5 Reasons To Use CRM Software and Marketing Automation
Cecily Giancaterino
May 25, 2023
∙
14 min read
CRM
Many businesses have made CRM software a part of their digital marketing strategy. They use it to collect customer data and track the activity of their sales team. While these are essential uses for any CRM platform, real success stories can be found at companies that combine the power of CRM with marketing automation.
When CRM is combined with a marketing automation system, you can optimize your marketing strategies. Lead generation, lead nurturing, customer retention, and customer satisfaction are all improved. And this combination is not just useful for big companies. A small business harnessing the power of CRM and marketing automation is just as likely to see great results.
In this blog post, you’ll learn how CRM and marketing automation software can work together and take your business to the next level.
Key Takeaways:
-
Using a CRM with marketing automation can greatly benefit your business by improving lead management, personalizing marketing campaigns, enhancing customer engagement, streamlining workflows, and providing data-driven insights for better decision-making.
-
With a CRM and marketing automation combined, businesses can efficiently capture and track leads, automate follow-up processes, and increase the chances of converting leads into customers.
-
Personalization is a key advantage of a CRM with marketing automation, enabling businesses to deliver targeted messages and content to specific customer segments, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
-
By automating repetitive tasks and workflows, a CRM with marketing automation saves time and increases overall efficiency for marketing teams, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives.
-
Data-driven insights provided by a CRM with marketing automation help businesses understand customer behavior, measure campaign performance, and make informed decisions to optimize marketing strategies.
-
FiveCRM's CRM with marketing automation offers a comprehensive solution to streamline marketing efforts, improve lead management, personalize campaigns, enhance customer engagement, automate workflows, and gain valuable insights. Book a demo with FiveCRM to explore its benefits and see how it can elevate your business growth.
What is CRM?
Before you learn about the power of CRM and marketing automation together, here’s a brief overview of each, and what they do on their own.
CRM stands for customer relationship management. Historically, this would simply refer to the business process of building and maintaining relationships with potential leads and existing customers. However, with the rise in popularity of software devoted to managing the customer journey, CRM has come to mean “ customer relationship management software.”
CRM centralizes data related to acquiring leads, turning them into customers, making sales, and other parts of the sales lifecycle. All CRM software will have a database of customer information and allow you to track activities like phone calls, meetings, email communications, and more. Typically, there are also features for managing leads through your sales process.
The features of more advanced CRM solutions will also have dashboards that offer a quick glimpse at metrics like new leads, sales, and customer contact activity. Sending quotes and proposals is another feature found in the best CRM systems, along with integrations with email and VOIP phone systems.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation refers to the process of using software to automate repetitive tasks. The automation of email campaigns is a common task, and when you say “marketing automation,” this is what a lot of people think of. However, marketing automation can handle many other tasks, including:
-
Customer segmentation and targeting
-
Upselling and cross-selling activities
-
Maintaining customer loyalty programs
-
Lead generation and lead nurturing
-
Analyzing customer behavior
Often, marketing automation features are built-in into high-end CRM systems. In other cases, a CRM provider will offer a suite of related products that help automate marketing efforts. There are also dedicated automation systems that can be tied into a company’s CRM software.
However it is accomplished, automation streamlines a company’s marketing efforts by freeing up salespeople and other team members from repetitive tasks. Real-time analysis of customer data can also automate the process of detecting trends right then and there.
Common uses of marketing automation systems
To give you a better understanding of the benefits of marketing automation tools, here are some ways that they're often used.
Categorizing and tagging contacts
Creating different categories for your customers and tagging those customers appropriately ensures you send them relevant information and deals from your company. Promoting products to people who need them instead of advertising randomly creates a targeted effort that works.
Categorize your customers by age, location, gender, job title, personal hobbies, social media interactions, and more. This segmentation is very easy to maintain and organize with the help of marketing automation found in many CRM systems. It is a useful way of understanding your audience and how you should advertise and communicate with them to push them toward a sale.
Email campaigns
Email marketing is still one of the best ways to get in touch with prospects and customers, and marketing automation makes the process better. With the help of advanced CRM, you can create amazing and effective email campaigns and track their progress through analysis and reporting.
Creating a drip campaign is key to keeping the attention of your customers and prospects. Sending out relevant and personalized content can grab attention, generating interest in your products and services.
Automation helps you work with email creation, lead scoring, sending automated email sequences, and much more, creating a streamlined campaign that works for all your prospects. This also provides you with information such as how many emails are getting opened and what action is being taken after opening the emails.
Analytics and Reporting
Use marketing automation as a way to get insightful reports and analysis of everything happening in your marketing team and what your reps are doing. Get a 360-degree view of the progress your team is making and get reports that help you understand where you are lacking and need to do better to create the right engagement.
These automatically generated reports reduce the time taken for reps to create such a graph themselves and can instead give you a more accurate representation of what's going on. Get important information on all the sales activities going on, lead conversion analysis, productivity by team members, social media engagements, and more.
This analytics and reporting feature is also great for understanding how your marketing campaigns are doing and how you can better them. Determine your strengths and resolve any problems of leads that aren't moving along the sales pipeline and figure out the best way to connect with them.
Now that you have a good understanding of what CRM and marketing automation platforms are, here are five reasons to combine the two—and the results you can expect to receive.
Reason 1: Frees up staff for more important tasks
Certain processes don’t need constant human intervention. For instance, sending out emails manually for an email campaign would get repetitive and take up a large amount of time for your sales reps and marketing team. Instead of working on templates, this time is better put to use working on a marketing strategy or communicating with customers.
There are many daily manual tasks such as marketing workflows, social media marketing, contact segmentation, responding to inquiries, sending newsletters, and more that can be handled more efficiently by automation.
Your staff will appreciate the ability to focus on the tasks that need more attention without getting bogged down by menial work. This makes for happier team members who are motivated to work on what’s important.
Reason 2: Lead nurturing is much more efficient
With the use of marketing automation, nurturing leads becomes more streamlined. CRM systems in conjunction with marketing automation give you a complete overview of your leads and where they lie in the sales pipeline.
In addition, automation can analyze your leads and quickly tell you which ones are more viable. With a quick glance, you can see which ones are closer to making a purchase. This is achieved by utilizing all the data you have available to you, including social media interactions and other data that may not be native to your CRM system.
Automatically gathering this information takes the guesswork out of the lead-nurturing process. You’re able to see which leads most resemble your current customers, better enabling you to target the right leads and understand them ahead of time. You’ll be sure you’re working on the right leads at the right time.
Ultimately, this gets you closer to meeting your sales quotas and turning leads into repeat customers who are loyal to your company.
Reason 3: Develops more sustainable customer relationships
Even the most basic CRM systems will give you insights into your customers that you can turn into relationship-building actions. For example, you can see which customers bought a specific product, making it easy to target those customers for similar products.
Marketing automation takes this to the next level by tracking and analyzing more customer behavior. From actions taken on your website to email responses and social media activity, automation tools capture all parts of the sales funnel. All of this adds up to you understanding your customer base better than you did before, making it easy to build more sustainable relationships.
Reason 4: Improves customer service
The data analysis aspect of marketing automation is also helpful when it comes to taking care of your customers. Your average customer expects that the sales reps they talk to will know them pretty well. That includes knowing what products they have purchased and their past interactions with your company.
In short, customers feel like they received good service if they don’t have to constantly repeat themselves. Marketing automation can collect a wide array of activity on each customer profile and make it available to your team. Customers will appreciate not having to tell their stories with each new call. They will believe your company is committed to customer service and look forward to the next interaction.
Reason 5: Results in better customer retention
Customer retention is one of the most difficult challenges. In a competitive marketplace, even long-time customers can be swayed by cost savings. Or they may just want to see what the experience is like with another company. There are any number of reasons that customers may want to go elsewhere, and it’s your job to keep them happy with your company.
An important metric to look at here is the customer satisfaction level. Out of all the customer experience data, this is perhaps the most important. It can mean the difference between staying with your company or being tempted to go somewhere else.
With the benefit of more sustainable customer relationships and better customer service, you are far more likely to hang on to the customers you do have. In the end, this is more profitable for your company, as it’s less costly to maintain a long-term customer than it is to gain a new one.
A nice side effect of a happy customer is that they are more likely to make referrals. Referrals are also less expensive to court than potential customers, as they are already somewhat sold on your company by word of mouth.
All this naturally leads to another feature of CRM systems: the ability to see who is making referrals. With this information in hand, you can focus your efforts on nurturing those customer relationships, leading to even more referrals and potential new clients who fit the same customer profile.
FiveCRM offers the power of CRM and marketing automation
As you can see from this overview, the combination of CRM and marketing automation is a powerful tool that helps you nurture and convert more leads, increase your customer base, and boost sales. Every sales and marketing team can benefit from this digital marketing strategy. Your next step is finding the right software partner for your modern marketing efforts.
FiveCRM offers a range of scalable CRM products that allow your company to harness the power of CRM and marketing automation. Whether your business is large or small or based on products or services, FiveCRM has the tools that are right for you. This includes not just the only CRM made specifically for telemarketing, but email marketing software, powerful reporting and analytics, and more.
Make sure your CRM works for you by getting in touch today to see how you can try a demo of CRM.
FAQs
Q1: What is a CRM with marketing automation?
A: A CRM with marketing automation is a software solution that combines customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities with automation tools for marketing campaigns. It enables businesses to streamline their marketing efforts and enhance customer interactions.
Q2: What are the benefits of using a CRM with marketing automation?
A: Using a CRM with marketing automation offers several benefits, including improved lead management, personalized marketing campaigns, enhanced customer engagement, streamlined workflows, and data-driven insights for better decision-making.
Q3: How does a CRM with marketing automation improve lead management?
A: A CRM with marketing automation helps businesses capture and track leads, assign them to the appropriate sales representatives, and automate follow-up processes. It ensures leads are nurtured effectively and increases the chances of conversion.
Q4: How can a CRM with marketing automation personalize marketing campaigns?
A: With the help of customer data and segmentation capabilities, a CRM with marketing automation allows businesses to deliver targeted and personalized marketing messages to specific customer groups. This enhances customer engagement and increases conversion rates.
Q5: How does a CRM with marketing automation enhance customer engagement?
A: By automating personalized communications, such as email campaigns, social media interactions, and website personalization, a CRM with marketing automation helps businesses engage with customers at the right time with relevant content, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Q6: How does a CRM with marketing automation streamline workflows?
A: Automation features in a CRM with marketing automation streamline repetitive tasks, such as lead nurturing, campaign scheduling, and reporting, saving time and increasing efficiency for marketing teams.
Q7: How can a CRM with marketing automation provide data-driven insights?
A: By tracking and analyzing customer interactions, campaign performance, and sales data, a CRM with marketing automation provides valuable insights that help businesses make informed decisions, optimize marketing strategies, and drive business growth.
Q8: How can FiveCRM's CRM with marketing automation benefit my business?
A: FiveCRM's CRM with marketing automation offers a powerful solution to streamline your marketing efforts, improve lead management, personalize campaigns, enhance customer engagement, automate workflows, and gain valuable data-driven insights. Book a demo with FiveCRM to see how it can benefit your specific business needs.
Michael King says...
"I can’t think of a time where a client has requested something that we weren’t able to do with FiveCRM. Unlike most systems, it has a lot of flexibility."
Managing Director, Senior Response
JAINE HUSBANDS SAYS...
“Each client, and each of their campaigns, has its own unique specifications. We essentially needed to set up mini CRMs on one platform to meet those requirements.”
Operations Director, Team Telemarketing
Why wait?
Start improving your outbound efficiency now, with the most customizable Telesales solution on the market.