What’s in this article:
- Smart retailers and e-commerce brands are rethinking their customer relationship marketing strategies by hiring Customer Relationship Managers
- Some of the most crucial tips to help you in your CRM job search and your next interview
With the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers have redefined what value means to them and are shifting loyalties. 35% of B2C brands have recorded unusual customer churn. In a move to remain competitive and drive retention, smart retailers and e-commerce brands are rethinking their customer relationship building strategies by hiring Customer Relationship Managers. Brands that have posted jobs for Customer Relationship Managers include Ted Baker and Amazon. If you’re in the market for a Customer Relationship Manager position, here are the skills brands are looking for in 2021.
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Email Marketing
Email remains a great tool to build relationships with customers and drive sales. 94% of businesses say email is in their top 3 most effective marketing channels. Brands are looking to hire Customer Relationship Managers with strong email marketing experience who will be responsible for developing email marketing strategies to maximize customer engagement, retention, and create brand loyalists. With consumers demanding more personalized emails and tailored recommendations, experience building email campaigns with dynamic and personalized content are important capabilities to have.
Sending messages or offers that resonate with consumers is key to building strong customer relationships. As a Customer Relationship Manager, one of your responsibilities will be to maintain and optimize A/B testing plans to increase email open and click-through rates and improve email marketing investments.
With the need to ensure a positive ROI on their email marketing investment, brands require Customer Relationship Managers to establish and implement email metrics and KPIs, define benchmarks, track engagement metrics, analyze email campaign performance and provide actionable email recommendations.
So, having experience leveraging email analytics tools to gain better insights into how email marketing efforts affect conversions is essential.
Customer Lifecycle Marketing
The journeys of existing customers have changed with 56% of existing customers reporting new paths to research and purchase. Consequently, brands require customer relationship managers to develop and continuously optimize lifecycle programs across relevant touchpoints to increase conversions.
Engaging customers based on their stage in the customer journey is key to incentivizing customers to return and continue their relationship with the brand.
So important skills to have include the ability to create a detailed map of customer lifecycles for key segments and use segmentation tools to provide insight on the lifetime value of customers, across different consumer segments. You should also be familiar with the use of segmentation methods to target customers with customized content, marketing automation tools to optimize triggered campaigns and feel comfortable developing a testing culture to help optimize triggered campaigns.
Campaign Management
Today’s digital customers must be engaged with a consistent experience throughout their journeys and across the channels. But with only 3% of US companies achieving true omnichannel personalization, brands need Customer Relationship Managers to help them deliver omnichannel personalized experiences across channels.
Therefore, when applying for Customer Relationship Manager positions, you want to demonstrate your experience creating and deploying successful campaigns across multiple touchpoints and throughout the customer journey. Also, highlight your ability to analyze and interpret results from campaigns and share learnings with key stakeholders to drive continuous improvement of campaigns.
With technology playing an important role in improving customer experience, having the skills to leverage campaign analytics solutions such as Customer Data Platforms to ensure campaigns are contextually relevant across customer channels will give you a competitive edge in the CRM job market.
Marketing automation is key to campaign management -so if you have experience with marketing automation systems – show them off.
Data Analytics
Now that digital life has become mainstream, brands are leveraging big data to support the personalization of customer interactions and be more competitive. 59% of managers say their company is using analytics to gain a competitive advantage.
Brands are on the lookout for Customer Relationship Managers with analytical skills to help them determine the relative value of their customers by applying analytics to behaviors, journeys, and purchases.
Consequently, knowing how to analyze large data sets, gaining insights from them, and translating your findings into actionable business information are valuable skill sets. In your CV, indicate your experience mining data to understand customer behavior and indicate your ability to use tools such as Adobe, Excel, SQL, to run queries against the data and uncover insights.
The role of CRM is a collaborative one. So, you need to be a cross-functional team player and comfortable partnering with data science or analytics teams to develop models and diagnostics that drive performance improvement.
We hope these tips help you in your CRM job search. Look out for new and exciting CRM job openings on our CRM-only job board. Good luck!