Social trends and technologies are evolving continuously, inevitably impacting every industry, including IT.

Staying alongside such changes is critical to remaining competitive in a continually changing business landscape.

The power of the customer will be a driving force behind every significant CRM trend. CRM executives are breaking down departmental obstacles, rethinking strategies, and depending on machine learning to gain one common objective.

Top 5 CRM marketing trends

Here, we present five trends to consider when refining and developing your customer relationship management program. 

1. Collaboration and data sharing across multiple departments will increase

In the early years, organizations purchased CRM technologies in different pieces for individual departments. This proved to be a quite cumbersome and time-consuming process, as employees needed to switch between various applications. It created hindrances to marketing, sales, and customer service departments sharing data on the move. 

Now, suppliers are providing integration-ready partnerships, partnership ecosystems, and one-stop solutions. These options allow employees to share information actively across multiple channels, from inside or outside the workplace, through a single interface. This all-in-one ability helps enhance productivity to a great extent and saves time.

2. AI will accelerate the sales cycle and solve many client problems

For marketers, the problem doesn’t lie with receiving data, but, rather, what to do with it once they already have it.

Artificial intelligence, along with cognitive technology, promises incredible benefits – such as enhanced customer retention, greater customer satisfaction, and lower acquisition costs.

Cognitive technology has the ability to make sense of unstructured data significantly, such as client surveys and call-center records, and associate them with the web-browsing data to develop richer client profiles. It also involves advanced predictive analytics that can provide a greater understanding of customer behaviors. 

At the time of adding product data, campaign history, and external factors into analysis, you can accurately decide the best action for an individual customer at any point of time. From the customers’ perspective, it feels like they are interacting with humans. This allows you to provide experiences that are personalized and optimized for your company, as well as for your customer.

3. Customer journey analytics will give granular behavioral insight

Leveraging geographic and demographic data is very common, but it only gives a glimpse of the client's journey.

Now, it is possible to calculate and visualize the complete cross-channel client journey across smart devices over time. You can figure out where your customers are in their journey, determine how activity in one channel will impact performance in the other, view where they struggled, and eradicate friction from their experiences. 

For instance, if you find a visitor writing a review of your product, they are in the advocacy phase. When they start visiting multiple product pages, they are in the compare phase. Leveraging this to aid you to tailor your messages with appropriate information and offers can speed up the customers’ purchasing journey, leading to enhanced revenue and loyalty.

4. Content marketing software will gain importance in the long-run

It has been observed that the marketing automation software industry has witnessed the fastest development over the past five years of any other CRM segments. That trend will start to move even further up-funnel toward content marketing software. 

When marketing automation users turn more advanced, they will start hitting the wall with their solutions built-in capabilities. Developing lead scoring models, nurturing leads, and leveraging landing pages and dynamic emails enables the ability to personalize marketing experiences only for those prospects already captured in CRM or email database. 

With a content marketing solution, both the marketing and sales departments can start to personalize the customer journey before knowing who exactly their prospect is.

They can provide relevant blog posts and advised content based on their prospect's past browsing history. Additionally, they can customize website experience based on the search term that someone used to find their website. They can also monitor content performance and tie that to the real sales data to inform which content is going to convert leads and drive sales for their company.  

5. CRM system as the platform for customers omnichannel approach

Today, clients are becoming multimodal in their communications with different brands. They shift from one marketing channel to the other, as it suits them, when they are curious about a product or service and want to resolve a problem.

As the experts working at McKinsey and Co. suggest, merely initiating touch points across various channels is not enough. The steadiness of customer experience is significant as the breadth of engagement. Customers demand that brands must be responsive across various channels and provide high-quality customer experience at the same time. 

Advanced CRM solutions unify multiple channels, including sales calls, mobile marketing, social campaigns, and more. This new CRM technology trend to enhance client experience can shift with the times. 

Conclusion

The more data you can utilize to gain visibility of your clients' needs, the more engaging your CRM experience will become. By understanding your customer’s interests and preferences, and resolving issues at the earliest, you can gain long-term relationships with them.

Find all available CRM software solutions for your company's needs on G2.