Marketing automation and CRM are two very different concepts; however, implementing these two systems has become a necessity to boost lead generation and personalize the customer experience.
In this article, we will help you understand how marketing automation works, distinguish the best platforms for CRM and identify the areas of complementarity between CRM and automation.
How does marketing automation work?
Marketing automation refers to platforms that help businesses automate repetitive marketing tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns. This allows for a more personalized experience for customers.
Implementing marketing automation brings several benefits to your business and helps solve many challenges. Among these benefits we can find:
- Reduce your sales cycle length: Dealing with long sales cycles is one of the biggest challenges for businesses. Marketing automation allows you to follow your relationship with your prospect over a longer period.
- Value creation with qualified leads and re-engaged prospects: Marketing automation allows you to effectively manage relationships with all your customers and create proximity with each customer in an automated way.
- More efficient production and distribution of your content: Marketing automation improves the publishing process on all platforms and saves time.
- Better targeting and personalization of the customer relationship: marketing automation improves the targeting of messages, which allows for a more personalized customer relationship.
Read also :
→ Everything You Need To Know About Email Automation
CRM and Marketing Automation: a winning duo!
Customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platforms may seem similar, but they have different functions and serve different purposes. They are even more effective when used together.
CRM and marketing automation platforms support each other and have the following benefits:
- A more complete view of the customer: Marketing automation is the first step in building a relationship with a prospect. Having access to marketing data allows the sales team to see everything that has been undertaken or discussed with a customer or prospect from day one and create personalized messages and outreach.
- A better understanding of what works: Integrating the two systems helps get an overview of what works and what doesn’t in the sales process.
The comprehensive information gathered from sales sources gives your marketing team a better idea of what facilitates conversion. This helps improve ROI calculations for different marketing campaigns and set accurate goals.
- Improved efficiency: Data segmentation allows organizations to capture data faster and more efficiently while avoiding errors and duplication. This improves campaign efficiency and ensures that follow-up communications are targeted to the right prospects.
- A more holistic understanding of the entire sales and marketing process results in more accurate information, better analysis, and more accurate lead scores.
- Faster problem resolution: When sales are down or marketing campaigns are not doing as expected, integrating CRM and marketing automation provides a better understanding of where the problem is coming from and how to solve it.
Integrating these two platforms also allows for quicker recognition of when leads are no longer qualifiable or when click-through rates of specific campaigns and ads begin to drop.
The best CRM for Marketing Automation
Customer relationship management (CRM) is the technology that manages all of your company’s relationships with customers and potential customers. A CRM platform helps companies stay connected with customers, streamline processes, improve profitability, and ultimately increase business growth.
Several CRM tools exist on the market, and we have selected 3 CRM platforms for their ease of use and their ability to develop your business.
SALESmanago: SALESmanago is a solution designed to enable any e-commerce business to conduct omnichannel communication with its customers, creating automated processes that increase engagement and sales at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
SALESmanago harnesses the power of data, combining advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence to deliver personalized experiences. SALESmanago is the privileged partner of Eminence, your digital agency in Geneva.
Eminence joins forces with SALESmanago to help improve your marketing automation campaigns
HubSpot: Participates in social media marketing campaigns and also handles blogs. It allows you to create landing pages and perform A/B tests to see which ones work best.
Intercom: Intercom is specialized in a conversational relationship platform. Its goal is to increase customer satisfaction through more human interaction. This platform has a conversational marketing wing.
MailChimp: This CRM solution has sales force automation and marketing tools. MailChimp provides access to the history of conversations with customers (phone calls, emails, or chats). It also allows you to segment prospects and customers in many ways, such as industry, value, and location.
The benefits of integrating your CRM with marketing automation:
Integrating your CRM with marketing automation allows you to:
- Help nurture leads and develop better relationships with customers even before their first contact with the sales team.
- Enable customers to be better informed and make larger purchases, with minimal cost to the business.
- Provide visibility into customer behaviors by collecting information about their web activities and browsing habits.
- Classify prospects by assigning them scores based on their recorded activities. These scores can be used to assess their level of interest and purchase intent.
- Shorten the sales process by automatically sending prospects the most relevant information at the best possible time.
- Contact inactive prospects automatically through email retargeting campaigns.
- Save time by selecting only the interesting prospects for the sales team, allowing for a more efficient allocation of effort between the sales and marketing teams.
Do you want to implement a powerful automation strategy and reach your business goals?
In conclusion, combining CRM and automation can be one of your best decisions! You can better understand where you need to improve your marketing and sales process, attract prospects that are truly relevant to your business, and boost customer loyalty.
Our experts at Eminence, your digital marketing agency in Geneva, can help you integrate these systems into the way you manage customers and prospects, to improve the customer experience. Don’t hesitate to call on us!