Mid to large B2C enterprises, consumer goods brands and other consumer centric companies find limited options when reviewing marketing database and CRM solutions. The Big 4 CRM providers cater for the B2B market primarily. A myriad of other second tier SaaS CRM providers are similarly best suited to B2B marketers or small business.
But when it comes to marketing, B2B and B2C companies are fundamentally different. B2C companies typically:
- Have more customers and larger target markets
- Have lower average transaction values
- Have a higher average purchase frequency
- Understand the greater role of emotion in purchase decisions
- Have retail stores, ecommerce stores and use POS software
- Or if selling through distributors, may not have access to consumer sales data at all
Consequently, the marketing goals for B2C companies are very different. Where B2B companies focus primarily on sales, B2C companies also focus on customer loyalty, maximising transaction value and purchase frequency, incrementally growing the lifetime value of each consumer and gaining insights from behavioural data.
Simplicity is unique in that it offers an all-in-one CRM solution that especially caters for mid to large B2C enterprises. This means faster setup, more intuitive workflows and features designed to meet the unique requirements for B2C marketers:
Coupons, vouchers, competitions and surveys
Consumer facing brands use coupons and vouchers to drive sales, and require intuitive tracking tools to measure the effectiveness of such campaigns. They also use competitions and surveys as data collection and customer acquisition tactics and require a CRM solution to power these tactics and store the resulting data alongside customer records.
Loyalty programmes
B2C companies use loyalty programmes to maximise share of wallet and gather customer data to optimise their marketing and product selections.
Social media marketing
Consumer facing brands use social media as a one of their primary marketing channels, as their customers are often heavy users. As such interactions are a major part of the consumer experience, it’s critical to incorporate social engagement into the CRM solution for a true holistic view of each customer.
Multiple brand support
With multiple brands often comes multiple brand teams, agencies and marketing tools. In such cases brands should only access data relevant to their brand (or family of related brands), especially when third parties such as agencies are involved. Similarly, consumer opt-ins and preferences should be managed by brand, rather than for the whole business.
Contact centre
In a B2B enterprise, the sales team make and take calls. In contrast, B2C enterprises often use a contact centre. What’s more, calls are more commonly inbound customer service enquiries, rather than relating to sales. Accordingly, B2C CRM software needs a fully functioning contact centre UI to enable agents to gain rapid access to all necessary customer data for efficient resolution of customer service enquiries. Simplicity Contact Centre provides such an interface, giving contact centre agents the right tools to resolve calls efficiently, escalate and transfer cases as appropriate and follow up on enquiries submitted via other channels.
Single view of customers
With larger number of customers and systems containing customer data, duplication across multiple systems and within systems is common. Simplicity matches all incoming records to existing customer records and merges them where appropriate. This ensures every customer exists only once in your database and all interactions with a customer are stored with that single customer record.
Complex segmentation and campaign management
Consumer focussed enterprises require more advanced segmentation functions, using engagement scores, survey responses, purchase history, brand preference, conversion propensity and numerous other dimensions. Using these segments in practice then requires more advanced campaign management capabilities to ensure deliver a tailored message to each segment with branching campaign workflows, suppression rules, triggers and wave campaigns.
Risk of privacy and security breaches. Expensive data migration projects.
With consumer data spread across multiple agencies this can create security, privacy and compliance issues. Ensuring your suppliers all meet requirements for security and privacy is challenging when agencies change frequently and new suppliers are appointed. Data migration projects become costly or abandoned and the customer data is lost. A better approach is to use a single customer data repository, providing agencies and third parties with an API to access data. This way, when agencies change there are no costly data migration projects and you have assurance that all your consumer data is secure and meets the regulatory and best practice requirements of responsible guardianship of consumer data.
Performance at scale
B2C marketers communicate with larger audiences than their B2B counterparts. Furthermore, B2C campaigns are more likely to become viral and place rapidly escalating demands on the underlying technology. In such scenarios marketers want to capitalise on the success of their campaigns to maintain the virality and extend the reach as far as possible. Slowness, timeouts and errors quickly stop such success in its tracks. So it’s critical your CRM provider has sufficient infrastructure and application performance to deliver a flawless user experience at scale. Simplicity is designed to support even the most wildly successful social media campaigns. We manage consumer marketing databases with millions of customers and billions of interactions.
One size doesn't fit all
So when you’re reviewing CRM providers, don’t settle for an adaptation of a B2B CRM tool. Changing your processes to fit a B2B system is a recipe for frustration and vendor lock-in. Choose a system that is flexible enough to meet your unique B2C marketing requirements. Contact Simplicity and we’ll show you the difference.
