Marketing automation is a collection of tools, strategies, and technologies to improve customer interaction with your business. It helps you acquire new customers, retain your existing ones, increase revenue generated by the sales funnel, and build a more personalized relationship with them.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and is a program used by business organizations to record, store and manage customer information.
CRM software integrates with other systems in your organization, such as accounting system(s) or email servers, allowing you to quickly access data from these systems.
When combined with marketing automation, sales representatives can communicate directly with their customers using highly personal approaches.
Salesforce CRM, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the world's most extensive customer relationship management (CRM) system with $8.7 billion in revenue over the last five years.
It offers a flexible web-based application that enables data tracking across multiple channels and devices, including email and social media tools.
NextGenCRM has been designed to give business intelligence to sales professionals and reduce rejection from frustration.
The company claims its software provides an unparalleled solution for:
eCRM has helped companies worldwide become more competitive by improving customer management, internal communication and reporting on key business metrics.
Some benefits of CRM Marketing Automation are as follows -
Organization
This allows you to quickly and easily find your contacts for the most effective ways of communication. You are able to access their information from any internet browser or mobile device using an email address, phone number or company name in just a couple of easy steps.
By consolidating all customer information into one place, CRM software
offers greater visibility to your entire sales organization, which can help you understand where problems are occurring.
This view of the business also identifies trends in your company's performance that might suggest changes in strategy or marketing efforts.
If a prospect is more likely to buy now than he was previously, this insight can give him a reason to call you on the phone with his credit card number ready.
A CRM lets you create automated contacts from email campaigns and social media methods like Facebook advertising that target potential clients.
Increased sales opportunities
CRM software can help businesses increase the number of leads that they develop. A typical CRM system tracks actionable information, like previous purchases and contact notes, which are used to target your sales messages more efficiently.
This can help you reach out to a larger audience and ultimately boost sales.
Fraud prevention
Through aggressive anti-fraud measures like social media fraud detection tools, a CRM platform helps combat identity theft by protecting brands against fraudulent activity on Facebook or other online platforms.
The technology filters fake profiles and alerts staff when their accounts receive unusual connections.
Task tracking
A CRM keeps track of every step in the process of a customer's interaction with your business, from initial contact or inquiry to when that customer is ready to purchase.
You can use this information to close more deals and provide better levels of service for all customers.
Knowledge management
CRMs allow you to store all kinds of information about each individual contact so it's easier to find and access when needed and keep up-to-date on the industry standards.
The software also allows you to create custom reports based on each individual's data set without having a separate tool for that purpose.
Some of the most used CRM systems are as follows:
HubSpot:
HubSpot is a customer support software platform with over 95% of customers reporting overall customer satisfaction.
The platform integrates with other popular platforms to provide enhanced email marketing capabilities, so you can build out more personalized emails tailored to your customers' specific preferences.
Salesforce:
Salesforce is an email-based CRM that matches customer contacts in your database with relevant sales and marketing information, including data collected on social media.
Salesforce provides a suite of analytics to help you better understand the actions of leads and customers, helping improve its overall performance.
The platform helps business teams modernize their sales processes while automating tasks at every touchpoint with their customers It can also ensure that all team members are on the same page by acting as an integrated core for all communication throughout your organization.
Freshworks:
Freshworks is an email marketing service that integrates directly with your CRM system to help you increase sales and build new relationships by providing automated follow-up campaigns.
Marketing automation is software that can automate the process of sending email, creating newsletters or social media posts.
Marketing automation software is different from a simple CRM: it provides services and tools to aid marketers in their everyday marketing operations as well as helps them with certain tasks they may not be able to accomplish alone. This brings us to our next point...
Key takeaway: CRMs help create personalized communications with customers, but marketing automation tools can send tons of emails per day—all on autopilot without the need for human intervention.
Marketing automation systems will typically include a client-side application, which allows you to collect data from your website and/or offline marketing channels (such as phone calls, email or in-person sales conversations) and then send that information to a server for analysis.
The system can use this data to inform automated contact strategies, such as the creation of opt-in lists. It also helps automate those engagement tactics with personalized messaging.
The most common benefits of marketing automation are:
1. The ability to tailor your communications based on who your customers are and what they're interested in.
2. Marketing automation software helps you close that "cold call" or sales pipeline by giving you more advanced targeting strategies and personalization techniques, rather than just generic copy, quotes and calls to action.
3. The ability to automate all the data silos between each department, streamline processes and workflows for maximum efficiency across departments within the business (your team works smarter, not harder).
4. Interactions with customers can be turned into productive conversations about their needs – instead of a sales pitch, your audience is indifferent to, which leaves little room for a sale.
5. Giving you the ability to email lists of qualified customers while they are still telling you what they want – another "sales" phrase commonly thrown at prospects and clients in traditional marketing channels such as sales calls.
6. The group system works so well because it allows an individual within each department (say the sales team) to see all that goes into helping win their next prospect.
Successful marketers who have already established professional relationships will benefit from effective marketing automation software because these tools automate tedious sales pitches via emails that are tailored specifically to your clients.
As mentioned above, your marketing campaign will have a high-level focus but still use automation to reach a larger audience and create more business for yourself.
Marketing automation is ideal for selling products like shipping software and services that can be measured in sales numbers or lead counts.
When rethinking marketing automation it is important to start with questions such as “Does my customer rely on email?” Is there some action they want to take? If so, are there some details they will need?
To set up your marketing automation program you'll want to take the time building it to fit what activates most of your customers. The clearer your customer's goals and priorities are, the better results you can expect.
Some of the most popular examples are-
Marketo
Marketo lets you create and manage up to 10 email campaigns, 5 social media campaigns and 2 landing pages. The platform also allows for inbound calls from a large phone tree of over 45 field sales representatives.
In addition to automated marketing automation, Marketo has an analytics dashboard that measures everything from lead conversions to ROI on marketing efforts.
366 Degrees
This is a marketing automation software provider that gives CRM integration and sales automation software to make an easy - to - use, all-in-one marketing tool.
This software permits companies to create social, email and video marketing campaigns.
Most marketers and sales professionals realize that a solid marketing automation and CRM integration can minimize costs and increase productivity, but there is more to it than that.
The right CRM and marketing automation merger enables you to take full benefit of each tool's capabilities and empowers you to transform and improve how you engage with customers.
CRM Marketing Automation is a software that can help you create automated marketing campaigns to reach your target audience and boost your sales.
This software is used by companies such as Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and many others. It helps businesses to collect data from multiple sources, analyze it and send out emails based on the collected data.
