Since its inception during the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924, Black Friday today is a weekend-long extravaganza, stretching to include Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. With the popularity of online shopping today, retailers need to utilize the technology at their disposal to nurture and convert customers eager for Black Friday deals. A Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a great way to manage the rush, cement new deals, and improve customer experiences during the holiday season. 

Here are some CRM tactics that will help you make the most of the Black Friday rush. 

1. Get to know your customers: A CRM can help you organize any data you have about your customers and prospects, from their demographic information to their browsing habits and use that data productively. Built-in analytics will help you gather context to understand buyer intent better and tailor your marketing accordingly.

2. Personalize your emails: Invest your time and money into personalized emails for prospects who actually want to receive them. You will have more luck converting a lead who signed up for more information and can benefit from a tailored pitch than you will while cold contacting people who might not be looking for your products or services. 

3. Group leads intelligently: The right CRM software, like Freshsales Suite will make grouping leads easier by comparing each new lead to predetermined categories of characteristics or groupings like demographics or industry. Once you have your contacts segmented, it’s easier to search by age group, location, or any other relevant data to your marketing needs. 

4. Lead scoring: A CRM software can help with lead scoring, so you don’t waste time on leads that are unlikely to convert. The CRM can help you identify the highest value prospects to prioritize your time and resources better. 

5. Take advantage of automation: You can trigger different messaging for different personas at different stages of the buyer journey. Writing and scheduling your emails and SMS ahead of time will be much more efficient than writing each message right before sending it. While the content should be personalized, the sending can be triggered to automatically go out to contact at different times or based on different user actions. 

6. Reconnect with existing customers: A CRM can help you target unengaged customers and get them to buy from you again. You can automate follow-up communications, so customers don’t feel ignored. With subscription-based models, you can send automotive renewal reminders so your customers remember that they are subscribing to your service and get back into regular use. 

7. Follow up with cold leads: If a prospect showed initial interest and then didn’t follow up, it may be time to follow up with them. CRM data can help you detect this behavior and address it by reminding you to contact them or nurturing prospects with content tailored to their interests. 

8. Know when to sell: AI-powered data insights can help you make better sales decisions by helping you better understand your customers’ needs at different stages of their journey.  

9. Integrate seamlessly: When choosing CRM software, you want to make sure it integrates with other business-critical software. Keeping all this straight will make things much easier when it comes time to follow up with old subscribers and get them reengaged. Plus, when Black Friday brings in an influx of web traffic, you don’t want your checkout process, chat features, or anything else to be bogged down. 

10. See how campaigns are performing:  A CRM software can generate detailed reports on your campaigns and see how they compare to past ones so you can adapt your messaging as you go. You can also determine whether you’re sending your emails to the right person. 

11. Identify upselling opportunities: Email monitoring is an excellent way to identify promising sales opportunities based on engagement. You can see if an email is opened and when and whether the recipient takes any action. Someone who opens your email immediately and clicks a link to your site is probably a better lead than someone who only opens one out of every three emails. 

12. Automate triggered responses: Good CRM email tracking will let you set up automatic emails based on actions and insights. Always be clear in your messaging about why they are receiving the email so they trust the legitimacy and respond promptly to your call to action. 

13. Leverage chatbots: Robust CRM solutions will offer chat campaigns as part of good customer management. Using a chatbot provides several benefits in improving customer experience and increasing the reliability of your company.