Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is all about managing the relationships you have with your customers – including potential customers. CRM combines business processes, people, and technology to achieve this single goal; getting and keeping satisfied customers. It’s an overall strategy to help you learn more about your customers and their behavior so that you can develop stronger, lasting relationships that will benefit both you and your customers. It’s become almost impossible to build and run a successful business without a strong focus on CRM.

Customer journey mapping is an important exercise that helps companies understand their customer’s perspective so they can meet needs and expectations. It also drives companies to reach all the business goals for individual customers – such as long-term engagement, buying additional products or services, or becoming a reference. The customer journey map itself is a visual diagram of the way your customers engage with you throughout the buying cycle. From the time they learn your company’s name or find you on Google, all the way to the time they purchase their first product/service from you, and even beyond that.

The effectiveness of email marketing is in its deliverability. Perhaps you’ve followed all best practices to craft an ultimate subject line and have the most valuable information for your customers in the email body. But unless the email gets into your customer’s inbox, the time, energy, and money you put is all useless. A recent Report on Email Deliverability notes that when a businesses send out permission-based emails like membership confirmations, password resets, delivery notifications, and more, one in every five emails fail to land in the inbox. This means businesses are failing to connect with 20% of their customers. We say an email has not delivered successfully when it ends up in spam folder or an Internet service provider blocks it.