7 CRM Trends for 2024

The world of Customer Relationship Management is constantly changing. Efficient and relevant communication are the keywords for marketing, sales and service in 2024. New technologies and features allow us to respond even more individually to customer needs and to be one step ahead of the competition. In this article, guest author Antonia Ehrenstein casts an eye with you on the most important CRM trends for 2024 and shows you how to take your CRM to the next level.

These are the 7 most important CRM trends in 2024

CRM Trend 1: Artificial Intelligence

AI is now standard in most CRM systems and is no longer unthinkable: Tools alone predict the next purchase date in email marketing, generate smart product recommendations, analyze contacts and much more.

Chat-based artificial intelligence, on the other hand, is a bit more special and it is currently on everyone's lips: Tools like OpenAI ChatGPT can give you ideas on all sorts of topics, generate code, or even write a good night story. The chat-based AI tools have been trained to have a conceptual understanding of contexts. They can personalize content and deliver valuable content when fed with the appropriate information.

Chat-based AI has been gaining relevance in many areas of marketing for some months now - including in the CRM area. Although so far few companies work with it, some tools offer massive added value. Applied cleverly, AI generates campaign ideas for you, inspirations for email content and subject lines, lead-gen ideas and much more. In the B2B area, it provides your sales team with ideas for personalized cold messages, leaving a positive impression of your brand with potential customers. You can also optimize the content you've written in terms of word choice, tone, or text structure.

Based on the input you provide to the AI, it generates personalized responses to your concerns. Of course, the idea is not for the tool to take over all your work. Try it out for yourself and find out in which areas you could be inspired by the AI.

CRM Trend 2: UGC

Customers trust customers. Over 90% of users rely more on recommendations from other people than on content created by a brand.* What works in the social media area, you can also use in CRM: Have you already created User Generated Content (UGC) for your brand or had it created? Top! Incorporate it into emails and tell a story with it. Instead of just using static product images and posed photos from photo shoots, occasionally incorporate "imperfect" content that has ideally been generated by your users. If you currently do not have any UGC, it can relatively easily be created depending on the type of your product or service:

Show your product in action in a real situation. Practical examples: If you sell beauty products, show how you use the products. If you offer a software tool, demonstrate its use with a realistic example. Include user reviews, social media posts, YouTube videos, testimonials, or customer photos in emails. You can also fill individual emails in your automations with UGC and point to your social channels. This gives your customers the feeling of being part of the brand, which in turn increases their loyalty and bond with your brand.

UGC is a valuable tool to gain the trust of customers. If you manage to successfully integrate this content into your CRM campaigns, you can strengthen the authenticity and sympathy of your brand. Tip: Make sure that you are entitled to use any content in your emails.

CRM Trend 3: Dialogue-oriented CRM

One channel that is increasingly coming into focus in the CRM area is messaging services like WhatsApp. You can use these for 1:1 communication, as an interactive newsletter, or both. A major advantage of messengers is the dialogue orientation, which greatly strengthens customer loyalty: In a dialogue, you can easily answer customers' questions. The best part: You reach your customers on the same medium they use every day anyway - for private communication.

Additionally, you offer them an easy way to contact you: Instead of navigating to your homepage or app, looking for the customer support button, and filling out a form with a request, the user simply opens their commonly used messenger app and sends you a message. Since the channel was only discovered for commercial use in recent years, there are still few business contacts among users' personal chats.

You can not only promote the channel on your homepage, but also in your emails. To initially test your target group's reaction to the new channel, send an email drawing attention to the new channel first to engaged users.

But direct communication is not the only advantage of messaging services: You can also use special tools like charles to send automated, hyper-personalized messages. For example, you can send interactive messages where the user has several buttons to choose from, allowing them to respond with just one click. You can use this feature, for example, for multi-step preference querying.

CRM Trend 4: Using Multiple Channels

Not only messenger services are trendy for customer communication: With increasing competition, it is smart to pursue a multi-channel approach, for example with communicative CRM. Which channels are you currently mainly communicating with your customers? If it is exclusively email, consider which other channels would make sense. Use chatbots for example to answer standard customer questions and thus as a first touchpoint for customer support. If you have an app, ask users for permission to send them push notifications and use in-app notifications.

When signing up for communication on various channels, the user expects to receive relevant information. So make sure to feed them accordingly and thus strengthen the positive customer experience. Ideally, the messaging on various channels complements each other. Example: Send a person who has just signed up for both the newsletter and push notifications not the same welcome messages by mail and push, but coordinate the messages and timing with each other.

Important when playing on several channels: Definitely think about a strategy beforehand and set up intertwined automations to play your customers smartly. This is the only way to ensure that you offer added value to your users when they give you the opt-in.

One medium that is now underestimated is mail (direct mail). Your customers' mailboxes have long since stopped being flooded with advertising - which makes the channel interesting again for marketers. You stand out particularly if you send a kind of postcard and choose a font that looks handwritten. This leaves a personal impression on the customer and at first glance doesn't seem like annoying advertising. By the way: addressed advertising may generally be put into mailboxes with the "No Advertising Please" sticker. However, make sure to enable an explicit opt-out of mail advertising.

CRM Trend 5: Automations + Personalization

The Q1 is known for setting new marketing strategies and goals. Reduce the pressure on manual newsletter content during this time and use the first months of the year instead to create a solid foundation. The cornerstone for successful CRM in 2024 is workflows that cover the milestones of the customer journey. Look at where you can make your automations even more personal and where it might make sense to set up new workflows to round off the customer experience.

Instead of sending a campaign to particularly loyal customers, set up automation that automatically sends a "Thank You" mail with a voucher after the 5th purchase. This way, you save time, can reach all customers at the same time in their customer journey, and have more extensive options for individualizing your content.

Automatisations and elements for personalization are becoming increasingly important as efficiency enhancement and an individualized customer experience become increasingly important in many ways. The customer wants relevant content sent to them. The focus here is on the touchpoints a customer has had with your brand, to pick up your customers where they are:

Behind the newsletter sign-up or account creation, for example, you switch on onboarding automation by mail or push notification. The customer just bought a product? Send them an email with application information and product information that is useful for customers at the roughly calculated delivery date. A few weeks later, you can ask them to rate your product. Make sure that customers are automatically removed from the corresponding automation as soon as they are no longer in the corresponding customer lifecycle stage: If a purchase was made, customers should immediately be removed from regular onboarding and sent into the post-purchase automation mentioned. Also consider whether it might make sense to completely exclude customers in these two elementary funnels from your regular communication - depending on how many newsletters you send on average per week.

But not only the milestone events are relevant: Think around the corner. Engagement with certain content offers a lot of potential to make your communication more relevant for customers. Example: Has a customer logged into your app several times in a while, but not for several weeks now? Send them a push notification with a personalized message that invites them to interact. With this type of smart automation, you remind users to take up their behavior patterns again.

CRM Trend 6: Use Smart Segments

In 2024, you should also pay special attention to your segmentation. Clustering your customers based on interests, for example, is a win-win situation: Customers prefer to read your content and interact with it, so with smart segmentation, you can expect higher open and click rates. Filtered targeting also traditionally lowers the unsubscribe rate because fewer customers perceive your message as irrelevant.

So it makes sense to take a look at what segmentation capabilities you have with your tool and into which categories you can divide your customers so that both parties benefit. With this, the first question arises: What data do you currently already have from your customers that allow you to make your messaging more targeted?

In the B2B sector, this includes company size and industry, for example, whereas in the B2C sector, age and gender may play a role for you. But smart email segmentation goes beyond using static data. Take into account interactions that customers have had with your brand. Maybe you have information from different touchpoints: Did a customer register with you from a landing page on topic X? Switch on an automation tailored to the content behind the registration. Has a customer become aware of you at event X? Group and play these people accordingly and make sure to specifically invite them to the next event of this kind.

If your CRM tool allows it and you work in the e-commerce sector, it makes sense to divide customer groups into "only buys in sale" and "also buys without discount". You do this by, for example, tagging your campaigns (retrospectively), and then forming a corresponding segment from your customers. You send less pure informational content to price-sensitive customers, who only interact with sales content. Conversely, you send fewer discount coupons to customers, who also buy from you without a discount.

You're not sure if your current CRM tool is right for you? Then compare the best CRM systems for small and medium-sized businesses here.

CRM Trend 7: Template Optimizations

Over 88% of 16-35 year olds use their smartphone to read private emails.** Those who still treat the mobile version of their email campaigns sluggishly should change this urgently. Possible solutions if the chic design looks great on the desktop, but rather modest on mobile: With tools like Klaviyo you can create a mobile and a desktop version for one or the other element. This way you can guarantee the optimal mobile display for complicatedly built elements.

Moreover, more and more users use the dark mode, so you should optimize your emails for this as well. One of the golden rules is to use png files for images, as these have a transparent background and therefore blend better into the dark design. General rule: Test the mail before sending it on your smartphone or use tools to view the email on various email clients and devices.