Businesses that use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can easily keep on top of their client and prospect buyer journey in one centralized place.
CRM software gathers customer data, from initial contact, to nurturing the lead, to signing the deal, and every step after for maintaining the relationship.
Depending on the software, it can also store data such as the pages your leads or prospects visited on your website, the emails that they opened, and those that they didn’t, among many other things.
As a result, financial advisors have seen an increase in revenue when they used CRM data analysis in their marketing efforts.
As of January 26, 2021, 50% of businesses using Client Relationship Management software saw a Return on Investment (ROI) in six months or less, according to a data review by G2.
CRM tools will help you generate meaningful insights you can use to grow your financial advisor business.
Here’s how CRM data analysis will specifically help you attract new leads and secure new clients:
1. Easily Identify Your Ideal Client
Every advisor needs to find the time and resources to attract new potential clients, however, you also want to have enough time to manage the accounts of your existing clientele.
CRM data analysis can help you save time throughout this process by displaying compiled data that makes it easy for you to pull out the similarities of your ideal clients.
This means that you can quickly identify what characteristics to include when building your your target audience.
For example, a client looking for general insights on money management will be a different segment than someone looking for information about retirement planning.
Once your ideal clients are identified, you can tailor your language to their pain points and interests, in turn, increasing conversions.
You can also take it one step further by using CRM analytics software on social media platforms such as Facebook or LinkedIn to further target new subscribers.
Once you’ve clearly documented your target audience and have a better understanding of them, you can personalize all of your digital marketing efforts to their specific needs and pain points, driving more successful campaigns.
2. Reduce Client Acquisition Costs
Getting new clients is essential to business growth, but it’s no easy feat.
You can use CRM data analysis to manage your current clients strategically while also mapping out the most cost-effective ways to identify and attract new leads.
CRM sales reports and customer data platforms can help you to make those informed decisions.
For example, it can show you where you need to shuffle your marketing priorities to ensure you’re spending your time on the campaigns and outreach that will drive results.
So, if you notice that spending time and money on a specific lead isn’t getting you anywhere (for instance, they have not interacted with your marketing efforts beyond the first point of contact), you can switch gears and focus on other leads that are more likely to turn into paying clients.
An integrated CRM desktop, like in the example screenshot below, compiles all of the information about an individual quickly and effectively.
Some CRMs even include a goal prediction tool that reflects how likely the client is to do business with you.
3. Improve Your Email Marketing Strategy
Financial advisors need a solid email marketing strategy, just like any other business.
Leveraging CRM data will help you recognize patterns among your current clients that you can use to segment your email sends.
This can improve open rates, click rates, and responses to your email marketing strategies, which can help you boost conversions.
Customer segmentation is crucial in email marketing. It’s the technique of dividing your list into small groups that share similar characteristics.
You can use your CRM to help you identify client demographics by age, gender, location, preferred way of contact, etc.
Once you’ve segmented your email list, you can send personalized messages, offers, and engaging content to the right contacts at the right time.
You can take this one step further by personalizing discounts based on how long they’ve been your clients or by creating bundles to cross-sell or upsell services.
By applying CRM data analysis to your email campaigns, you can save time by not having to create random emails that aren’t relevant to your segments and may not even be enticing enough to open.
In fact, you’ll be able to create personalized marketing campaigns that your list values and increase the chances of someone reaching out to you to learn more.
4. Decrease Your Other Marketing Expenses
Analyzing marketing data through a centralized CRM platform will help you run campaigns across other channels where your target audience is active, meaning that you don’t have to waste time and resources on the channels that they aren’t.
For example, an analysis of your CRM data can show you the social media platforms that your leads frequent. So, if your leads spend most of their time on Facebook, you can make an informed decision to run your campaign on that platform.
You‘ll reduce other marketing expenses since you don’t have to run a similar campaign on Instagram or on any other platform that your leads don’t frequent.
Video marketing tools can also be integrated into your CRM software. You can automate your marketing campaigns and send personalized videos to different segment lists.
Using automation for your marketing campaigns also reduces marketing costs, while increasing the time you have to spend on managing your existing client relationships.
Remember, sending personalized marketing materials to the right segments at the right time is key to converting leads into clients.
5. Enhance Your Customer Service
Even without a customer service team, CRM tools can help you create an improved and streamlined client management process.
For example, your CRM can show the number of times clients have contacted you concerning their taxes.
You can use this data from your CRM to determine if there is a need to build a service strategy, webpage, email campaign, or FAQ section that addresses that concern only.
The screenshot below shows the interface of a CRM software that captures and analyzes customer interactions. The tool alerts the user to risks and opportunities across their business.
Analyzing your CRM records will help you learn your client interactions across different customer profiles and make it easier to identify what determines client satisfaction or any problems that they may be experiencing.
Most CRM software tools can also be integrated into other business tools such as Google Sheets or proposal builder software, making it even easier to manage your client interactions.
Integrating social media sites into your CRM platform can also help you provide a quicker and more cost-friendly solution to provide customer service across different channels.
Remember that customer service plays a significant role in building brand identity.
Your CRM software allows you to make informed decisions and ensure your customer service remains customer-centric, thus reducing client churn rates and increasing client retention.
6. Improve Sales Forecast Accuracy
You can use CRM data analysis to predict sales growth.
The analytics software can help you see the estimated time it should take for the prospect to go through the buyer journey.
Then, through predictive modelling, you can determine the conversion rate of prospects to paying clients.
That can help you make adjustments to your marketing strategy so that you can meet the target that ensures your business is healthy and will continue to grow.
Sales forecasts will be inaccurate if your business finds it difficult to track customer behaviour or if the data is stored in many different ways, across many different systems.
Since sales forecasts determine business decisions, inaccuracy can potentially increase the likelihood of decisions that can negatively impact your business.
Introducing a CRM software solution to organize data will help financial advisors generate accurate sales forecasts and maintain data integrity.
Key Takeaways
CRM software helps financial advisors efficiently invest resources, optimize lead conversion, and launch successful marketing campaigns.
Learning a CRM system might seem complicated at first, but it will be worthwhile once you use the data to improve customer service, deepen existing client relationships, and better understand how to attract your ideal clients.
A better customer experience also maximizes average revenue per user, decreases churn rate, and improves the client’s lifetime value.
In other words, CRM data analysis is critical to any financial advisor’s success.
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Ashish Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO of Polymer Search Ashish Gupta, former Tech Lead for Machine Learning at Google AdWords (6 years) and a quant developer on Wall Street. Co-Founder & CEO of Polymer Search, the first no-code solution to make structured data more accessible. His goal is to help anyone extract exactly what is driving their performance metrics or ad spend, at any level of detail, and without special data science knowledge. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishgup |
