4 Ways to Clean Up Your CRM for More Efficient Communication

Your customer relationship management tool, or CRM, is a cornerstone of your real estate business. It’s where key client information lives, sales opportunities are identified and logged, and critical details and interactions are tracked.

Your CRM is also an important part of your marketing and outreach strategy, highlighting its role and importance in efficient communication to clientele. It’s easy to get busy and quickly plug information into your CRM, but over time, this clutter can pile up. As a result, information can get muddied, records can be confusing, and you can waste too much time trying to untangle it all.

By taking time to clean up your CRM, you can make your workday operations simpler — and give contacts in your client database the experience they need to keep you top-of-mind.

Ensuring Efficient Communication with Your CRM

By tidying up your CRM and streamlining its use, you can help drive consistent, efficient communication to your client database. Clean up your CRM to ensure data and outreach efforts are quality and up-to-date.

Before you get started, remember to set a regular schedule of cleaning up your CRM. Consider a quarterly review to start, and then adjust accordingly. You’ll also want to set ground rules, either with yourself or your team (or both), to keep data clean and avoid duplicate efforts and data.

#1. Remove Duplicate Contact Records

To start cleaning out your CRM, export the entirety of your client database. Then, identify duplicate records using Excel or another spreadsheet tool. Check for the last point of contact of each record and only save the record most recently interacted with.

Removing duplicates gives you a more accurate estimation of your total client database, while also ensuring you’re not crossing wires and updating the wrong contact, or sending duplicate follow-ups. It’s also a best practice for data cleanliness in CRMs.

#2. Classify Your Contacts and Group Them Accordingly

Now that you’ve cleaned up your database overall, take a look at your clientele and put them into groups based on their behavior or characteristics.

When reviewing your client database, keep an eye out for characteristics for broad groupings like:

• Cold leads
• Warm leads
• Leads you’re not sure about
• Third-party leads
• Referral leads
• Past clients
• Vendors and professional contacts
  

Once you’ve classified your contacts by their status, you can go a step further and drill them down even more by qualities like:

• The ZIP or city they’re located in
• Where you sourced or met them
• When you last reached out
• Types of homes or price points they’re interested in
• Their profession or industry
  

By organizing your cleaned-up leads in this manner, you have a simplified and data-rich view into the who and what making up your contact list. In turn, you can quickly identify the types and frequency of outreach you can start engaging in to maximize these connections — and ensure your CRM unlocks efficient communication.

#3. Give Your Templates a Refresh

As you prepare to reach out to your cleaned-up contacts, review the content in your CRM. Is it loaded with outdated emails? Did you ever get to set up your text auto-responder? What does your email signature look like, and does it include a link to all your profiles and website?

Taking the time to audit and remove any unwanted content can remove clutter, improve functionality of your CRM, and cut through the noise of knowing what to send to who, and when. You can also ask an artificial intelligence tool like ChatGPT to rewrite your most-used emails to put a fresh spin on them.

For further communication efficiency, go a step further and group your templates accordingly by contact characteristics, too.

#4. Maximize Your CRM Now That it’s Cleaned Up

You’ve cleaned up your clientele base, your contact records are tidied and classified, and your refreshed content is raring to go. Take advantage of a clean CRM and use it to work smarter, not harder.

Update your nurture campaigns with the latest email and text message content you’ve freshened up. Add contacts into new nurture campaigns built specifically for their characteristics. Start setting time aside in your daily schedule to work through your updated call list for contacts who previously went silent. Monitor your nurture campaigns regularly for ongoing optimization.

By cleaning up your CRM, you’re able to take advantage of your database’s full potential and maximize your opportunity to offer a well-rounded, excellent prospect and customer experience.

Are you ready to get quality, vetted leads? Eager to build your brand and online presence? Get started with your RealEstateAgents.com profile and grow your business today!