Benefits Of Integrating Marketing Automation and CRM systems
Is your business neglecting to connect the dots between marketing and sales? Through the use of marketing automation, you can create better digital customer experiences and increase cross- and upsell opportunities, all while providing a much more congruent customer experience.
CRM and marketing automation software can be two of the most important pieces of software for growing a business. Most businesses use these tools to help improve their brand awareness and capture leads, but by not integrating their entire sales funnel, they are leaving money on the table.
Find out how your business stands to benefit from integrating your CRM and your automated marketing systems.
Table of Contents
- Fast handoff
- Personalization
- Consistent communication
- More effective, targeted and calibrated approach
- Real life example
- Paramount features for long-term success \ a. No-code customization \ b. API access and availability
- Key takeaway
Fast handoff
A study by Harvard Business Review reveals how shockingly fast leads go cold. “Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead” compared to companies that only reached out two hours later. They were also “more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.”
Minutes matter, too. Inside Sales found that a 5-minute handoff is 5x as effective as a 10-minute handoff in qualifying a lead.
Integrating your marketing and sales efforts so that contact can be made as quickly as possible can be much more effective than a pricey marketing campaign. The moment a prospect sends a query, authorizes contact, downloads an eBook, or opens an email, your sales team should be ‘pouncing. Speed is the name of the game. By clearly knowing all the information about them and what marketing they received, at a glance, they can take better-informed decisions and the appropriate action, ultimately being much more likely to close.
Personalization
If speed is the name of the game, personalization is fuel.
It works the other way around, too. Your sales team can provide valuable data so that your marketing team is communicating effectively and addressing only the right pain points and needs or wants. If your CRM is able to feed your marketing team with important demographic data then messaging and advertising can be much more targeted.
Study after study shows how important even simply addressing your prospect by name can be to closing sales. When it comes to sales, personalization goes a long way.
And because keeping existing clients is much cheaper than acquiring new ones, personalizing your communication can have a fabulous ROI. It often entails building relationships with them. Email marketing signed and sent from their own representatives’ email can help. All fed from to your automated marketing system from your CRM.
Consistent communication
Unfortunately, it is often the case that different departments get siloed. This can result in having different goals, and not necessarily communicating with prospects with the same tone of voice or even message. A representative that’s just been handed off a potential might not be aware of what message that lead has seen. Being able to instantly know what information your lead knows, wherein the sales funnel they are, whether they’ve downloaded your eBook or white paper, etc. can help them gauge interest better and be more effective in their sales.
More effective, targeted, and calibrated approach
Just as well, by lead scoring, you can know better determine the current level of interest and overall, how likely a prospect is to bite. Integrating both systems can help your teams understand the wider picture. Through better context, they can provide more targeted information. They might choose to send a very informative email with barely any call to action if they determine a prospect is not yet sure whether they are interested. Or they might send a very persuasive one to another that is ready to pull the trigger, so to speak.
Find out more on sending sequenced emails and communication on next week’s blog about drip campaigns, where leads’ actions determine when and what information they receive next.
Of course, the vast majority of this should be automated. Once you have created the content and material, set the rules, and are confident in its effectiveness through testing, you can let computers do most of the heavy lifting.
Real-life example
A client of ours had a treasure trove of data on previous clients, through assessments they had completed. By integrating their automated marketing with their customer relationship management system, they were able to extract relevant, detailed information automatically.
Then, they sent a timed sequence of emails through a drip campaign. They contained useful information based on each personality type. They were able to provide personalised, useful and actionable content instead of letting data sit on a hard drive somewhere. Leads found it valuable, and our client saw a steady stream of new customers.
Paramount features for long-term success
The CRM and automated marketing systems, along with any dashboard that may be facilitating their communication, should have two features to avoid any headaches and allow you to easily scale. We believe these to be non-negotiable.
No-code customization
Being able to change the sequence of emails, their content, and the data they pull from can be an absolute nightmare if you must enter and change the code. Make sure that your employees can change it, play around with variations and test it for the best results in the short-term. In the long-term, being able to change it easily will allow you to scale as your business changes and grows.
API access and availability
Without APIs, which are gateways that allow different software to talk and interact with one another, you will be unable to integrate both systems, period. Make sure that the software that you do choose has APIs, or any automation and integration that may be available, if any, will be severely limited. If your current software does not have them, consider planning a change.
Key takeaway
One of the biggest challenges you’ll face in growing your business is effectively converting prospects into customers. As a business owner, you know that an ongoing challenge is managing multiple platforms while trying to keep your messaging consistent across all platforms.
When your software, marketing automation and CRM are integrated, this becomes much easier, helps your team be more effective and achieves various business goals. Both your marketing and your sales teams can realise stronger performance.
Done right, the two can increase sales beyond the improvements they’ve already brought; improve the customer experience, brand, and communication consistency; close many more leads who were on the fence or who did not really ever intend to purchase; and make the lives of both departments much easier.
Get started today. Read about how to do so here.