5 Ways to Integrate CRM With Marketing Automation to Boost sales

5 Ways to Integrate CRM With Marketing Automation to Boost sales

The world of business has gotten competitive like never before. The average lifespan of a company was over 70 years in the 1950s. However, the introduction of new technologies and a dynamic business environment has bought the lifespan of an average company to less than 20 years.

average life span

Source: on-brand Partners

The sustainability and growth of the companies not only depend on acquiring new customers but also on maintaining the existing customers. According to the report, businesses lose a whopping $75 billion due to poor customer service.

A company needs to grow without harming their customer base. The best way to achieve it is by combining marketing automation with CRM.

Marketing automation means automating repetitive marketing activities, such as emails, website update, social media activities, and so on. On the other hand, CRM (customer relationship management) software lets you understand your existing and potential customers by retaining, analyzing, and organizing their data.

There are plenty of options for you when it comes to choosing CRM and marketing automation software. You can either select two vendors for marketing automation and CRM or choose one vendor to get both pieces of software. Some of the widespread marketing automation and CRM software vendors are Infusionsoft, Marketo, HubSpot, Zoho, Salesforce, and so on.

One of the recommended platforms is HubSpot. It offers both marketing automation and CRM tools to its users. The great thing about HubSpot is that you can get started with HubSpot CRM for free. Even the free version will assist your business to grow. Once you grow your business, you can opt for the paid features.

How can I boost my sales by integrating CRM and marketing automation?

Around 53% of the top-performing corporations have CRM system installed (Source). Another study shows that those companies who invest in marketing automation have increased their revenue by 79% and high-quality leads by 76%.

The results that you can get by integrating these tools are impressive. Here are some of the ways CRM and marketing automation can boost your sales, eventually leading to the growth of your company.

Your company can nurture your leads in a better way

You will not automatically convert your prospects by offering one free e-book or a report. There are a lot more works that you need to do to turn your leads into customers. After capturing the information of potential customers, you should guide them through to a sales process. The process of guiding is called lead nurturing.

The process of nurturing your leads is like building a stable relationship with a woman before you can ask your girl for marriage. You must answer all their objections and give them a solid reason to do business with your company before offering them a product/service.

Once you integrate your CRM and marketing automation software, your system will automatically start sending relevant content to your potential customers, according to their buying stage. It will result in significantly increasing your conversion rate as the system will continue to nurture the leads.

A boost in business intelligence

The study found that more than 50% of internet users are willing to share their personal information, while more than 60% of them expect companies to send personalized messages. What this means is that you will see a boost in your conversion rate if you send out personalized offers to your potential customers.

It is possible to send highly personalized messages to your customer base if you integrate CRM and marketing automation. Your software will capture critical customer data that your audience is willing to share with you. It is possible to use that data later to send out personalized messages to them via various channels.

CRM meter

A highly personalized message will send out the signal to your customers that you care about their needs. It will make them feel important, and that is what you need to do to convince them to do business with them.

The CRM software can use the data and show you many insights like page views by specific customers, time spent, resource downloaded, forms filled, and so on. These pieces of information will help you know the interests and preferences of your potential and existing customers.

After knowing these things, you can use the data to create more personalized messages for your customers. You can intelligently segment your customers and send out emails and messages that will resonate with them.

You can prioritize your potential customers

Not all leads are equal. Some people have better chances of buying your product/service in comparison to others. The 80/20 principle states that 80% of the effects are the results of 20% actions. In case of your business, you are likely to get more revenue from a small portion of your following. Some people are more likely to spend more money in your business than the rest.

One report revealed that over 50% of the revenue of small and medium-sized businesses come from repeat customers. With the help of CRM software, you can know in advance about your leads and their value. The information in your CRM software can allow the marketing automation tools to assign a value to each prospect.

CRM tools

Source: SuperOffice

The marketing automation software gives a score to the lead based on their online behavior. It will provide us with a hint about the people that are more likely to purchase our product and stay with us for a long time. After finding out the essential prospects, you can shift your focus to them and get more sales.

Shorter buying process

No companies want to wait for a long time to make a sale. However, there are times when they are compelled to wait to make a sale. It might take them a long time to figure out what the customers want before they make an offer to them. By stating “making an offer” I’m talking about making a relevant offer.

buying process

The time to make a sale can be challenging mainly when the users expose themselves to tons of information, which creates a lot of skepticism.

Thanks to advanced marketing automation and CRM software, you can drastically shorten that time. It will allow you to get them to buy your product and convert them into a loyal customer much more quickly than in the past.

You can now send out relevant information based on the collected data and answer their objections quickly to make a sale.

Accurately measure your performance

No one can do everything right. One always need to monitor the performance and continually improve the efforts to get better results. However, one needs to know their mistakes before they come up with an improved strategy.

The CRM software will get you the information, but it cannot accurately measure your performance. However, you can do that by integrating marketing automation software. It can dive deep into your marketing data and offer comprehensive statistics on your return. You will know what tactics are working for your company and what actions are incurring losses.

When you have detailed information, you can stop performing specific actions, update your strategy, and allocate more on the marketing campaigns that are producing results. It will ultimately lead you to have a better marketing strategy in place, saving you money, while increasing sales in a process.

Over to You

Many businesses have reaped the benefits by combining marketing automation and CRM. You can achieve similar results by implementing the combination in your business as well. However, it is not enough to connect both tools without any understanding.

Along with the installation of the system, you should also educate yourself and your team about the ways to best utilize the software for getting the maximum benefits from the system. Hopefully, you have gained useful insights from this article. If you want to add some more ideas, do leave your thoughts in the comment.

 

Marketing Automation: As worthy as it sounds? Let’s find out!

Marketing Automation: As worthy as it sounds? Let’s find out!

If you’re not aware, marketing automation is a took wherein, your marketing ways will be boosted with the help of an automation tool. This automation is said to be used by about 80% of the businesses and is expected to have raised by 51% when compared to the 2014 statistics. That’s the kind of response this Marketing Automation has been receiving. Let’s learn a little more about this in detail.

Why should you take it?

Marketing automation is the one thing, which when controlled properly, could lead your business to multiple prospects. This automation collects the data from the prospects and then you can utilize this data to convey the appropriate information to the respective audience. This has a high relevance rate and the rate of conversion would be substantially higher than any other way. So here you could get a good business without much effort. But before you go for such things, be sure of what you’re doing. If you’re not certain then you must not do it, as it may lead to loss of your loyal customers. The other reason why one needs to take this is as, in some of the tools, where you need to send your emails or notifications, you can just align them in the scheduling. This alignment would save you from remembering when you need to send out whatever you need to. So this will save your time and pre-planned scheduling reportedly has always better results.

This way the customer will receive emails on interval and according to their preference rather than flushing all the emails to all the customers all at once. Hence this way a customer relationship can be built with respect to their liking. Once the customer receives these emails, depending upon the bounce rate, the customer’s tolerance rate can be estimated as well and the time at which the response seems good. The constant connection in the right way builds the customer and service relationship and takes your business to the next level.

Which scale business does this help the most?

Marketing automation is one feature that’s basically a need these days for all the businesses no matter which type it is. If it needs marketing, then it needs automation. Because it not only saves time but increases efficiency to a whole new level. So a work that can be done in 5 days can be completed in one. Here, a lot of employment could put to rest and lot of money can be saved. This being automation, the chances of encountering errors is very low. So this would be beneficial for all those industries who are not in a position to maintain a high amount of employment. The small scale industries and the medium scale industries are remarkably benefitted through this. The small-scale industries that can pay for these subscriptions are considered to be highly beneficial by this.

thinking

How does it work?

When you come up with something on your websites and find a way to enroll potential customers into it, the tool takes in all the information into the CRM(Customer Relationship Manager). This information is then classified into categories and is saved. When you prefer sending them at a particular time, you can just schedule them for days to come. You can align them the way you want and send them at the time you want. You can add either of the marketing sources to send the information you want that has been store in earlier. It’d be best if you club the messaging, email and other social media sources at once and then send out. It would save time and work.

Which one should you go for?

So before you shell out your dime for this let me tell you not every marketing automation tool would be useful for every business out there. There are just certain tools that one needs for their business and they should know which one they need to go for. There are multiple automation Softwares that have different purposes. So you need to find the one that suits your business prospects. It’d be a good move to analyze and research on this first rather than jumping onto it without any awareness. As this might cause loss of bucks. So, understand the kind of tool that’d suit your kind of business and go with it. The future of your company would be in good hands if you find yourself the right kind of tools and operate the right way. Don’t mess up, as losing a customer is a lot worse than earning a new one.

Things to note:

  • Make a good analysis before stepping down to this
  • Start with understanding what all things can this feature do?
  • Understand the kind of business a certain tool deals with. Go with the useful ones, instead of wasting money on the useless tools.
  • Call for a team decision, multiple ideas and shared information go a long way in finding the right one.
  • Find your niche by analyzing the statistics received from these tools. So you can approach your prospects in an even efficient way.
  • Make your customers aware of all the information you have on them. Never use this information for your personal benefits.
  • These programs aren’t cheap so understand the right way to deal with this rather than just jumping for it. Be sure that you have a proper understanding on this and you know what you’re doing.

List of few of the best Marketing automation: 

The 20 Most Popular Marketing Automation Software Solutions

Source: Capterra