CRM data as a tool for reducing the cost of leads

The effectiveness of any marketing campaign is calculated not only based on the number of people attracted and orders received. It is also important to take into account how much money was spent on implementing the strategy. That is, it is important to take into account the so-called cost of a lead. And if there is an opportunity to optimize these expenses, then your business will only benefit from this. Thus, one of the latest marketing studies conducted by the recognized world leader in the field of management consulting, McKinsey, once again confirmed the importance of accurate segmentation of the user audience. They indicate that the effective use of customer data provides a 15% increase in revenue. At the same time, the cost of attracting a lead is reduced by 50%. As a result, the effectiveness of marketing, if properly organized, increases by an average of 30%.

But, at the same time, not all global companies use these opportunities in their daily practice. Data obtained from internal CRM systems is not used in digital strategies. Often, this happens due to the banal underestimation of their potential. But in fact, such information is a unique opportunity to build relevant segments of the user audience based on their personal data, including the history of previous interaction with your business. Thanks to this, the actions of the audience at the initial stage of interaction with the business are taken into account, starting from attraction and first contact. As a result, the overall position of the client in the sales funnel is assessed, the accuracy of communication is increased, and the cost of attraction is reduced.

Our review today will be devoted to the use of CRM data in the development of marketing strategies. In particular, we will talk directly about what parameters should be taken into account in this case and what benefits your business will receive from this. We will tell you in detail how to implement CRM data in your advertising strategies. As an example, we will give 3 integration scenarios that clearly demonstrate high efficiency and cost optimization. The information provided will allow you to take a fresh look at the customer data that is already in your CRM system and start using it to the maximum

CRM data: what exactly are we talking about

We include general information about customers in the category of CRM data, which your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system will collect and store throughout your entire work with your business. It is a platform whose functionality involves collecting, storing, as well as analyzing and subsequently using data about users who interacted with your business. These can be people who have already placed an order on the site at a certain time, as well as those who simply filled out a feedback form or called your managers to get advice, but did not interact with the business further.

In particular, CRM data is this:

• User contact information. This includes names, email addresses that were specified during registration, residential or delivery addresses, and phone numbers. In other words, this is all the data that allows us to identify the user, distinguish them from the crowd, and ensure communication with them.
• History of interaction with the brand. We have already mentioned that this will be information about people who have already contacted your company in one way or another. If it was a call, then a record of it will be saved in the CRM system. This can also be the contents of email correspondence, complaints received, including in chat, data on regular live meetings, as well as any other interactions that took place between the brand and a specific client.
• Purchase information. The information will include data on all the products or services that were purchased by this user, their frequency, the amount of each individual order or average indicators. That is, this will be everything that can be attributed directly to sales.
• Preferences and interests. Such information will allow you to understand what product or service a specific visitor was interested in even if they never made an order. You will be able to understand their needs and goals, find out what prevented them from moving further along the sales funnel and, as a result, make adjustments to your own marketing campaigns. Perhaps it makes sense to prepare a personalized offer, thereby transforming the visitor into a buyer.
• Lead information. This is information about potential clients, their interests, viewed products, services, as well as what stage of the sales funnel a specific person has reached. This will help you understand your own mistakes and take them into account for the future, including during the subsequent acquisition of new clients.
• Analytical information. This category contains complete statistical data, generated reports and other information obtained as a result of analyzing the entire array of customer information. By analyzing such documents, you will be able to evaluate the performance of both the business as a whole and an individual manager, and take a number of measures aimed at improving the results.

All this information helps to keep the overall process of interaction with the audience under control, ensure more flexible management of customer relationships. As a result, you will learn to better understand potential buyers, take service to a new level, and be able to personalize your offers. This is what will significantly increase the efficiency of sales and marketing strategy, in particular, by reducing the cost per click.

Why does a business need CRM data?

Collection of CRM data, its processing, structuring and subsequent use - this is what will provide modern businesses with the following opportunities:

1. Improved understanding of customers, their pain points, and wishes. You will be able to get the most complete picture of your target audience, and understand what specific preferences this person has. Accordingly, this will help you improve the user experience and increase satisfaction from interacting with the business.
2. Increasing the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Along with one universal ad, you can prepare several aimed at different segments of the target audience. As a result, you will be able to interest many more people, show each category the best benefits for itself. This will help increase clicks on the site, and, as a result, the number of conversion actions.
3. Personalization of service. If you know what products this person was previously interested in, what exactly he was looking for, what previously prevented him from being taken through the sales chain to placing an order, then you can correct the situation based on this data. A personalized offer significantly increases the likelihood of placing an order. This may relate to providing a product or service that will best meet the needs of a given person, or additional discounts, bonuses for purchases, offers of related products, etc.
4. Increasing sales efficiency. By analyzing the collected data, it will be possible to identify weak links - those bottlenecks where the customer's path often breaks off. Perhaps the problem is hidden in insufficient information on the site, the absence of some payment or delivery methods, a poorly configured filter system, low manager competence, etc. If you eliminate these weak links, then with a high degree of probability you will be able to more effectively lead potential buyers through the sales funnel until they purchase a product or service.
5. Increasing loyalty from the target audience. You get customers who will come back to you again and again to make purchases. Those who will recommend your business to their friends, acquaintances, happily participate in your interactive events, leave reviews, comments under posts.

All this allows us to confidently say that CRM data is a unique opportunity for businesses to improve overall interaction with the audience, intensify sales, optimize advertising campaigns. But here it is very important to implement everything as correctly as possible. And it is worth starting with the integration of the received data into advertising.

How to implement CRM data into advertising: sequence of actions

The implementation of CRM data into advertising involves the consistent implementation of a number of stages:

1. Client identification.
2. Linking identifiers.
3. Transferring information to the advertising platform.

We will consider each of the stages in more detail, which will help to implement these works in practice independently.

Client identification

Client identification is the first level of integration, which involves the transfer to the site from CRM system or an analytical service of a unique client identifier. In particular, it can be either UserID or ClientID. This makes it possible to link information about the actions performed by a particular person on the site and the status they received in the CRM system.

One of the most important tasks here is to organize correct mutual work. This is ensured by using a single logic for transferring a personal ID from the user's personal account or form with subsequent storage in localStorage or cookie files. There are 2 possible identifier formats here:

1. UserID. This option should be chosen in cases where the site provides authorization for users. That is, each person who has at least once made such a connection will immediately receive their personal unique identifier directly from the site. As a result, UserID will be stored in the client database. Here you can find it, as well as configure the transfer to the analytics system.
2. This option is used on sites where there is no mandatory registration, but the analytics system is already connected. In this case, each new user will be assigned a unique ClientID number. It will be stored exclusively in the browser's cookie files. It will be automatically transferred to the analytics system, meaning you will only need to perform a small setting so that it is simultaneously recorded in the CRM system. That is, along with all the information about requests from users, the order placed, the user's ClientID will also be saved in this system.

Thanks to such identifiers, you get the opportunity to identify the user, which will be especially relevant for their repeated requests, track their previous communication with the brand, the actions performed. It does not matter from which device this person will connect. Speaking of UserID, its use will be especially useful for businesses that actively interact with customers, including regular ones. Bright examples of such business representatives will be online stores, all kinds of educational platforms. As a result, the process of preparing personalized offers will be significantly simplified, since the history of previous interactions, preferences, previously placed orders, etc. will already be taken into account.

Linking identifiers

The combination of the two identifiers we discussed above will allow you to get a comprehensive analytical picture for each user, regardless of the device they use to access your site. You've probably already heard of the term cross-device analytics. With UserID, everything is more or less clear, because this number remains constant for each registered user. In the case of ClientID, things are not so clear, so it would be a good idea to also understand its features. There are the following nuances here:

1. ClientID can change. Alternatively, this can happen after the user clears cookies if they decide to use a different browser or device. That is, the same person can receive different ClientIDs from the system under different circumstances. This means that the system will not be able to link their actions together or identify the relationship. In order to maintain data integrity, you will need to send all those identifiers that relate to the same user to your CRM system. If you also use a mobile application in your work, you will also need to add appmetrica_device_id to this database. That is, it will be necessary to ensure the unification of all this data.
2. In practice, analytical tools often link the same ClientID to different users. As a result, identifying a specific person becomes much more difficult. Incorrect decisions can be made, including when setting up advertising campaigns, preparing personalized offers, etc.
3. ClientID is not able to track cross-platform activity. That is, people who connect to the same site from different devices will be mistakenly identified by the system as different users. As a result, it is impossible to obtain accurate analytics for each individual client. To correct this situation, it will be necessary to connect third-party identifiers or use data unification mechanisms.

In view of all these specifics, there is a need to link identifiers. That is, it is necessary to ensure a match between ClientID and UserID. This will allow you to build the most complete and accurate picture of user behavior on the site. If everything is implemented correctly, then thanks to ClientID, a specific session or visit will be recorded, and UserID will already identify the user. If this is not implemented, then it will be impossible to compare all the actions that clients perform when connecting to your site: different devices, browsers, the presence or absence of authorization, etc.

The main difficulty here is that you will not be able to simply build a correspondence between these identifiers and the analytics system. First, you need to link them by passing UserID in the visit parameters or events themselves. All this work related to the formation of a single system of identifiers is preferably done at the very beginning of work with the site, literally at the stage of connecting the analytics system. Experience shows that it will be extremely problematic, and in most cases even impossible, to ensure the linking of retrospective data.

Transferring information to an advertising platform

If you have already implemented the previous 2 stages, then you can proceed to the final one - configure the transfer of all information from the CRM system to the advertising platform you work with. This is the only way you will "make" this information work in advertising. Such integration can be configured automatically via API or via specialized external services. If desired, you can also do this work manually by uploading csv files.

The setup process itself, namely the structure and detailing of the upcoming process, directly depends on the specifics of the business, as well as the goals you would like to achieve within the framework of this marketing campaign. If we talk about Yandex Metrica, today there are 2 separate types of downloads:

1. Customers and orders from CRM".
2. "Offline conversions".

There are several key differences here. In particular, all the data that will be typical for the offline environment, be it calls, orders coming from CRM, and the conversions themselves will be supplemented within 21 days. That is, if no more than 3 weeks pass between the visitor's last visit and the moment of processing the file with the corresponding information on conversion actions, then such data will be added to the existing visit. When this period of time is longer, a new visit will be generated.

If we are talking about orders from CRM systems, then there will already be an extended period for making changes to the visit data. In particular, at least 111 days must pass from the moment of the last request accompanied by an order so that the system no longer adds a new action to the old record. In the case when it is necessary to change the income from the conversion action after the buyout, change the status, such as from “In progress” to “Paid”, such a solution will bring tangible benefits.

And here you need to decide which option for recording user data will be more suitable for you: accumulating information on clients in a specific transaction cycle or developing a separate strategy based on the dynamics of the user's transition to various stages of the sales funnel. Information can be collected in “goals”, “segments” or “audiences” for subsequent use in advertising campaigns.

Integrating CRM data into advertising: getting acquainted with the scenarios

Depending on what goals you pursue within the framework of a particular marketing campaign, what area of business you are working with, the scenarios for integrating CRM data may have a number of fundamental differences. The advertising accounts themselves and the related services that will be connected to the work will also be different. To ensure successful integration in the future, it will be necessary to perform a number of simple settings, and then maintain the data exchange process at a stable level. However, there are still a number of operations at the integration stage that will be universal. Moreover, they can be easily automated. In particular, we are talking about the transfer of identifiers, updating lists and unloading statuses.

To make it clearer how everything works in practice, we will now consider 3 scenarios for integrating CRM data into advertising in the following niches:

1. Education.
2. Financial technologies.
3. Real estate.

These are working practices that were implemented by specialists at one time and clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of using CRM data in developing advertising campaigns.

Integrating CRM data into advertising in the field of education

Attracting an audience to websites, services and other platforms dedicated to online education involves creating an emphasis on the so-called "qualified leads". Here it is important to focus on an audience that is truly interested in a given product. To implement such an idea, you can use services such as Yandex Metrica, Yandex Direct and directly the CRM system. As a result, thanks to the organization of data transfer to advertising systems, you can get a more effective, optimized campaign that will attract an interested audience. You will be able to more effectively customize strategies aimed at specific user segments.

The integration process itself in this case involved the sequential execution of the following steps:

• implementation of the collection of the ClientID user identifier in the CRM system, which is used in the work of this online school;
• writing a simple software connector to the CRM in Python in order to receive transactions and potential clients with assigned statuses via the API;
• creation of a boot file where offline conversion data is added via post-API directly to Yandex Metrica;
• creation of several goal options: with a breakdown of users by status, by new transactions with simultaneous transfer of its value.

Due to the fact that all work was organized directly with the API, specialists had a lot of opportunities to set various conditions and goals of the advertising campaign, regardless of its complexity.

As a result of the work performed in Yandex Metrica, all the necessary goals were created based on the data obtained from the CRM system. Additionally, distribution by lead status was provided here. Such information made it possible to build various scenarios, and then make upward or downward adjustments to them regarding high-quality and low-quality leads. Additionally, it became possible to direct retargeting to an audience that had already interacted with the business, including those who never finalized an order. Also, according to the results, a decrease in the number of repeat applications was noted due to the fact that current students of the online school were automatically removed from the category of potential clients.

Before the launch of the optimized campaign, when only manual settings were used, and the bet was made on primary leads, not very good results were observed. In particular, the number of unqualified leads was more than 40%, while high-quality leads were only about 10%. At the same time, on average 30% of all applications were repeating. If we talk about the cost of 1 application, it was almost 40,000 rubles. That is, the numbers are very impressive, and not in a positive sense of the word.

After integrating CRM data into advertising campaigns, the situation changed significantly. In particular, the share of quality leads increased by 2.5 times (amounted to 25%), but the cost of an application decreased to 18,000 rubles.

Integrating CRM data into financial technology advertising

Now let's look at an example of using CRM data, where this information is compared with events taken from partner mobile networks. In particular, when launching advertising in mobile applications, today there is one of the highest rates of robotic traffic. This means that the advertising budget is wasted: it is not real users who respond to your ad, but bots. Therefore, in such advertising campaigns, it is very important to identify robotic traffic and turn it off as quickly as possible. Integration with a CRM system will help ensure this. In this example, it was possible to ensure a fairly effective fight against fraud in mobile advertising.

To solve the task, along with the built-in CRM system, the AppMetrica service and anti-fraud system were also used. The integration process itself consisted of the following stages:

• unloading information from the CRM system in the fields «device_id», «event_date», «event_name»;
• loading this information into the AppMetrica service using post-Api events;
• the operation of the AppMetrica service is linked to the anti-fraud system, which makes it possible to identify indicators of clean installations from users, while receiving the identifier «device_id»;
• if the quality criteria are met, partner In-App traffic is optimized for a specific event, and if the conditions are not met — the event is not counted as a conversion action.

Thanks to the implementation of such work, specialists were able to establish the fact that the income received was indeed from performing target actions. If the task is to intercept organic traffic, that is, to identify those users who are searching for an application in the store by brand name, then it will be additionally necessary to analyze the information using anti-fraud systems.

In parallel with assessing the quality of traffic coming from partner mobile networks, in this case it was possible to automate all processes related to the transfer of confirmed events from CRM systems to analytics tools. Based on such data, specialists were able to make adjustments to the traffic attraction algorithm, increasing the efficiency of its work, and at the same time ensure the optimization of the launched advertising campaign.

Integration of CRM data into real estate advertising

The last example in our selection is devoted to cutting off robotic traffic by integrating the Yandex Direct service and call tracking. We are talking about developers' advertising, where today there is also a fairly high rate of fraudulent requests. In order to reduce their number, changes were made to the advertising campaigns launched in Yandex Direct, targeting them directly at requests from real users.

To implement this idea, I used the CoMagic call tracking system, as well as the Yandex Direct and Yandex Metrica services. The integration process itself was implemented using a narrow-focused data transfer method. In this case, the call tracking platform took on the role of the CRM system. It was there that all requests from potential clients were recorded, their status was indicated, as well as “yclid”, that is, the click identifier. We would like to draw your attention to the fact that “yclid” can only be used to transfer offline conversions from Yandex Direct to Yandex Metrica. For other tasks, it is worth using other identifiers.

Specialists configured the settings to transfer information about each application status along with their individual identifier "yclid" from the CoMagic system to Yandex Direct, Yandex Metrica with an interval of 2 hours. Thanks to this, high accuracy of information was preserved and its duplication was excluded. It was the binding of the application status and its identifier "yclid" that made it possible to understand which clicks lead to real conversion actions.

After the optimization of advertising campaigns was completed, new goals began to be added to Yandex Direct. The information presented in them allowed specialists to make adjustments to the launched advertising campaigns, directing them to high-quality leads: those that went through the call tracking service, that is, received the appropriate status in CoMagic. But robotic (non-targeted) traffic was automatically filtered out, which, among other things, also allowed us to optimize advertising costs.

Summing Up

In today's review, we examined the issue of CRM data in detail, told you what benefits for businesses can be obtained with their help during the launch of advertising campaigns. We talked about the features of integrating such information into analytics systems, advertising platforms, and gave a number of practical examples that demonstrated the high efficiency of such solutions in practice.

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