Special Moments Will Be Remembered

In the light of today’s platform economy, building long-term customer relationships is a critical success factor. It’s significantly more favorable than acquiring new customers and more profitable in the long run too. However, most companies still haven’t realized the importance of a versatile and thought-through customer relationship management (CRM) or simply don’t know how to set it up to account for their business needs. For this very reason, we inaugurated the Heroes of CRM Conference to provide a platform for discussing advanced CRM approaches and technologies, sharing knowledge, and building a community of hidden CRM champions.

The conference took place at the Soho House Berlin and started with a keynote by Manuel Hinz and Dr. Markus Wuebben, co-founders of CrossEngage, which highlighted the power of moments in CRM. Marketers need to know as much as possible about their clientele to be able to react swiftly with relevant content while accounting for individual needs and preferences. Ideally, brands are a companion for their customers, someone they like to hear from because they create decisive peak moments or turn bad experiences into good ones by being there. CRM should be about creating these moments. They are what customers will remember and which added up will define how your brand is perceived.

CRM Hero Dr. Markus Wuebben

“We are not brave enough to take CRM to a new level.”

– Dr. Markus Wuebben, CrossEngage

Following the opening keynote, Alexander Seiler from HelloFresh highlighted the relevance of focusing on every single customer instead of solely on the overall performance of a business. In his opinion, this is crucial to establish long-term customer relationships.

CRM Hero Alexander Seiler

“From the CRM point of view, you have to look at the customer, not the contract.”

– Alexander Seiler, HelloFresh

In a panel on offline mailings in the marketing mix, Robert Rebholz, founder of optilyz, steered the gaze to the “secret weapon of CRM” which, from his perspective, is direct mail. Julian Koster explained how Billie, a factoring platform, dispatches and tracks offline campaigns to use the cost-intensive channel effectively. The Berlin shoe brand Shoepassion, represented by Julius Jüppner, gave strategic insights into a more granular approach to customer segmentation and direct mail automation. In conclusion, Project A’s Aaron J. Rosen showed how various companies optimize their campaigns with multiple test scenarios and how to find the most suitable combination of online and offline channels for each campaign.

In addition to their customers’ channel preferences, companies should also account for the respective phase of the customer lifecycle. Daniela Schaller from limango explained how a customer-centric CRM approach has to mirror lifecycle stages. For the shopping club, CRM is of particular importance, which is taken into account with over 100 automated communication paths.

CRM Hero Daniela Schaller

“We inspire our customers through emotional, personal, interesting, and inspirational communication.”

– Daniela Schaller, limango

Later on, we had the pleasure to host the Managing Director of Stylebop—Mark Ralea. He explained the usefulness of building a brand identity and highlighted that making mistakes is a natural step in the path of creating life-changing products or businesses.

CRM Hero Mark Ralea

“The small mistakes are clearly more decisive for a relationship than anything else.”

– Mark Ralea, Stylebop

Last but definitely not least, special guest Dr. Florian Heinemann emphasized the relevance of focusing on product and service quality to survive in a platform economy. The founding partner of Project A also answered the most pressing questions of the audience and advised on how to build the perfect CRM team.

CRM Hero Dr. Florian Heinemann

“If you can only hire two people in CRM, I would hire one who can calculate and segment and one who can tell stories. And I’d put the math-savvy guy in charge.”

– Dr. Florian Heinemann, Project A

We will further share and gather know-how and invite everyone interested in improving their CRM strategy to join us next year.