CRM+Marketing Automation: A Powerful Solution to Grow your Business

Customer relationship management(CRM) helps business owners track and manage their customer base.  

CRM software is ideal for making the most of relationship development with existing clients and potential business prospects, eliminating any gaps in the sales pipeline. It can also handle everyday tasks, such as tracking email campaigns, generating correspondence reports, and many others.

But what if you don’t have time to regularly engage with prospects/clients while monitoring your ongoing sales functions? 

That’s where marketing automation comes into play. Marketing automation software can help businesses save valuable time by automating tasks and enabling them to better serve and stay connected with their customers. 

Let’s understand the benefits of uniting a robust CRM system with marketing automation software that’ll help you grow your business.

What Is CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) helps organizations manage their interaction with current and potential customers. It also helps organizations improve customer service, sales, marketing, and productivity. 

The software offers a single interface to store information about customers and prospects and provides a central point for organizations to track and manage this information. CRM systems provide a 360-degree view of the customer, enabling organizations to make more informed decisions.

According to Nucleus Research, companies who use CRM software regularly make an average of $8.71 for every dollar spent.

Don't forget to check out: Salesforce Marketing Automation and its Benefits

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation software automates the delivery of marketing messages to customers across multiple channels based on their individual preferences and behaviors. 

Using marketing automation, you can streamline marketing activities such as lead management, email marketing, social media marketing, and much more, which helps reduce the cost of communicating with prospects and customers. 

According to Social Media's Today 2019 State of Marketing Automation Survey report, at least 75% of businesses are already implementing or utilizing marketing automation in their business to some degree. 

Benefits of integrating CRM and Marketing Automation for Businesses

Integrated marketing software platforms make all the difference to your business regarding sales success and long-term growth. Let's look at the key benefits of combining CRM solutions with marketing automation solutions:

Enhanced Customer Targeting  

Buyers who are active decision-makers are already through 57% of their buying journey before actively engaging in sales. Now, it's up to the sales and marketing team to reach out at the right time in their consumer's journey from awareness to the point of actual purchase.

CRM lets you identify the most relevant information about prospects as they go through various customer journey stages. Marketing automation will help you get in touch with your target audience at the right time, which can significantly affect your conversions.

56% of consumers are willing to share data to receive faster and more convenient services. (Source)

Nurturing Potential Leads To Improve Lead Acquisition

With over 41% of sales going to businesses that respond first, communication with the customers at early stages becomes significant. Lead nurturing allows you to grow a healthy customer base and helps you create informed customers through consistent interaction in the customer's buying journey. 

Integrating CRM and marketing automation tools helps you collect relevant data quickly while preparing you for personalized communication. 

For example, email marketing analytics show you which topics, subject lines, and offers more customers. Automated emails can help you schedule newsletters, email campaigns, and e-courses, lessening the need to check things manually while the customer data is prepared constantly. 

Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. (Source)

Check out another amazing blog by Melonleaf here: What's the Cost of Salesforce CRM Consulting in India?

Use Lead Scoring System For Better Returns From Your Leads 

When you automate lead-generating tasks, you can determine the value your prospects will add to your business. You'll be able to gain deeper insight into how they might use your product and the best ways to communicate with them.

CRM helps sales and marketing teams assign a numerical value to each lead to help reflect the lead's likelihood of becoming a paying customer based on their perceived level of interest as per the scoring criteria.

Using marketing automation, sales, and marketing teams can now send personalized emails tailored to specific customers while creating necessary plans and cross-departmental collaboration. They can prepare plans based on the leads that are most likely to make further purchase(s).

57% of marketers say lead nurturing is the most valuable feature of automation software. (Source)

Improved Retargeting And Customer Retention

As a brand, you need to ensure that you have higher customer retention rates and a stronghold on the mind of your current (to-be) customers. Therefore, having more meaningful interactions with the customers will help you create a positive outlook about your brand.

CRM lets you segment your customers based on engagement or where they are in the sales cycle. You can export your prospect lists from the CRM to the ad network that you're planning to use.

You can then use marketing automation to follow up or retarget the potential leads through ads. If those leads turn into customers, you can target the new ones based on the campaigns that have proven successful for you now that they’ve converted.

The click-through rate (CTR) of a retargeted ad is 10x higher than the CTR of a typical display ad. (Source)

Analyze And Identify The KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

By tracking significant developments from beginning to end, you can link marketing automation to your CRM system to pinpoint precisely which actions brought success and which didn't. 

Tracking the developments from start to finish is significant in ensuring that you measure your progress effectively, helping you decide if it is worthwhile to continue with a specific activity. 

By using the data collected throughout the marketing campaign, you'll have more of an idea of what levels of response drive sales and will allow you to pinpoint the most successful parts of your campaigns.

Automated, personalized offers based on past browsing and shopping history can increase sales by 20%. (Source)

Conclusion

The power of CRM and marketing automation combined can give your business a significant advantage over the competition. It can save your marketing and sales team time, effort, and money to help them focus on more productive tasks. 

You can collect information from the lead's initial contact to the moment of conversion, all by using this powerful combination of CRM and marketing automation.