Everything Your Jewelry Business Needs To Know About Effective CRM Management
By Emmanuel Raheb
Founder and CEO, Smart Age Solutions
Every jewelry business wants to grow and improve their sales. While many jewelers focus on external factors such as running additional advertising campaigns or increasing their marketing budgets, the real growth comes from within. How you approach and deal with your customers can mean the difference between making a solid sale or suffering a lost opportunity. CRM is how you do it.
What is a CRM strategy?
CRM, or customer relationship management, is a plan to grow sales by optimizing and improving your existing customer service by how you interact with your audience. This can be done through a combination of additional staff training, improving business processes, and incorporating new technology to streamline your operations. Customer relationship management is becoming the best version of your business to best serve your customers.
Why your jewelry business should invest in a CRM system?
An effective CRM system will help you to optimize revenue, increase your profits, and improve your overall customer satisfaction. Everything in a CRM system will help you to succeed by design. By capturing more information about your customers, the more you’ll understand them and the more sales you’ll make.
A CRM system makes it easy to target the people who are most likely to buy from you, eliminating a lot of the waste that goes into prospecting and improving your conversion rates.
Choosing a CRM system
When choosing a CRM system you need to be clear about what you want. There are many options on the market. Certain CRM software exists “in the cloud”, while other CRM software is installed on your computer to be used locally. If you have multiple jewelry stores then a cloud-based solution is a must so that all your stores can coordinate effectively.
Another thing to consider with CRM software are what additional options or add-ons are available. Do you need your CRM system to schedule sales calls or send automatic email reminders to customers about their order? Do you need it to integrate with your other software systems? Is it important to have all customer information in one place? Or, are you willing to have separate systems if it means saving on costs?
Always schedule a demo and ask for a trial period so you can see how the CRM software works in the “real world” at your jewelry store. Doing your due-diligence is an absolute must before making a final decision.
Benefits of using a CRM system
There are many benefits of using CRM as part of your business strategy. You make information easily available, you better connect with your prospects, and you increase your customer satisfaction. There really are no downsides to implementing a CRM system, other than the time and expense to get started. Inertia may honestly be your biggest hurdle.
To help get you started, here’s how to create a successful CRM strategy:
1. Define your business goals.
Having a clear picture of where your jewelry business stands today versus where you want to go is how you begin. Without firm goals in place of what you want to achieve, no CRM system will be able to help you. CRM is only as good as what you put into it. Knowing what you must do to double your sales, get customers to return, and grow your customer base, can’t be answered by CRM alone. CRM is a tool and only as effective as your business planning.
2. Build your ideal customer profile.
Creating a profile of who you want to attract to your jewelry store is the definition of your customer base. You may have noticed that your store attracts a certain type of clientèle. Are these the type of people you want to attract more of? Do they have the discretionary income to spend on jewelry? Are they able to help you grow and meet your sales goals?
Understanding the age, marriage status, demographics, personality, order history, income-levels, and favorite jewelry styles of your customers are all components of CRM. Anything that can be captured about your target market should be captured. The more you know about your ideal customer, the more
jewelry you’ll sell.
3. Map your customer journey.
The customer journey is simply a visual representation of your customer’s experiences with your jewelry business. It represents every interaction your customer has with you, whether by phone, live chat, on your website, or in store. It’s every touch point.
To begin, imagine you’re a new customer looking for an engagement ring. Do you start by researching styles on your website? Do you ask questions through live chat or email? Do you decide to begin looking at rings at the physical store? Where do most of your customers start their buying journey?
This is important to know so you fully understand your customer’s decision-making process. You need to set goals you want to achieve at each customer stage. It all starts with awareness of the journey your customer takes.
4. Automate repetitive tasks.
As a jewelry business owner you know that your most valuable asset is your time. There’s only so many hours in the day and even seemingly small tasks can eat up a big chunk of it. Compiling invoices, pulling order histories, sending a mailing, remembering important dates such as customer birthdays and anniversaries, etc. are all things which CRM can do for you. Anything that can be automated should.
CRM is an ideal tool to take care of routine administrative tasks. Because it captures all important information in one-place, it reduces the time it takes your staff to do things and helps increase your store’s productivity. This allows your team to focus on other activities that generate sales.
5. Define your team’s goals and set clear KPIs.
Setting individual goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your sales team, marketing team, and customer service team is a must. Your jewelry business has goals, but so should each of your team members. By measuring each person separately you can ensure that everyone is in alignment with your quarterly and yearly business goals. Focusing on the small picture helps you complete the big one.
For example, your marketing team many use CRM to do a postcard mailing to promote an upcoming sales, while your sales team on the floor uses CRM to look-up each visitor’s past purchase history so they can recommend the best styles they might like. CRM helps you to coordinate every area of your operation. The sky’s the limit when your goals and actions are clear.
By taking the time and resources to invest in CRM, you’re building the foundation for a more successful jewelry business. It’s only by having a 360 degree view of your customer through CRM where you’ll be able to best serve your target audience and become the jeweler of choice for everyone in your area.
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