The Best Practices and Greatest Benefits of Marketing Automation and CRM

 

The use of marketing automation can help move deals through the sales pipeline and provide highly targeted messages. Customer relationship management (CRM) may collect and organize your client data. What transpires when these two systems are joined, and their features are used?

 

Learn how to use marketing automation and CRM together in the best possible manner and how much value they can add to your company. We also include five real-world use-case samples so you may get ideas. After this article, you may sign up for a free trial of the all-inclusive CRM solution Pipedrive.

There are many benefits to combining marketing automation and CRM. It enhances the relationship between marketing and sales, makes it possible to understand client behavior better, raises the caliber of leads, and helps to conserve resources.

A fundamental understanding of both systems is required to comprehend how this is feasible; it goes like this:

Marketing automation is made to automate repetitive marketing processes like sending emails and push alerts. Thanks to automation technology, you can get data from different sources and use it in marketing efforts.

Marketing automation makes it possible to communicate with customers in a timely, precise, and focused manner. One use of automation technology is to move prospects through the sales funnel and into conversion. The respondents to our global marketing automation survey ranked better message targeting and a higher marketing ROI as the two most important advantages of marketing automation.

You may manage your company’s relationships and interactions with clients and prospects using a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. For instance, it keeps track of a person’s history of purchases and how long they have been a customer.

CRM aids in precisely segmenting clients, planning sales operations, enhancing customer service, tracking deals, and streamlining procedures.

CRM already contains all client data; thus, connecting it to marketing automation is essential to bring data into the automation system. However, the benefits of CRM and marketing automation go far beyond just supplying sources for consumer contacts.

• Since data is imported and exported between systems, nothing is lost along the way.
• You may be confident that there are no obstacles to the free flow of data.
• You don’t need to keep track of communications with a single customer across various channels.

Sending automated communications to various segment groups pulled from CRM will be possible. The customer’s activities are added to the data in CRM when the marketing actions have been implemented. You’ll find additional advice for this further in this article, so keep reading!

Individual Customer Communication

Message personalization is essential since it increases the likelihood that the recipient will reply. However, 55% of marketers believe they lack the data and insights necessary for efficient personalization. Customer information is kept in multiple systems at once.

The problem can be solved using marketing automation and CRM to send triggered, customized, and personalized communications based on consumer behavior. You can customize your communications using specific consumer data points, such as prior purchases, closed and won deals, interests, business information, etc.

The picture of client behavior becomes more explicit as more systems are connected to automation. All potential actions, such as newsletter clicks and website visits, can be compiled into the customer’s CRM profile.

As a result, sales may communicate strategically, and customer interactions are more productive. Marketing gains a clearer understanding of the messages that resonate the most with leads and the information they find most useful.

Streamlined customer service and increased sales

You will be able to better service your present and potential consumers due to the integration of marketing automation and CRM. You may more readily look into and evaluate client behavior to inform your future decisions.

As a result, you may send marketing communications to your customers at the proper time they would find interesting, increasing up- and cross-selling and customer happiness. The sales cycle may also be reduced as a result of consistently meeting the needs of clients and prospects at the right moment.

Giving points for a prospect’s behavior is possible with contemporary automation technology. Sales understand that a lead is warm enough to be approached after a particular threshold of points is met. In the best-case scenario, sales have a ton of information in CRM about the prospect’s behaviors and want before making any calls or sending any emails.

How to get started

We now know why it is crucial to combine these tools, but how to achieve so is still a mystery. The steps are listed below.

• Purchase the equipment. Invest in top-notch products that are already integrated.
• Organize the steps. Bring sales and marketing together to map out the entire purchase process, make notes along the way, and determine necessary actions. Add pre-sales marketing, sales touch points, and new customer onboarding to the roadmap.
• Arrange the customization. Choose the data points you’ll utilize to tailor the customer experience. There are several options, including geography, age distribution, the types of things bought, and the volume of purchases. Use subscription forms, for instance, to ensure you gather all the required information.
• Develop automated work processes. Start developing the computerized workflows for various tasks, such as rekindling the customer relationship, onboarding, and warming up the lead. Use our free guidebook of marketing automation examples as inspiration to improve your business.
• Examine and adjust. After developing and launching the automation, you must keep an eye on the outcomes and, if necessary, tweak them. You can experiment to see how the results change if you tweak the automated letters’ headlines, content, or scheduling.

Examples of real-world usage cases

Let’s look at a few instances where marketing automation and CRM have increased sales.

Onboarding

CRM as a data source

Email/push notification channel

Trigger: First purchase or new sign-up

One of the most common marketing automation applications is onboarding, and CRM gives the procedure a lot of strength.

When sales record a deal as won in CRM, marketing automation receives a trigger to begin the onboarding process for the new customer. Educate and instruct your customers while assisting them in using your items.

You can start to drive more purchases later in the onboarding messages. Running a referral campaign, as Dropbox did, is one clever method to accomplish this. Dropbox grew by 3,900% in just 15 months by giving users who invited their friends to use the platform free data storage.

Upsell

CRM as a data source

Message: Email

Customer segment: devoted customers

Customers that make several purchases show interest in your business and are frequently prepared to make additional purchases. They are a fantastic segment group for your upselling campaign because of this. The required information can be extracted from CRM, such as a list of clients who have made at least three purchases from you.

Send an appealing coupon together with a tailored campaign letter. Set a deadline to ensure that customers respond quickly, and make it obvious what benefits the offer will bring to the recipient and why they should take advantage of it.

Customers who didn’t purchase the first email can be reminded that the campaign ends in three days after a few days have passed.

The upsell campaign also provides a possibility for more precise segmentation. If a consumer doesn’t purchase the campaign, you can separate them into platinum-level customers and lower their status.

Birthday presents

CRM as a data source

Channel: SMS/email

The customer’s birthday is the trigger

On their special day, remember your customer with a thoughtful gesture! In B2B marketing, the first purchase anniversary is celebrated, whereas, in B2C marketing, the customer’s birthday is honored.

Set the automation to regularly monitor the CRM for persons with birthdays coming up in the next ten days. Send these clients a personalized note to commemorate the forthcoming event.

Being proactive while sending anniversary texts is a fantastic idea because many of us like to organize the celebration in advance. The customer is more likely to accept your offer if the benefits are clear in advance.

Reawakening Inactive Customers

CRM as a data source

Channel: SMS or email

trigger: circumstance

Encourage your passive customers to do business with you once more. Get a segment of customers from CRM who haven’t purchased in a specific amount of time. Send them individualized messages to reacquaint and entice them to return to you.

It’s crucial to convey the value in these messages as well. Show the customer the advantages of coming back to you. For instance, you may SMS customers and offer them a complimentary delivery.

Although this automation chain has a different target market, it is similar to upsell automation. The automation can be carried out in the background and repeated monthly or on any other schedule that works best for your company.

Return the data to CRM.

CRM and marketing automation needs to communicate back and forth. You must ensure that the data isn’t just delivered to the CRM; it is also pulled back from the automation platform.

Giving the contacts scores depending on how they respond to your marketing communications is a practical technique to ensure this. You can award different points to contacts at various points throughout the automation chain, such as one point for viewing the message, five points for selecting the aggressive CTA, and so forth.

The scoring system allows you to distinguish between hot and excellent leads. Every morning, send all contacts with lead scores greater than 5 to sales using CRM filtering.

Try the CRM that Increases Closing Rates by 28 Percent on Average

Only when a wealth of client data is available can an efficient automated chain of communications be built. Therefore, a dependable CRM system is essential. After using Pipedrive’s CRM for a year, users average a 28 percent increase in transaction closings. Pipedrive can help you gain customers and encourage upsells with targeted marketing automation campaigns.

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