What are marketing automation and CRM software used for?
Essential tools for marketing and sales teams, marketing automation and CRM software are often used separately and not by the same teams.
The sales team most often works with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management software), which allows them to gather all their contacts and track their activities.
For its part, the marketing team uses a marketing automation solution where it can send newsletters and other communications to defined segments and deploy strategies to contact prospects at the right time and in the right way using relevant content. A closer look at these two pieces of software, which have more in common than you might think…
Definition of a marketing automation solution
A marketing automation software allows you to automate your communications across different channels based on contact behavior. Thanks to this solution, all the contact’s so-called behavioral data, that is all the actions a contact will take: visiting a web page, opening an email, clicking a link, attending a webinar, etc., are tracked and gathered in your software.
Also read: why is webinar integration with marketing automation important?
The core of marketing automation is then to create marketing scenarios based on this behavioral data. These campaigns will be designed by your teams, but executed daily by the machine (and therefore automatically). You script the customer relationship and personalize it according to the contact’s interactions.
Definition of a CRM
A CRM is software that centralizes your entire customer database. It acts as an intelligent address book where all customer data and sales actions are recorded.
Most companies equip themselves with a CRM to store their prospect and customer data. The goal is to facilitate access to data by different departments of the company such as sales or customer service. Whether it’s an address, a phone number, or purchase data, this information allows the salesperson to have the prospect’s history and statistics. The CRM also allows them to track the interactions they’ve had with their prospect, giving them a review of sales opportunities, workflows (or operational flows), statistics on their prospect, and a log of activities.
Also read: how to configure the database of your marketing CRM software?
In short: marketing automation allows you to automate your marketing campaigns using predefined conditions and triggers. It will detect subtle signals, compile them to make them understandable and actionable for salespeople via the CRM.
The CRM helps you manage your sales processes and keeps your sales team organized using a database. It automatically assigns tasks to salespeople as leads move through the sales funnel.
Marketing automation is mainly used at the top of the sales funnel, while the CRM is dedicated to the bottom of your funnel.
Why do they work better together?
Often, some employees do not have access to data present in the marketing automation software or in the CRM. This data remains unknown, unshared and undervalued, which can lead to mistakes and wasted time. ?
Yet converting a prospect requires acting at the right time.
Synchronizing your two solutions therefore means reconciling the marketing and sales departments for better collaboration. Indeed, members of both departments always have a common goal: to convert the prospect.
CRM and marketing automation are complementary
Synchronizing these two pieces of software significantly optimizes sales performance and makes their work easier. Overview of the 6 reasons to integrate your CRM and marketing automation software:
Automated list management and segmentation
➡️The combination of the two softwares allows you to organize your contacts with segments, adapt your campaign content and analyze the prospect’s behavioral information (thanks to marketing automation) to enrich their history (CRM). Automatic updating of your contact lists is also possible.
Autoresponders and triggers that fire at the right time
➡️All team members now know if the site visitor fills out a contact form, confirms an online order, subscribes to a newsletter, books an appointment or registers for an event. Very handy for the salesperson to contact the prospect at the right time if they know their prior behavior. ?
Your CRM data is constantly qualified
➡️With synchronization between your CRM and your marketing automation, your customers’ and prospects’ data are up to date in both systems. If there is a data or behavior change from a prospect, it’s easy to update campaigns and alert your salespeople.
Combining data gives you valuable insights
➡️You have factual data, history and scoring of your customers. Cross-analyzing your CRM and marketing automation data gives you a better view of the most important KPIs for your customers.
Your customer journey is polished
➡️Marketing and sales optimize their actions and know where the customer is in the sales funnel. Marketing automation maximizes lead acquisition, the CRM closes the acquisition and begins retention. This enables better mapping of the customer journey.
GDPR is no longer a constraint
➡️After synchronizing the two systems, you have all the historical data via the CRM and behavioral data via marketing automation, all in one place. It will be very easy to grant access to consumers and contacts who requested it. Same for deleting them. Good to know: Webmecanik stores this data in France, for even more security. ?
If you already have your marketing automation software to contact your prospects at the right time and in the right way, your CRM is therefore the essential complementary tool to reach your objectives more easily. You wouldn’t think of buying a bottle without its cap, would you? Yes, these two softwares are that complementary. That’s why synchronization is now possible with most software vendors.
It is also available and accessible with the Webmecanik Automation and Webmecanik Pipeline solutions, on the Pro version of the CRM.
The importance of the marriage between CRM and marketing automation
You understand, a successful company is one where the marketing and sales departments live a happy and cloudless marriage. That’s why your software vendor must help you unify sales and marketing to maximize your chances of converting your leads into customers!
Discover the winning duo, CRM and marketing automation
Learn more about your prospects and customers, create impactful communications, increase your conversion rates and analyze your campaign performance thanks to the marketing automation and CRM pair.
Thus, you will avoid mistakes, duplicated efforts, or even the loss of customers that can be caused by a lack of coherence between marketing actions and sales actions.
This synchronization also saves you time and can strengthen trust between marketing and sales teams that use the same methods and tools. Each team member has a 360° view of customer data and can place the customer at the center of their approach.
How to synchronize these two systems?
So how do you synchronize these two systems? It is technically possible to link your two tools via an API development or a special plugin already developed on one of the two softwares.
If you do not have a CRM that can be synchronized with a Marketing Automation software, you should know that the Pro version of the Webmecanik Pipeline CRM allows full synchronization with Webmecanik Automation.
Discover how to integrate Salesforce with Webmecanik Automation
Discover the integration between Webmecanik Pipeline and Webmecanik Automation
Webmecanik helps you synchronize your software
Are you facing an issue within your company? Can’t define the link between your sales and marketing objectives? Have you just realized it’s essential to synchronize your CRM and marketing software? Of course you want to find a solution to all your problems!
After your demo request, our team will qualify your overall need and assess with you the best solution to synchronize your CRM and marketing automation software. Convinced and decide to trust Webmecanik? Here come the implementation steps:
- We define your marketing automation strategy together :
Your objectives? : we start by identifying your sales and marketing objectives. This will allow us to direct our efforts in the right direction.
Your KPIs ?: we then determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your strategy.
Your targets ?: we help you clearly define your targets for more focused communication.
Validation of your conversion funnel :
Attract leads? : We develop strategies to attract qualified prospects to your offers.
Qualify your leads?: We define the criteria to effectively qualify leads based on their interest and engagement, notably through lead scoring.
Nurture your leads ?: We implement tactics to maintain your leads’ interest and engagement throughout the conversion process.
Retain your leads ?: We guide you on best practices to retain your customers and encourage repeat business.
All this is possible thanks to our marketing automation software.
Your custom fields ?️: We establish the necessary custom fields for precise segmentation and targeting in your campaigns.
- Audit & synchronization schema :
– which data from your CRM database are necessary for your Marketing Automation campaigns?
– data schema to decide data sharing flows.
– decision on the chosen synchronization model (plugin, flat file transfer, API, Zapier ?)
– performing a synchronization test
– operational implementation ?
- Annual planning :
We develop an annual plan, divided by quarter, to structure your marketing actions and campaigns throughout the year.
- Launching campaigns on the Webmecanik Automation Software :
Finally, we create the first scenarios (campaigns) in the Webmecanik Automation software. This allows you to get started and have campaigns that work by the end of the support period!
This workshop is designed to provide you with the tools and knowledge necessary to optimize your digital marketing, ensuring each step of your strategy is aligned with your business objectives. Afterwards, you can either continue independently or choose to delegate this work. In any case, the teams, support and our online training are available to guarantee the success your project deserves!
