As a marketer, you know that the database is the source of your marketing campaigns. You probably also know that creating, organizing, and maintaining a database is a challenge. Within a company, there are various data sources enriched by several teams, and this can quickly become a real headache. Depending on the size of your organization, this can sometimes mean hundreds of thousands of contacts, with dozens of informational fields, data derived from behavior on the website, or your interactions in different data tables. In short, the idea is not to make your head spin but to give you tips and best practices to configure your marketing CRM database as effectively as possible.
What is a marketing CRM database
A marketing database allows you to store and bring together all the information about an organization’s prospect and customer contacts. The information collected can be demographic, personal, behavioral, and geographic. Anyone on the marketing and sales teams may be in a position to complete the many pieces of information in the database. Centralizing this customer data in your marketing database is essential for developing your sales strategies and personalizing your marketing campaigns; it is even in your best interest.
Also read: The foundation is the customer database
The importance of configuring your database
Configuring your database effectively has several advantages. For example:
- Simple, always-available access for sales teams
- Standardized data, for reliable information without duplicates.
- Synchronization and responsiveness: ensures instant data updates, crucial for responsive marketing operations.
- Sustainability and traceability: facilitates customer relationship management by keeping a history of interactions.
- Strategic data collection and use: optimize data collection and use for targeted, personalized marketing actions.
- Support your strategies: thanks to the information collected, you will be able to achieve your goals more effectively.
Also read: Tips and tricks for organizing your database in Webmecanik Automation
Contact management
Configuring a marketing database allows you to better manage the contacts you want to reach. These contacts are either customers or prospects. In any case, the more information is filled in, the better it can be used. It is possible to tailor your actions (marketing and sales) according to your contacts’ criteria.
Here are the types of information that can be found in a CRM database:
- Contact details: last name, first name, email address, postal address, phone number…
- Demographic information: date of birth, age, interests…
- Lead source: SEO, newsletter sign-up, growth hacking, social media, webinar, trade show…
- Completed or planned activities: calls, emails, appointments, notes…
- Behavioral interactions: visits to website pages, opening newsletters/emails, participation in a webinar, clicks…
- Purchase history: purchase date, purchase category, product(s)…
If you want to understand why integrating webinars with marketing automation is important, this article may interest you.
Company management
B2B professionals can easily target their prospects and customers by using company-specific segmentation in their marketing CRM database. This makes it possible to link contacts to companies. They can thus adapt their marketing actions according to criteria related to the companies they work with. The criteria can be, for example, the number of employees, the type of business sector, or the size of the company. To this can be added a notion of scoring. Let’s imagine that each contact performs actions showing interest in my brand but not enough to trigger sales action. Except that I notice that at the overall company level, this involves several people and the level of maturity and interest seems much more significant. This would give, for example, a case where each contact receives 10 points versus a company that receives 30 points because 3 contacts linked to the company show interest. And that works out well because 30 points are needed in my marketing automation strategy for an action to be triggered automatically!
Multi-table management / custom object
For users of marketing CRM software who want to use data across different dimensions of the database (notably possible with the integration of Webmecanik Pipeline and Webmecanik Automation). This is what is called multi-table / custom object. Thanks to this feature, marketers can add as many data sources as they want. This multi-table data is generally linked to their business activity. This data generally complements the information already entered in the standard “Contact” and “Company” tables. This technique makes it possible to go even further in segmenting a marketing database; it addresses a broader CRM need. Imagine data coming from your products, your logistics, your resellers, or any other source of information that requires segmentation in its own right for highly targeted communications. If you would like to know more about multi-table, custom object.
4 tips for configuring your database within your marketing CRM software
To help you configure your marketing CRM software, here are a few tips:
➡️Use CRM and marketing automation software
Choose software that is fully synchronized, in real time, and bi-directional. This guarantees up-to-date data entered by the marketing and sales teams. To understand why you should take advantage of the winning duo, CRM and Marketing Automation.
➡️Define the database fields
To configure your database optimally, define the fields you need. They must be based on your marketing and sales strategy. You should know what information is necessary for your marketing automation campaigns and for the sales teams to successfully carry out their deals.
➡️Set up required fields
When creating a contact and/or a company in your database, you can, for example, require the contact’s email. This requirement helps enrich your database with information that is essential to your campaigns.
➡️Assign a leader to the project
Whether on the marketing or sales side, ideally the leader should serve the interests of both parties. They must ensure the software remains clean and up to date. This is, of course, important for data quality, ease of use, and GDPR compliance.
Thanks to a well-configured marketing CRM database, you put all the odds in your favor for greater performance. It guarantees greater customer loyalty, increased sales, as well as better communication thanks to precise knowledge of customers and prospects.
Also read: How to configure the database of your marketing CRM software
