Once you have a basic understanding of how customer relationship management and marketing automation differ, you may find that implementing both makes the most sense.
The sales and marketing departments are on the same team, but it can often feel like they are in constant conflict. Using tools that reduce errors, clean up data, and give everyone involved easy access to the information they need improves results and gets everyone back on the same side.
CRM Software
Customer relationship management, or CRM, is meant for the sales process. It is designed for use by sales reps to organize their customer database and foster relationships.
CRM has several different components, with each designed to nurture your customer relationships. A well-designed CRM, when used properly, takes much of the guesswork out of the sales cycle.
CRM will prompt sales reps to make calls and follow-ups, check-in on account renewal leads, and even prompt birthday reminders. The CRM will manage timing and scheduling so that you know the optimal time to reach out.
Workflows within the CRM can be automated, which cuts down on much of the busy work that is frustrating for sales reps. Automating time-consuming tasks frees up sales reps to do the work they get paid for.
CRM can also include the ability to sync channels, taking yet another time-consuming task off of your plate. Finally, CRM allows you to offer targeted content to customers. This leads to improved customer loyalty and trust and increased conversion rates.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation allows you to streamline many of the tasks within the marketing sphere. You can use marketing automation to review analytics such as email opens and website views. Marketing automation is also helpful if you plan to run an email campaign or other regular communications.
The use of marketing automation allows you to boost engagement by segmenting your potential customers. Marketing automation allows you to use past experiences with a customer, as well as current preferences, to make an educated guess as to how to segment customers.
Marketing automation allows you to score various aspects of a prospect. This helps you determine how promising a lead is and make smart choices on how to move them to conversion.
It can be challenging to determine how effective a particular marketing campaign is. Using marketing automation, you can view analytics at the end of the campaign, analyze insights, and get a better idea of what worked and what needs improvement.
Marketing automation also allows you to trigger emails at times when a customer is most interested, such as after a visit to your website. You can also schedule email campaigns to run for individuals who haven’t visited your site in a while.
Should you use CRM and Marketing Automation?
1. What CRM can do for you
If you are curious about whether your business could benefit from CRM and marketing automation software, there are a few things to consider.
Your business could benefit from a CRM if you are struggling to utilize customer data. Spreadsheets are nice, but at a certain point, you will run up against limits to what you can manage. If you are spending too much time maintaining your data, you may benefit from a CRM.
Another hint that your business is outgrowing your current tracking method is if you are receiving complaints from customers. Growing pains are part of every business, but a CRM is designed to help manage and resolve customer issues.
Finally, notice how much time you spend working through the sales journey with each customer. If you are routinely struggling to close or losing customers at a particular point, a CRM can help. CRMs help you guide your customers through the sales funnel without losing them along the way.
2. What Marketing Automation can do for you
Wondering if your business could benefit from marketing automation? Is your company struggling to maintain a customer list?
Just because you have emails and phone numbers does not mean you are using the information you have in the best possible way. It is possible to have so much information that it hinders your marketing efforts if you cannot properly manage it.
Marketing automation allows you to quickly and easily target your customers. Using the tools of your marketing automation software you can be confident that your content is seen by the people who you want to see it.
Marketing automation allows you to work easily across all marketing channels. You can use it to manage emails, web forms, landing pages, social media, and blogs. You can pull up analytics information quickly and easily.
Knowing what is working and what is not is one of the most complicated parts of the sales and marketing process, and marketing automation makes it easier.
Perhaps you don’t believe you are ready for a marketing automation tool quite yet. Maybe your customer base is small and your contact list isn’t expansive or detailed. Marketing automation can help here as well. Marketing automation can help you build your customer list and improve the quality of your leads.
CRM Vs. Marketing Automation
The choice between customer relationship management and marketing automation does not need to be one of either or. Integrating both can offer tremendous benefits to your business. The ability to sync your data across both platforms provides benefits for both sales reps and the marketing department.
Using CRM and marketing automation tools allows you to get the benefits of each, tightening your sales funnel and increasing conversions. Your sales reps can count on better leads when the marketing process is designed to provide well-qualified leads. Closing sales, after all, is the end-game for most businesses considering CRM and marketing automation.
How Automation benefits your Business
When using both CRM and marketing automation tools that can integrate with each other you increase the visibility of marketing efforts to the sales team and the sales journey to the marketing team. Both groups, who depend on each other for success, can easily see where in the process a customer is, what needs to happen next, and whose job it is to handle that.
Integrating the work of your sales and marketing team allows for consistent messaging throughout the sales journey. While the marketing team will still “hand-off” leads to the sales reps, the messaging remains the same and the customer will likely never notice the switch.
Using both a CRM and marketing automation tool allows you to refine the customer journey in a way that makes sense. A visit to the webpage can trigger an email that includes a discount code. Using a comparison tool on the site can send the information to a sales rep for follow-up. Regardless of what you currently doing to move your potential customers along the sales journey, implementing customer relationship management and marketing automation tools can help.
With an integrated approach to sales and marketing, the entire sales journey is shortened. Using CRM and marketing automation together prevents bottlenecks along the sales journey and hands off the qualified lead from marketing to sales at the optimum decision time.
Integrated systems allow for shared data management. Sales reps do not need to wait for information from marketing, as all of the customer data is available across both platforms. Not only does this save time and effort, but it also reduces the opportunities to introduce errors in the data.
Better understand both processes
Integrating your CRM and marketing automation allows you to have an excellent overview as well as a close-up view of your marketing and sales cycle. There can be overlap in some areas of the sales journey, and allowing both the sales and marketing departments to have an up-close look at data can help everyone work toward higher conversions.
With an integrated system, you will see where in the sales journey you lose customers, where efforts are stagnant, and what areas need strengthening. Having this data available at the click of a button allows you to test different scenarios while working to improve both your marketing and sales efforts.
Get Started Today
Does your business struggle with presenting a consistent message? Do you struggle to build and maintain strong customer relationships? Do you wish you had more or better data, or wish that you could use the data that you do have more effectively? All of these are signs that you could benefit from CRM and marketing automation.
If you are ready to clean up your data, grow your customer list, tighten up your sales journey, and increase conversions, get in touch. Our products are easy to set up and use, making it easy to start growing your business today.
