An English acronym for Customer Relationship Management, CRM encompasses all the tools that will enable your company to collect, process, and analyze data about your customers or prospects in order to optimize the quality of the customer relationship.
CRM software is a tool used to manage all interactions between a company and its customers and/or prospects: it collects data and allows it to be analyzed. It also automates sales tasks. Sellsy, a French CRM software offers this type of service.
As for Marketing Automation, it represents a set of techniques used to automate marketing actions to boost your digital marketing campaigns. These can thus be implemented without human intervention, through scenarios previously established according to the maturity of your leads.
CRM software and Marketing Automation are therefore closely linked and complementary, to be more efficient and improve performance! Ready to connect these two tools?
Marketing Automation is a set of techniques used to automate marketing tasks according to conditions that you define in advance. In short, it allows you to implement digital marketing campaigns without
manual, and therefore human, intervention. Webmecanik, French marketing automation software offers this type of service
In order to establish smart scenarios linked to the maturity of prospects or customers, it is imperative to connect the marketing automation tool with the CRM software. These two platforms cannot replace one another; they are rather complementary. The information
collected in the field (whether online, in-store, or by phone) can then be interpreted and used in scenarios.
CRM and Marketing Automation aim to :
● Improve prospect and/or customer knowledge on the sales and marketing side
● More easily engage in dialogue with prospects according to their level of maturity
in the conversion funnel
● Optimize the customer relationship every day, and in real time
The benefits of integrating CRM and Marketing Automation
The benefits of good CRM / Marketing Automation integration are numerous. Highly
complementary, they are designed to “work” together in order to strengthen the effectiveness of sales and marketing teams. The goal is to provide an authentic and personalized buying experience to your prospects and customers.
By integrating the two solutions, you increase your capabilities tenfold!
Proof:
1.You strengthen the link between marketing and sales teams
You gain a better understanding of business signals, and, consequently, you increase customer value through the creation of cross and complementary campaigns. Your marketing and sales teams thus form a coherent and well-structured tandem to become
more efficient.
You can also use the progressive profiling technique to collect information about your prospects through progressive forms. The information collected will not be lost because you feed the Marketing Automation tool and the CRM
automatically.
2. You automate lead nurturing processes and make them more intelligent
You can personalize your messages, offer the right content at the right time to the right person to run an intelligent campaign in order to support your prospects in their thinking. You can also consider implementing a lead scoring strategy or even
A/B testing.
A quick reminder of these important concepts:
Lead scoring : a strategy consisting of calculating and assigning a score to each lead according to a scale based on each action performed.
ABM/testing : or Account Based Marketing, is a B2B marketing strategy that allows you to focus on a specific customer account or prospect. The objective is to concentrate the joint efforts of sales and marketing teams on acquiring and/or retaining the most strategic accounts through personalized marketing campaigns.
3. You obtain qualitative and dynamic data
You benefit from enriched customer data. Without any intervention on your part, data on prospects is fed back automatically, in real time, thanks to synchronization between Marketing Automation and CRM. The customer relationship is then optimal thanks to perfect centralized customer knowledge.
4. You adjust your marketing campaigns
Once again, by integrating the two tools, you are more precise in carrying out your marketing actions thanks to the information sent back from the CRM to the Marketing Automation tool. For example, if one of your prospects is in the purchasing phase, you are able to see
whether they are in process with the sales team and therefore remove them from a workflow.
5. You generate a better conversion rate from prospects to customers
Sales teams benefiting from reliable real-time data are more effective. As CRM considerably reduces manual data entry, the sales process is therefore accelerated and they are more focused on outreach and the customer relationship.
6. You save valuable time
Being able to measure the actions carried out during your marketing activities, you benefit from a clear and precise view of all your campaigns. You can thus prioritize tasks and ensure regular contact with your customers and prospects without wasting time on repetitive low-value tasks (such as, for example, data collection and sorting, segmentation, etc.).
7. You establish a human-to-human relationship
CRM / Marketing Automation integration must absolutely encourage the humanization of the customer relationship. It is not a matter of eliminating the human relationship, quite the contrary, but of emphasizing a more personalized approach by taking each customer and prospect into account individually. Thanks to the synchronization of these two tools, you gain better knowledge of them, their specific needs, and are able to strengthen the customer relationship.
8. You increase Customer Lifetime Value
In other words, from first contact to sale, all the way through after-sales service, you manage your acquisition and loyalty budgets. You can thus adjust them wisely and more easily assess return on investment. Marketing Automation, combined with a CRM tool, allows you to strengthen Customer Lifetime Value.
And do not lose sight of the fact that Customer Lifetime Value is closely linked to the customer. It represents “Customer Lifetime Value.” That is, an approximate estimate of the profit generated throughout their relationship with your brand. Thus, if you target your existing customer
base, your attention should focus on upselling and the sale of related products (cross-selling).
You are then able to initiate the purchasing process by sending your prospects messages as soon as they show interest in your product and/or service (through, for example, downloading a white paper, participating in a webinar, etc.).
A checklist in a few questions for a successful integration
In order to best prepare CRM / Marketing Automation integration, it is essential to ask the right questions beforehand to ensure successful synchronization.
In particular:
● What information is necessary for my marketing and sales team?
● Where does this information come from?
● How is my CRM organized?
● At what point would I like to inform my sales team that a lead needs to
be handled?
● Do my salespeople and marketers speak the same language when a lead
moves through the conversion funnel (MQL, SQL, etc.)?
● Has my marketing segmentation been properly thought through beforehand?
● Are GDPR compliance and CNIL policy updated so that
information about my contacts can be exchanged securely?
● Etc.
There is no doubt that integrating Marketing Automation with CRM software allows you to significantly increase your results. Much more effective when they work together, they ensure better productivity to grow your revenue
and build a relationship of trust with your customers. A solution to adopt that makes all the difference!