One of the essential aspects guaranteeing success in a business is having a stable customer relationship. However, managing customer relations has become a complex affair because of multiple sales processes and marketing channels. Businesses that haven’t implemented marketing automation or customer relationship management (CRM) will have difficulty attending to and managing their customers. This has the potential to affect sales and profits. This article is an overview of CRM and Marketing automation.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a software system used in streamlining, analyzing, and automating the fundamental workflows and critical marketing tasks like lead generation, segmentation capture and nurturing, retention of customers, account-based marketing, and relationship marketing. Marketing is used for hastening processes and eliminating tasks wasting time. It is also used to create targeted, personalized marketing campaigns for sending to your customers.
Businesses can create improved customer experiences using marketing automation by nurturing targeted content leads. Companies can use marketing automation to increase their production, optimize and track their customer engagements, converts its leads to customers increase efficiency, and qualify leads within their workflow.
Working of a Marketing Automation
Marketing automation within a company automates various critical marketing tasks. It aims to free up your business resources, save you money and time, and help you explore better customer targeting strategies. There are four main parts of marketing automation software:
- Engagement Marketing Engine: Marketing processes are created, managed, and automated here.
- Central Marketing Database: Data on customer interactions, user behavior, and prospective leads is analyzed and stored here.
- Marketing Technology Stack: Also called a martech stack, this is a collection of different other applications used by a business to accomplish its marketing goals like social media tools, content management systems, and SaaS platforms.
- Analytics Engine: A business’s marketing ROI and revenue impacts are tested, measured, and optimized here. You could also evaluate and view the areas that require improvements.
Marketing Automation Examples
There are various market automation systems, all of which use different tools to streamline operations within your business. Below are examples of several popular marketing automation service providers.
1. 366 Degrees
This marketing automation system leverages sales automation software and CRM integration to craft an all-in-one, easy-to-use tool. Marketing automation enables businesses to create email, video, and social media marketing campaigns.
2. Autopilot
This tool provides a visual take of the marketing automation software. It also features a 30-day free trial personalized messaging, capturing and converting leads. Autopilot has a well-crafted user experience among its other critical features.
3. Marketo
Using Marketo, you can engage with the right customers through behavioral tracking, scale, and build automated marketing campaigns, while also determining the effects of your marketing channels on the revenue.
Importance of Marketing Automation
1) Increased Productivity
Reducing the number of tedious and repetitive activities in a business through automation is the primary goal of marketing automation systems. This allows the employees to shift their focus to other, more pressing tasks. Automation makes the employees work easier, boosting their engagement and satisfaction.
2) Integrated Analytics and Data
Every prospect’s action is an extra data point for the marketing strategy that instantly tells you what the customers are searching for. Manual tracking of customer behaviors is near impossible if at all possible, as helpful as that information is.
However, a business can use the information inputs across different channels to understand the needs of its customers and, at the right time, deliver the right product. Such workflows help drive the qualified prospects into valuable content that results in leads. The leads can then be thoughtfully nurtured into customers. However, marketing automation does not stop there.
With its customers at the center, a business can continue engaging them using personalized workflows, leading to repeat, loyal customers who even refer their family and friends.
3) Improved Workflow
Identifying the issues within your workflows is one of the primary benefits of marketing automation. It then helps in process streamlining through tracking and assigning tasks automating schedules, facilitating simple inter-team communication, and sending alerts to the team members.
4) Shaping and Predicting Behavior
Nowadays, intelligent marketing automation software uses machine learning in improving product recommendations. With time, the business can use automation to shape and predict what customers will do next and encourage them to increase their spending. A business can use automation to drive conversions, increase revenue, or generate demands.
5) Higher Conversion Rates
A marketing automation software helps increase the conversion rates by ensuring that a business’s content is delivered only to those customers interested in your company’s products. It also helps in crafting content that is applicable and engaging.
6) Increasing the Scope and Scale Of Your Campaigns
The next benefit of marketing automation software is helping you increase the scope and scale of business marketing campaigns. For instance, automating email campaigns is better and more efficient than manually sending emails.
Marketing automation enhances the scalability of your campaigns beyond the bounds of the size of your teams. A business can develop a comprehensive campaign series to increase its revenues at different stages of the purchasing cycle.
7) Improving Customer Experience
Marketing automation helps a business offer its customers a better experience. It allows the sending of behaviorally triggered emails to the customers. The tailored and customer targeted emails are sent to a customer whenever they perform specific actions. This might be browsing certain products, signing up on your online platform, or whenever a customer abandons items in the shopping cart.
Used simultaneously with website personalization, the behaviorally triggered emails help the business to create a personalized customer experience. Through building better and more personalized marketing, a business can increase its profits.
8) Boosting the Return on Investments on Staff Costs
Marketing automation boosts the return on investments on staff costs. It minimizes the need for employing staff to perform repetitive marketing activities. Hence, you can streamline your marketing team and reduce staff costs. The streamlined team can now focus on tasks that have the highest impact on the business. Those tasks add the most value to your business, improving the ROI on your employee investments.
What is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
A CRM software is a system that handles sales and contact management, customer relationships, and agent productivity across the entire sales process. It aims to win back previous customers, find new ones, and improve the existing customer relationships. The system facilitates collecting, organizing, and managing customer information from all departments at a central location. Such information includes customer purchase data, the duration they’ve been a customer, on-phone conversation notes, among other customer data. A CRM can optimize customer interactions, increase sales, streamline processes, and enhance customer satisfaction.
How Does A CRM System Work?
It works through tracking the prospective and active customers through your company’s social media accounts, website, or email, collecting information, and guiding every contact through a customer journey like alerting an employee to a customer’s interest or sending a marketing email.
Benefits Of A CRM Software
A CRM system has a lot of benefits to a business that can ultimately save you money and time. It is also an excellent tool that increases your chances of lead conversions to customers. Below are some of the main benefits of a CRM system:
1) Better Internal Communication
Using a CRM system helps you build better communications within the business. Sharing customer information between various departments enhances teamwork and helps in customer experience optimization, one of the main benefits of a Customer Relationship Management Platform. Every employee can also answer the customer queries on what’s happening with their service or products. The overall business efficiency improves since you function like a well-informed team and offer better services to customers.
2) Gain Valuable Insights
How good is your company performing? Since a CRM platform centrally stores the information in one place, it is pretty easy to analyze your entire performance. You can quickly generate reports by pinpointing vital information like the generated revenues, results of a business’s marketing campaign and the leads generated. Reliance on better reporting data ensures you can improve your long-term revenues and make effective business decisions.
3) Improve Customer and Revenue Retention
A CRM platform helps in enhancing customer relationships, but in what ways? The business can improve its current customer retention rates by using CRM software. In most cases, this translates to more revenue for the company. A study by Harvard Business review established that a 5% reduction in customer defection rates can improve the profits or sales between 25%-85%.
Using the collected data, the business can use a Customer relationship management system to proactively address the accounts at risk and contact satisfied clients at the right time to encourage repeat customers.
4) Optimize Your Marketing
A CRM system also allows a business to have a cost-efficient and more targeted marketing program, mainly email marketing campaigns. You can identify the correct time for product promotion and leverage on marketing automation offered by a CRM system by understanding your customers’ needs and behaviors.
Using CRM software also helps a business segment its customers and offers insights into which customer groups are more profitable. Using such information, the business can set up the necessary promotions targeting the customer groups and execute them at the perfect time. Hence, you stand a better chance of revenue increase by optimizing the marketing resources. Consequently, this greatly helps your sales team.
5) Increased Sales Opportunities
Using a CRM, a business can track customers’ purchasing patterns and insights into trends and themes. You can then use these insights for developing lead generation and marketing plans with a higher probability of attracting new customers and leads.
6) Centralized Tracking Of Sales Progress
With a customer relationship management system, you can track sales progress across the entire company and point out the areas in need of improvement, close any gaps, assign leads to your sales representatives, and track customer journeys.
7) Improve Customer Satisfaction
Enhancing customer satisfaction by securely storing the data is among the prime benefits of using a CRM system. using this strategy, all the dealings involving selling, servicing, and marketing the services and products to the customers can do systematic and organized. A CRM system also helps you understand customer issues, ensuring you can accord them better services.
For example, whenever you need to solve a customer’s issue, your representatives can retrieve all the customer activity, including preferences, past purchases, and any other thing that can help you resolve the problem swiftly. This way, a business can use a CRM system to get continuous customer feedback regarding its services or products.
8) Organization
One of the primary advantages of a CRM is its ability to automatically track and organize business contacts after you key in the basic information like name, email address, and phone number. A customer relationship management system acts as a central repository of customer information that your employees and other business members can access and utilize to generate more leads and improve customer service for the business.
Examples of A CRM System
So, what CRM software can you use to achieve the benefits above? Below are some examples of CRM systems:
1) Salesforce
One of the best-known SaaS CRM companies is Salesforce. The platform allows a business’ marketing, commerce, IT, service, and sales teams to work seamlessly through Salesforce’s customer 360 tools.
2) HubSpot
HubSpot provides a free CRM tool that offers real-time updates on your sales process through a virtual dashboard. It supports about 1 Million contacts offers company insights and deal tracking.
3) Fleshworks
This company offers email, activity, phone capturing, AI-powered lead scoring, targeted messaging, and a centralized 3600 customer views.
4) Pipedrive
This is a user-friendly customer relationship management system that includes communication tracking, automation, lead management, and a mobile application for business contact management from any place. Pipedrive extends a 14-day free trial.
Take Away
Technology is here with us, and only businesses that can seamlessly integrate it into their daily operations will achieve considerable success. Tracking customer needs and inputs manually is a tiresome and near impractical task. However, with a marketing automation CRM, the process has been reduced to simple tasks. Now that you understand the two and their revenue-boosting benefits, why not find the right SaaS provider and integrate it into your business? The future is undoubtedly bright for those businesses which will integrate technology into their operations.
