Adopt a customer relationship management system (CRM)

Together with your website, this is the most critical tool for a growth marketer. It’s where we keep track of all people we care to build trust with. It’s a list of all your leads and customers. It can tell you who you initially got in touch with, how engaged a lead is and when the lead becomes a customer. It helps you to understand who your most important customer is and who to avoid in the future. The CRM is the tool I’m most picky about. It has the most long-term consequences, and it is hard to change it later.

Many of us have used an email tool like Mailchimp (https://mailchimp.com/) in the past, and (ab)used it as a CRM. It’s an email tool first with added CRM functions. For B2C e-commerce businesses, this might be alright, but not if you plan more than a regular newsletter. For B2C and B2B alike, the next level is ActiveCampaign (https://www.activecampaign.com/), in my opinion. It’s a true marketing automation tool with strong CRM, email, and sales capabilities. From there, you would have to jump to a tool like Hubspot (https://www.hubspot.com/), an all-in-one solution for marketing, sales, and support. I am still using it in several projects, but I prefer to pick my own set of tools, but if you don’t want to worry about syncing data between tools and have good onboard analytics, check it out.

One of the major benefits you get with a CRM is lead scoring. Imagine every lead in your list had a number from 1 (not likely) to 100 (very likely to become a customer) attached to it. You could tell your marketing and sales team precisely who to focus on. The simplest way to get started is a tool like Zapier, which has a free built-in lead scoring function if you have an email address (https://zapier.com/apps/lead-information). Its currently build on the rather expensive MadKudu (https://www.madkudu.com/). To take it further, it’s common practice to give points to specific activities of the contacts in your CRM like download lead magnets, opening emails, requesting a call, etc. Your CRM is tracking those activities.

Stay in regular contact with your leads

Getting somebody on your email list is just the beginning. Now we have to keep earning more trust towards our brand. The most common way to do that is to send regular emails with relevant content to your subscribers. We need a reliable tool to send messages like the before mentioned Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, or Hubspot. Why not send it all from your Gmail? You quickly be marked as a spammer, and nobody will receive your emails. The tool that seems to have the best grasp of what messaging is about is Intercom (https://www.intercom.com/). It can send emails, live chats on your website, manage support tickets, and even proactively reach out to your users at the right moment. To Intercom, these are all simply messages send through different channels. I like that view because it helps me to see the complete message history of each contact.

Your contacts should hear from your weekly (B2C) or at least monthly (B2B). Otherwise, they will forget you. If you are worried about spamming them, simply don’t send spam. Send the lovingly crafted content you have been building to solve your customer’s problems, and they won’t mind. My preferred way is to send a personalized onboarding message sequence every other week and a regular newsletter in between. At Pirate Skills, we do this with Active Campaign (https://www.activecampaign.com/), but most email tools will do this for you.

Gather customer feedback actively

The ultimate tool for engagement is customer feedback. Since the beginning, we have asked the attendees of our meetups what they liked, disliked, and what they would change, followed by a Net Promoter Score (NPS rating) (http://www.npscalculator.com/). This has been the most valuable resource for improving the relationship with our community. At least once a month, we sit down in the team and pick three new improvements we want to execute. 

I love to send out surveys, and for some wild reasons, users like to answer them. My two favorite tools are the free Google Forms (https://docs.google.com/forms) and the more powerful and user-friendly Typeform (https://www.typeform.com/). For general feedback, I like to ask three questions.

• What did you like about … ?
• How would you change … to make it more helpful for you?
• How likely would you recommend … to a friend/colleague? (1-10 scale)

A tool that helps me to do that (and much more) on my websites is Hotjar (https://www.hotjar.com/). It also allows you to replay the website session of each user as a video. This means you can look over the shoulder of your customers while they are using your website. This way, I have found so many silly hurdles I had build for my customer. It’s also a great form tracking tool, which leads us to the next segment: Analyze and optimize the customer journey.

Tools to analyze and optimize the customer journey

Acquire, engage, analyze. Let’s talk about that last part every growth marketer needs to master and the tools that can help us. Analytics tools are to me like a flashlight in a dark room. I just can’t work with merely believing that my content marketing and paid campaigns are working. And I can’t afford to waste time and money. Plus, I am committed to make the very best out of every marketing situation and learn what I can from success and failure. 

Analyze what your customers are doing

The universal tool to analyze user behavior on websites is Google Analytics (https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/). It tells us where our users have come from, which pages they visit, and which conversion goals they have completed. It integrates very well with Google Ads and gives us a neutral look at the performance of all other campaigns from emails to influencers, social media, or LinkedIn Ads. In e-commerce cases, we learn about the most profitable product campaigns, and in B2B, we can determine which lead magnet performs the best.

The next upgrade to using just Google Analytics is to use it with the Google Tag Manager (https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/tag-manager/). It enables us to track every critical click, scroll event, and form submission we want. The best part is that we can track 99% of these events without writing a line of code. With GTM, you can add all kinds of additional tools to your website without coding, like chat, popups, or user experience tools.

Optimizing the user experience

Speaking of user experience tools, Google Optimize (https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/optimize/) is a free tool that helps us to create A/B tests and personalizations on our websites. For example, we can show two product pictures or prizes and see which one converts better with which type of audience. While analytics tools help us to see potential bottlenecks, this enables us to do something about it. We talked about it in detail at the “Personalization is the new A/B testing” if you want to deepen your skills in that area.

Link your analytics with your ads

Let’s use the example of Facebook ads. With the help of the Facebook pixel, a tool to analyze user behavior, we can see how each campaign, audience segment, or creative is doing in terms of cost per conversion or even return of advertising spent (ROAS). It’s very similar to installing Google Analytics, and if you have Google Tag Manager installed, it’s incredibly easy. If you have the Facebook pixel installed, it automatically works with Instagram ads as well if you connect it to the same ad account. 

You should do that with all the ad platforms you are using. Not doing it would be like flying in the dark, which can be quite expensive in this case. Also, most analytics tools have a so-called SDK for the most popular development frameworks if you have a mobile app. Make good use of them. They are often even more powerful than the web tools, but harder to implement.

That’s it! Now you know the tools I love to use to acquire customers, engage with them in a meaningful way, and analyze the success of my ideas.