Marketing automation and CRM (customer relationship management) are essential for any business serious about improving the efficiency of their sales team and gaining visibility into sales and marketing efforts.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation software bridges the gap between your website and your sales team. This is what feeds information to sales about who visits your website and what pages they view, blog posts they read, and forms they fill out.
CRM
CRM software is where all of your leads and contacts live. This may be where the sales team receives leads, communicates with prospects, and tracks contacts through the sales process.
Marketing automation and CRM tools are essential to determining ROI of digital marketing efforts for our clients. We also use these tools to help our clients better understand their leads, deliver the right emails and content and the right time, and improve sales team efficiency with insights and lead scoring.
Features of Marketing Automation & CRM
Email Marketing
Email marketing tools allow businesses to send emails to a list of contacts, manage and segment those contacts, and view reports on email performance. These tools also typically handle anti-spam regulations to ensure compliance with your efforts. Software like Mailchimp or Constant Contact are primarily email marketing tools, whereas more robust software like ActiveCampaign and Hubspot offer email marketing as just one feature.
Automated Email Workflows
Triggered emails see a click-through rate of up to 150% higher than traditional emails. While standard email marketing typically refers to static emails, automated emails and workflows allow for dynamic sending based on triggers. A single email could be sent in response to a specific page view or a series of emails spread out over the course of weeks or months could be triggered by a form submission.
Website & Event Tracking
When evaluating email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM options, a major consideration is the level of tracking you’ll need to send the types of content you want to send. More basic options, like Mailchimp, offer some automation, but limited website integration and tracking. For businesses looking to seriously invest in email as a marketing channel, ActiveCampaign or Hubspot are great options with plenty of flexibility to know what specific leads are doing on your website and when.
Lead & Customer Profiles
While website and event tracking features work their magic from a marketing side, the lead and customer profiles that are built with this information can be a game changer for your sales team. ActiveCampaign and Hubspot both offer CRMs with detailed profiles including sources of leads, website visits and pageviews and email engagement. In addition to triggering emails, these details can also be used to score leads and improve sales team efficiency.
Sales Pipeline
Visibility into your pipeline is essential to reaching sales goals, both on an individual and an organization level. The right marketing automation and CRM tools provide insights into how leads are progressing through the sales process. You can then use this information to identify what’s working and what isn’t, calculate ROI on your efforts, and determine where to spend your marketing dollars
Sales Process Automation
Marketing automation is a great way to begin the sales process when leads aren’t yet sales-ready. Once a lead becomes qualified, automating processes such as a notification to the salesperson to send a follow up email in a couple of days can help maintain consistency and ensure your best leads aren’t neglected. You can also use sales automation tools to standardize email content and attachments and prevent rewriting of the same email for every lead.
Marketing Automation & CRM Tools
Mailchimp
Mailchimp can be a fit for organizations who have an existing CRM they are looking to integrate with email software. It offers limited automation capabilities, but no website tracking or reporting.
ActiveCampaign
We typically recommend ActiveCampaign as a basic marketing automation and CRM solution for organizations looking to test the waters and implement a basic way of tracking leads and sales.
Hubspot
Hubspot is our choice inbound-marketing software and CRM solution for organizations wanting a “one-stop-shop” for all digital marketing tools, campaigns, and reporting.
Marketing Automation & CRM Results
Metro Detroit-based Technology & Manufacturing Company Sees 371% Increase in Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate
Web Ascender implemented marketing automation strategies and CRM tools to improve engagement, speed the sales process, and boost overall sales.