What Is a CRM Campaign? Top Features & Benefits (+ Examples)
Jess served on the founding team of a successful B2B startup and has used a wide range of sales and marketing tools over the course of her 15-year career. She uses her industry knowledge to deliver the best answers to your questions about sales tools and sales management.
This article is part of a larger series on CRM.
A customer relationship management (CRM) campaign is a project, initiative, or series of activities designed to build and nurture a customer relationship, managed within a CRM system. It includes developing and deploying email, short message service (SMS) messages, social media, promotional, and online advertising campaigns. Direct sales activities, like cold or warm call outreach, also count as CRM campaigns—assuming they are managed in a CRM platform.
CRM involves building and maintaining relationships with prospects, leads, and current customers or clients. By default, CRM systems have modules and features that let you run campaigns to make initial connections and guide leads through their buyer journey.
4 Most Useful CRM Campaign Features
CRM platforms have capabilities that help in all areas of a developing CRM campaign. Some of these include content development, audience selection and targeting, workflow automation, campaign deployment and execution, and performance reporting. All that said, here are the four most useful CRM campaign features to manage sales and marketing initiatives for brand awareness, lead generation, nurturing, and conversion.
Campaign building features allow you to create CRM marketing campaigns, wherein users develop content such as blogs, emails, ads, landing pages, web forms, social media posts, and formal assets like e-books, case studies, whitepapers, and infographics. Additionally, teams can distribute content by publishing it on a website or social media page or sending it out via email or text.
Once the content and channels are ready, teams can use campaign sequence builders to automate deployment, redeployment, and customer journeys. HubSpot, for instance, is a marketing-focused CRM system that lets you nurture leads through automated email campaigns. Users can custom-select content, audiences, and deployment date, and configure rules for when additional emails or special promotions are sent based on opens, clicks, and other recipient behaviors.
HubSpot email marketing campaign builder (Source: HubSpot)
Aside from the automation builder, HubSpot is also excellent for CRM marketing campaigns with content, website, and social media management. Teams can write and publish blogs or social media posts, manage editorial or social media calendars, and create online advertisements—all from the CRM. There are even options to develop online web forms and site landing pages and manage your entire website.
Besides the content and channel side of CRM campaigns, audience management is the next essential component. Users need to segment their leads so that they can target them with appropriate content and channels based on circumstances, e.g., where they are in the sales funnel and customer attributes such as demographics or organization size and industry.
Audience segmentation features in a CRM are valuable for this particular aspect. Users can create contact and audience lists based on contextual lead data stored in the CRM, such as lead score, brand engagement history, and customer characteristics. They can then use those lists specifically for outreach campaigns such as email, text, or phone calls. Freshsales is a CRM that has excellent list filtering capabilities to segment audiences.
A Freshsales lead list by score (Source: Freshworks)
Tagging is another solid tool in CRMs that helps in the segmentation and filtering process. It essentially assigns custom attributes to leads and existing customer records to help better understand them. Plus, you can filter out customer lists based on tags in products, like Zoho CRM. For instance, if you wanted to deploy a promotional email campaign with limited-time discounts, you might only do it for people you’ve tagged “Discount Motivated.”
A Zoho CRM list by tags (Source: Zoho)
Pro-tip: Not all general-use CRMs come with advanced features like audience segmentation. If you have a unique sales process that requires unique capabilities in a CRM platform, consider developing a custom CRM solution.
Some CRMs may not have CRM campaign features built into the system, or you might be using a specific application or online service you’re already comfortable with. In both circumstances, you can take advantage of CRM integration capabilities. You can connect your CRM system with a third-party application or native software to the CRM platform for extended functionality and data synchronization.
While popular CRM providers have hundreds to thousands of integration options for marketing, finance, and operations management, there are specific ones best suited for managing CRM campaigns. Here are some examples of CRM integrations for developing content and engaging with leads and customers:
- Email tools: Email software lets you create and automate mass email messages. By integrating popular tools like Mailchimp with your CRM, you can distribute automated drip campaigns using contact data from the CRM system.
- Phone systems: Voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone systems let you make and receive phone calls through the internet. When integrated with VoIP tools such as RingCentral, users can place calls within the CRM, then log call notes and information in lead profiles during call outreach campaigns.
- Social media platforms: Social media sites let businesses generate and engage with leads on an online social forum. When integrating platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook with a CRM, teams can easily collect lead data and monitor activity with a CRM that integrates with social media.
- Project management systems: Project management tools let teams organize and collaborate on tasks related to a CRM campaign. Integrating a CRM and project management tool like Trello lets you design, deploy, and monitor progress in one interface.
Pro tip: CRM technology is crucial to campaign development and other tasks to move leads through the sales pipeline. Learn more about what goes into using a CRM to improve relationships with leads and customers with our CRM process guide.
Whether you’re using built-in CRM tools or integrations, you need to track campaign performance to make adjustments to your content, channels, and audiences. The ultimate goal is campaign optimization—where you’re getting the best conversion rates in terms of brand interest gained, leads generated, and prospects moved to the next stages of the sales pipeline.
By choosing the right CRM, you can get data collection features to monitor audience touches, customer interactions, and conversions after campaign deployment. Users can also observe what’s happening through the CRM’s dashboard tools or report generation features. In Pipedrive, for instance, you can look at email campaign performance over time to monitor clicks and opens.
Pipedrive campaign performance reporting (Source: Pipedrive)
For deeper insight, teams can also analyze that data to look at conversion rates and factors of campaign performance. For example, HubSpot has A/B testing and analytics for their email, social media, and online ad campaigns. Users can run head-to-head comparisons with minor changes to content, the audience, or channel to see which campaign produces better results.
HubSpot email marketing A/B testing (Source: HubSpot)
On the highest analytics levels, CRMs have artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to spot patterns for campaign optimization. Zoho CRM, for example, has Zia, which helps businesses perform better in their email or call outreach by telling users the best time to contact a lead.
Zoho Zia’s best time to contact feature (Source: Zoho)
Gain a robust understanding of CRM systems by downloading our CRM e-book. In this in-depth technology guide, explore insights into the value of CRMs, the features they offer, and how to select the right provider for your small business. You’ll even learn how to create a CRM strategy and properly implement a CRM into your operations.
The Expert’s Guide to Customer Relationship Management
Small Business Use Cases + Pro Tips
Benefits of Using a CRM for Campaign Management
CRMs are both a data management system and sales and marketing application. As a database, it stores, organizes, transmits, processes, and reports data on contacts, leads, customers, activity, and performance. As a sales and marketing tool, it has features, modules, and integration capabilities to create content or communicate marketing messages to contacts in the system.
The combination of both solutions makes it a powerful method for campaign management because of these key benefits:
- Sales and marketing automation: CRMs let you preconfigure customer journeys and workflows, allowing you to automate sales and marketing team tasks as well as campaign deployment.
- Centralization: CRMs have all relevant customer data and tools in one system, letting users manage and monitor campaigns in one interface.
- Business intelligence: CRMs let you track, report, and analyze activity and campaign performance through artificial intelligence (AI) and data insights tools, giving teams the ability to make critical adjustments for campaign optimization.
- Collaboration: CRMs offer data sharing, task and project management, and team communication features for marketing or sales reps to coordinate and collaborate on campaigns.
Pro tip: CRMs are significantly more valuable when the system design, layout, data fields, and modules are tailored to your unique operational needs. Our picks for the best customizable CRMs will help you find a product that’s easy to configure for your business’ requirements.
CRM Campaign Examples
Once you understand CRM campaign benefits and the specific features you can use to execute them, you can look into real CRM campaign examples. Your CRM campaign management strategy, in terms of content and channel, will be determined by where your audience is in the sales funnel and buyer journey. The types of campaigns that can be managed through a CRM can be divided into three main categories:
1. Top of the Funnel (Awareness) Campaigns
These campaigns are designed to target prospective buyers who are not aware of your business and have not engaged with it. The purpose is to get leads into the marketing or sales funnel to later nurture into qualified prospects.
Campaign/Content Type | Description | Best Channels/Distribution Methods |
|---|---|---|
Blog Articles | Written conceptual, how-to guides, buyer’s guides, listicles, and analysis pieces on a company website to educate customers | Online ads, email, and social media |
Social Media Posts | Copy published onto company social media profiles to present thought leadership, educate audiences, or inform of a company update or promotion | Social media |
Web Form Landing Pages | Page on the company website with content and an online form to submit contact information for additional communications | Online ads and social media |
Initial mass emails distributed to contact list to introduce a brand or communicate a promotion | Email | |
Cold call with prospects who could be a good fit for your business to introduce your brand and qualify them | Phone | |
Videos | Video content to educate viewers and present your brand—easy to absorb and gives a creative touch | Email and social media |
Infographics | One- to three-page thought leadership or analysis pieces that use limited copy but with plenty of stat and quote callouts | Email, online ads, and social media |
2. Middle of the Funnel (Interest) Campaigns
In these types of campaigns, it’s assumed that the audience already knows of your brand by submitting a web form or interacting with it in some way. Therefore, they’ve expressed some level of interest, and you now use your campaigns to nurture leads and develop the relationships further.
Campaign/Content Type | Description | Best Channels/Distribution Methods |
|---|---|---|
Case Studies | Written piece on real-life customer success story of when they used your product or service | Email, online ads, and social media |
E-books & Whitepapers | Formal, visual (callouts, quotes, charts) thought-leadership piece discussing a common challenge, solution, benefit, and outcome that applies to your target audience | Email, online ads, and social media |
Podcasts | Audio content featuring discussions with industry leaders or authority figures in your organization | Email, text, online ads, and social media |
FAQ Landing Pages | Direct responses web page to frequently asked questions (FAQs) of leads and customers | Online ads and social media |
Webinars | Education seminar conducted online on topics relevant to your target audience | Email, online ads, and social media |
Phone Follow-up | Warm calls or SMS texts to interested leads to see where they are in the buying process and if they have questions | Phone and text |
3. Bottom of the Funnel (Sales Decision) Campaigns
These campaigns will likely be distributed by sales reps and account executives to sales qualified leads (SQLs) who’ve expressed buying interest. The idea is to push the prospects or even current customers into a position to consider or confirm buying from your business.
Campaign/Content Type | Description | Best Channels/Distribution Methods |
|---|---|---|
Solution Brief/Comparative Analysis | Condensed whitepaper, case study, or graphic piece comparing you to competitors while being applicable to a specific lead’s circumstances | Email |
Demo or Free Trial Offer | A session or limited trial that lets leads view or use products or services | Email, phone, text, and social media |
Promotion & Discount Offer | Temporary special promotions used to get leads on the brink of a purchase to quickly make a decision | Email, phone, text, and social media |
Client/Customer Testimonials | Real positive feedback and quotes from customers on their experience and satisfaction with your offerings | Text, email, online ads, and social media |
Bottom Line
CRM campaigns are initiatives and activities managed through a CRM solution seeking to develop relationships with leads or customers. It can include marketing campaigns—such as mass emails, blog or social media posts, or online ads—and sales campaigns in the form of cold call outreach. CRM features like campaign builders and data reporting benefit organizations with streamlined automation, work centralization, and improved collaboration.
