able to send per month, how many audience segments you have, the capabilities you want included and then do research on potential solutions.

Test drive a few options before finding the right software, as they are all a bit different and you might enjoy a workflow or user interface more than another.

CRMs often offer analytics that track metrics for your email open rate, click rate, and suggest actionable insights to increase your engagement rate. Keep an eye on what is working and what hasn’t resonated with your viewers.

Download a copy of our free team marketing worksheets here. Want to learn even more? Check out our book and video course, Unify Your Marketing.