Customer Relationship Management is a solution, which has revised the process of sales and customer service. While many CRM systems include certain marketing tools, none of them can substitute or provide solutions required by marketers to carry out integrated marketing campaigns. CRM is a valuable solution to follow the sales but it doesn’t provide complete picture of information, necessary for an adequate planning and organization of marketing strategies.
In order to successfully control the whole path of marketing process development, marketers need complete data. The moment of new contact acquisition as a lead and then carrying him on through the whole purchase path, often preceded by appropriate education, is of great importance. The evaluation after the purchase process is acknowledged more and more often. Information from client is particularly precious since it allows to improve elements of the process, he wasn’t too satisfied with. That’s why, merging CRM with complete tool for marketing automation is a crucial step to success, regardless the size of the business.
5 benefits of CRM and Marketing Automation integration
-
Providing so called hot leads
According to Marketing Sherpa, 61% of marketers send all generated leads directly to sales department, of which 27% of contacts is appropriately prepared to make a purchase. Efficient merger of CRM and Marketing Automation will allow to deliver ‘the hottest’ leads to the sales department. It’s really important that the contacts picked by us should be really prepared for the purchase, what in turn is based on clever process of carrying the client through particular stages of the sales funnel. Using CRM data, Marketing Automation systems allow to send personalized one-to-one messages, depending on particular input collected by the system.
-
Marketing department efficiency boost
Marketing Automation system, which is directly integrated with CRM, will ensure insight into on-line interactions accomplished by potential client – visits history, e-mails sent, click and open rates or presence at the organized events. Marketing automation can award contact with points, basing on specific activity on our website. For example, page visits history provides us with knowledge about moment the client clicks on the price list during the visit on the page. If we find out that page is clicked at the very end of the visit, it’s the information that potential client may then be ready for a purchase and Marketing Automation system should award suitably high number of scoring points for such action. The fact that particular lead should be a priority and needs to be contacted promptly, will be precious knowledge for our salesperson. An old saying ‘make hey while the sun shines’, proves true here.
-
Sales process acceleration
According to IDC research over 50% of potential clients in average B2B data base is outdated. Marketing Automation allows to nurse contacts from the moment of their acquisition by launching e-mail marketing campaigns, so-called content marketing accomplishing, following WWW page visits and coordinating activities in social media. In turn, we can activate cold leads by retargeting campaign.
-
Generating leads prepared for the purchase
Marketers taking advantage of Marketing Automation systems are able to provide content touching particular moment in purchase stage. Educational cycles like Lead Nurturing, comparative materials, case studies or how-to videos, help potential clients to go smoother through the purchase cycle and what’s even more important – to buy more. As stated in Forrester Research report, companies targeted at Lead Nurturing are able to generate 50% more leads, prepared directly to purchase products or services we offer, at the same time decreasing the cost of new lead acquisition by 33%.
-
Following effectiveness of each campaign
Combination of CRM and Marketing Automation assists in following the results of marketing campaigns, already from the initial contact until the ultimate sale or even a bit later. You will be able to obtain insight into conversion, knowing how many potential clients responded to your message. Moreover, you can actually follow the real revenue generated by particular campaign. Not having precise knowledge about which activities you really benefit from, makes it impossible to plan consecutive ones. For instance, you can pursue e-mail marketing campaign and achieve high open rate but this can only result in a few redirections to WWW page and no revenue.
Summary
Close integration between CRM and Marketing Automation will help both marketing and sales department to decide when exactly invest time and suitable resources. Merging automation and client relations management allows for a quick and efficient exchange of key information between departments, to let them cooperate more effectively and accomplish better and better results.
Follow
