Contact management strategies are essential to effectively utilise your contact database. Even a vast database doesn’t provide much use in your marketing and sales efforts unless it is accurate, up to date, and has been segmented appropriately.
Having a well-planned contact management strategy for your database will also help to boost your business revenue over time by ensuring that the individuals you are targeting to attract, engage, and delight with your content and service are being presented with information relevant and interesting to them, helping them progress to the next stage of the buyer’s journey.
What is contact management?
HubSpot defines contact management as: "the process of leveraging a dedicated software program that easily stores and sources customer contact information, including names, contact histories, and email information."
There are four key elements to proper contact management:
Database management
Maintain a ‘clean’ and up to date database by regularly reviewing your contact lists’ engagement rates and removing disengaged contacts can help to ensure you are only targeting people who are currently interested in being contacted. Over time, this will raise your engagement and improve the rate in which contacts become customers.
Top tip – HubSpot recommends ‘cleaning’ your contact database no less than every three months.
Segment contacts
Organise and segment your contacts into appropriate buyer personas and workflows when certain criteria are met – assisted by your CRM software. Grouping your contacts into personas with similar traits, job titles, and needs, allows you to target these groups with the most relevant information for them.
Top tip – HubSpot defines buyer personas as semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer, "encompassing the various needs, goals, and observed behaviour patterns among your customers".
Track and measure
Use your automated CRM software to track and measure customer interactions and keep a log of previous communications to easily review by your sales team moving forward.
Top tip – With HubSpot, even full chatbot conversations are logged in contact pages to ensure that no communication slips through the cracks that could help you better serve the needs of your contacts.
Nurture leads
Nurture your leads appropriately with content suited to the segmented lists or personas they belong to, and then analyse how they engaged with the content to help you continually improve your understanding of, and communication efforts with, your ideal buyers.
Top tip – According to HubSpot: "Sensible contact management will always take some degree of personalisation and often hinges upon your ability to measure and learn from your lead nurturing efforts. A CRM's automation capabilities allow you to deliver on both of those tasks."
Why is a contact management strategy important?
Effective communication with your contacts relies on sending them the right information at the right time. For this reason, it is crucial that your CRM software allows you to track, document, and analyse all communications and engagement a contact takes with your company and content.
With the ability to see the progress that has already been made, you can ensure that how you proceed in your outreach efforts has the best chance to genuinely help your contacts and meet the needs they have now, and not frustrate them with repetition or irrelevant information.
By streamlining your contact database and improving your marketing and sales efforts over time through this continual analysis and improvement in outreach quality, you will provide a better service to more targeted individuals, and increase the number of contacts who convert into satisfied customers. In turn, this will also increase your return on investment (ROI).
How HubSpot can help
HubSpot’s CRM software automatically tracks and measures your contacts’ engagement and interactions with your company and content, updating their contact profile feed with each new change so your sales team can easily view the activities that have taken place and where each contact is in their buyer’s journey.
The automated software acts like extra ‘hands on deck’, removing repetitive manual tasks from your team’s to-do list, and allowing them to spend their time where it is needed most – writing quality content and relevant communication.
HubSpot also includes resources for lead and pipeline management. This automation provides your team with the ability to easily manage and track where their contacts are in their customer lifecycle, and determine the most appropriate way these contacts should next be communicated with.
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