But does it make you money?

I’ve seen companies spend enormous sums on advanced systems and then use them as nothing more than a very expensive address book. It’s like buying a Formula 1 car and parking it outside your house. Nice car. But it doesn’t win any races.

The system doesn’t know which customers are most important, what you should say to them, when you should say it, or whether what you did even helped. Someone has to decide that, and that’s where most people get stuck.

Here are five questions. If you answer “no” to several of them, you’re leaving money on the table.

1. Do you know what you want your customers to do more of?

More first-time purchases? More repeat purchases? Do you want them to shop more often, buy more products, or stay longer? If you don’t know, everything you do becomes “let’s send out a newsletter, let’s run a campaign.” That’s not a strategy, and without a strategy, you’re just stumbling around in the dark.

2. Do you talk to everyone the same way?

A new customer. One who has made 20 purchases. One who stopped shopping six months ago. One who hasn’t bought anything in a year. They all receive the same campaign, the same offer, and the same frequency. You would never go on a date with four different people and say exactly the same thing to all of them. Do you see the problem?

3. What happens between campaigns?

Most people are good at running campaigns. Plan, write, design, send. Then the next one starts. But someone buys, someone signs up, someone starts shopping less, someone abandons their cart. What happens then? Usually nothing. And that’s where the money is waiting.

We had a client where only 0.9 percent of the email volume was event-driven, even though the automated emails had nearly twice the open rate than the manual ones. On top of that, there were 16 email sequences that had been started but were waiting to be activated. They didn’t need a new system. It was already there. But it wasn’t being used.

4. Do you know what actually makes a difference?

In the last campaign, many people opened the emails, a few clicked, and you thought, “That went well.” But did it? Did you get more purchases? Did the customer come back? Clicks aren’t a result. It’s what happens at checkout that counts.

At another client’s company, B2B and B2C customers received essentially the same communications. The average B2B customer was worth nearly five times as much. Five times. And no one had noticed!

5. Do you have both the brain and the hands?

Effective CRM work requires someone who understands the strategy, someone who understands the data, someone who knows the platform, someone who writes the emails, someone who builds the workflows, and someone who measures results. The expertise is usually already in-house, but it’s spread across four different departments. Everyone is good at what they do. But who’s at the wheel?