How to Store and Activate Declared Data with Your CRM

The first step to building a successful declared data strategy is capturing consumer preferences, motivations, intentions, interests, and more at scale. The next step? Storing and activating that data.

This post is the first in a series on how to store and activate declared data via your existing marketing technology stack. This week, we’ll cover how to use declared data with your CRM. Stay tuned for upcoming posts on how to use it with your DMP, CDP, ESP, data lake, and more.

What Is a CRM?

Let’s cut through the marketing alphabet soup for a second. A CRM is your customer relationship management system. Put simply, a CRM is your technology for managing all of your customer and prospect contacts.Through it, you manage your brand’s interactions with these customers and prospective customers. You can store critical data like contact info, past purchases, on-site behavior, and more, so everyone on your marketing team can access it and use it to make marketing decisions.

Why Do CRMs Exist?

CRMs exist to centralize all of your known customers and prospects and give visibility to your customer-facing teams. Giving your marketing, sales, customer support, and product teams a glimpse into your CRM can allow them to make important decisions like how to nurture leads to a purchase, when to time a product release, or why a price increase drove more purchases.

Your CRM gives you a bird’s-eye view into all of your known contacts, and allows you to identify important behavioral or purchase trends.

How Does Declared Data Work with my CRM?

Declared data is first-party data freely given by consumers, often about their motivations, intentions, interests, and preferences.

How does it work with your CRM? Just like any other attribute.

Once you decide the most valuable declared data points for your business and begin to get them from consumers, you map those attributes back to your CRM. The declared data points are tied back to your customer contact profiles, just like any other piece of first-party data or personally identifiable information.

Just as you may have fields mapped to specific contacts for address, credit card type, email, and coupon usage, you can map declared data items like favorite vacation destination, preferred style, and more.

Within the Jebbit platform, you create an attribute for a possible response. Let’s say you work for a women’s apparel brand that sells jeans. You’d probably love to know each shoppers’ favorite style of jeans, right? If you ask consumers to indicate their favorite between the options of bootcut, skinny, flare, and boyfriend, you could create a custom attribute in your CRM entitled “jeans_preference” and then map each response back to the individual who gave it.

Once you’ve begun collecting declared data and mapping it back to your CRM, you can pull lists and segments of consumers who share the same declared data attribute. For example, women who prefer boyfriend jeans.

How Does Declared Data Provide Value When Used with My CRM?

Declared data lets you go beyond just transactional and demographic data, giving you a deeper understanding of every customer and prospective customer in your database. As mentioned above, you can also pull lists and segments of customers in your CRM who have specific attributes. You could identify a segment of travelers looking to book a trip in six to nine months. A segment of shoppers who want to buy a watch for their male significant other. A segment of readers who would pay for exclusive professional sports reporting.

Integrating declared data with your CRM gets you closer to your customers and allows you to truly personalize your marketing messaging and offers based on information actively given to you, from them.

Activating Your Declared Data from Your CRM

Once you have declared data tied to the contacts in your CRM, it’s easy to activate it for personalized marketing. Here are just a few ways Jebbit customers are doing this:

• A micro-segmented email to travelers looking to book a romantic vacation within the next three months.
• On-site personalization based on declared data captured on shopping preferences.
• A targeted audience of readers interested in paying for premium sports coverage.

Who Are the Most Common CRM vendors?

As a marketer, you’ve likely heard of most CRM vendors. Salesforce was first-to-market with a cloud-based CRM. You’ve also got Oracle, SAP, Adobe, Microsoft, and HubSpot. This list is by no means exhaustive, but includes many of the most common, software-as-a-service CRM vendors.

How to Get Started with Declared Data and Your CRM

Curious to learn more about how to use declared data with your CRM? Chat with one of our declared data specialists about how to get started.