The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Automation
Millennial’s have adopted a complex buying pattern with the aid of digital technology, making it harder for marketers to market. Consumers are no dummies as they are now leveraging multiple media to gather data and stay updated. Marketing automation, a savior of the sinking ship in this modern world, is here to help the marketers outsmart their buyers. It employs technology to execute various marketing strategies for the target market. Furthermore, marketing automation with a built-in CRM can streamline and optimize a variety of marketing activities. It increases the efficiency of the sales and marketing teams by saving time on administrative tasks, delivering messages with the right content to the right audience, closing deals faster through increased automation, revenue, and profits. The advanced technology of marketing automation software can deliver custom solutions to suit your business requirements.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation software provider is a system that “allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows.” It helps you automate daily marketing tasks such as lead nurturing campaigns, follow-up emails, lead scoring, and marketing reports, etc. Define triggers to automate repetitive tasks such as frequently asked customers queries, live chat, and other frequent customer interaction activities. Marketing automation helps organizations focus on core business activities and concentrate on building long-term customer relationships, while it handles the rest of your mundane office routine. It manages the online element of a marketing campaign, including data analytics that can create personalized content to individual customers to drive engagement and revenue.
According to statistical data “ Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.” Collaborate your sales and marketing efforts on a single platform via marketing automation software, which stands to benefit from the two teams working as one. Off late, companies have been increasingly using marketing automation combined with CRM abilities to leverage maximum benefit.
Marketing automation is used by a quarter of all the B2B Fortune 500 companies. 75% of companies that have integrated marketing automation have earned a positive return within a year.
Benefits of Marketing Automation in CRM
1. Saves time
Save your time and automate repetitive tasks with marketing automation software. You aren’t automating processes that don’t matter; you’re automating processes that take too much time to do manually. You can create multiple campaigns and schedule emails to n number of customers. You can set autoresponder for daily follow-ups and more in the CRM.
73% of marketers believe that a key benefit of marketing automation is becoming more efficient and saving time. Statista states, “The computer age is providing the software to scale your marketing. The marketing funnels can be loaded once and used multiple times. The mundane tasks of publishing and measuring are taken care of. Also, things like multiple approvals by the management team for the marketing process can be managed by software in the cloud. These are all-time savers.”
2. Qualified leads of sales
Marketing Automation & CRM seamless integration ensures that the leads delivered to the sales team are qualified, sales-ready, and warm. Good marketing automation software will use the CRM database to cleanse, append, and enrich contacts by performing various background activities. The result would be, sending back more informed data into the CRM which is collected through visitor tracking, smart segmentation, form fills, engagement tools like pop-ups, subscriptions, and a lot more.
61% of B2B marketers send all leads to the sales team, but only 27% of such leads are qualified for the sales for direct calls.
Avoid such mishaps by implementing automatic lead scoring via marketing automation software. Once the leads reach a predefined threshold score, you can automatically route these sales-ready leads to your sales team. Furthermore, Automation tools will cross-verify leads against their database repository to find if there are any bad emails, bounce emails, call validations, etc. and determine whether a lead is qualified for sales or not. Marketing automation software saves a tremendous amount of time and energy by automating the process of differentiating between qualified and unqualified leads. This data is synced to CRM for sales representatives to prioritize and connect.
3. Avoid lead leakage
A marketing automation system can efficiently use lead nurturing to automatically drip content to your leads over time, providing valuable touch-points and keep your presence felt. Marketers can pretty quickly set up such lead nurturing campaigns which eventually become sales-ready without putting a lot of effort. What’s interesting is that sales representatives can use the CRM systems to view and monitor responses to these background-run marketing campaigns and take appropriate actions.
4. Build relationships
Marketing automation software aids organizations in building valuable relationships with their prospects and customers. The regular in-flow of data on daily customer activities help personalize your interactions and improve them if need be. It helps you deliver valuable communication to your potential buyers and current customers, and build strong relationships.
Marketing automation is a state-of-art technology which can be customized according to your business requirements.
Here is a List of Key Features That You Need for Marketing Automation in CRM.
1. Lead management
Marketing automation is a solution for creating a unified lead generation platform for your business. Its flexible features allow you to control the lead generation process, convert website visitors into leads and nurture them to increase the sales qualification until the customers are ready to buy. Lead management is all about generating and nurturing leads. Lead nurturing sends automatic emails that will trigger based on the customer’s behavior, sending the right information to the right prospects at the right time. Lead management in CRM helps you to keep leads engaged and actively moving through the stages of your sales pipeline.
According to research “ 80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads, and 77% had an increase of conversation.”
2. Campaign management
Campaign management involves planning, executing and tracking direct marketing campaigns. Create triggers to automatically dispatch email campaigns based on customer behavior and actions. Send personalized marketing campaigns and ensure that your campaign management software supports both inbound and outbound marketing. Plan, create and execute marketing campaigns from inside the CRM with easy-to-create, drag and drop options. Save your favorite campaigns in your database, and utilize them as and when the need may arise.
3. Email marketing
Email marketing automation is a tool that allows automating conversation with customers and the delivery of highly personalized content. Maximize ROI by creating emails with pre-fabricated templates and communicate to build a professional relationship through email marketing. Get access to advanced email reporting tools which specify the email open rates, links clicked, and bounce rates, etc. Marketing automation in CRM customizes content interactions through various workflows.
Email + CRM is the perfect combination to create tags, custom fields and move your contacts between email list. It also schedules autoresponders, tracks leads on the website, automates drip email campaigns and build email lists.
An autoresponder is a series of emails, delivered in a predetermined sequence at predetermined intervals. In email marketing, an autoresponder can create new lists specifically to those who want the content.
4. Lead scoring
Lead scoring is another essential feature of marketing automation software. Not all leads can be treated equally, as the level of interest expressed by each lead can vary drastically. Score your leads according to their inclination to purchase, which can be measured by one’s reactions to your marketing campaigns. Automate lead scoring to make your marketing system more productive, as It helps you concentrate on the promising leads. Moving leads through the marketing funnel is a challenging task and can be successful with the right technical aid. Score leads and automatically route quality leads to your sales team for further nurturing process.
5. Landing pages
A landing page is a web page created to prompt a particular marketing campaign. It is essential for lead generation as landing pages help increases conversion rates through the campaign. With marketing automation landing page builder, you can build sophisticated landing pages to market products to the right audience through customizable landing pages. Marketing automation software comes with a flexible, easy-to-build, drag and drops landing page builder which helps you drive more traffic to your webpage.
6. Social marketing
Social media conversations require you to keep your finger on the pulse of your audience interactions. A lot of prospects interact with your brand online before they make purchase decisions. Be quick and efficient in answering your potential clients with marketing automation software which keeps track of all your social conversations. You can monitor, start and record conversations of customers and prospects. Know how your customers and prospects respond to your emails, messages and website content as marketing automation software comes with in-built social media marketing tools.
7. Visitor tracking
Monitor leads who visit your website by tracking their behavior, including which pages they click, from where they access the website, what keywords they type on Google, that direct them to your website, and so on. Many applications deliver real-time alerts to sales representatives when a lead, prospect, or customer visits the website. Visitor tracking should also help you segment your database based on these tracked activities.
8. CRM integration
Empower your team with enhanced tools and features by integrating marketing automation with a customer relationship management platform. Reduce costs and maximize productivity with the power of two combined in a single software. CRM integration helps you transfer lead information between marketing and sales and increase the effectiveness of campaigns between the two. Refined contact data management enables you to access a 360-degree view of your customers. Leverage easy customer behavior visibility and improve workflow prioritization.
9. Data management
Data management is a platform that collects data relevant to your customers and displays it to the end-users. Effective data management in marketing automation helps with targeting prospects and can be leveraged for lead scoring and lead assignment processes. Data management provides the intelligence that the marketing automation solution uses for nurturing. The filter and logic on prospect activity levels, coupled with profiling of the prospect and their company, can lend rules that influence engaging content.
10. Reports and analytics
Reporting and analytics are an integral part of marketing automation. Real-time reports and analytics empower their users in making informed and data-driven decisions. With a CRM integration, you can customize reports depending upon your business requirements. Monitor marketing campaigns to measure their performance and maximize ROI.
Final Thoughts
CRM integrated with marketing automation can increase the efficiency of marketing. It helps you understand how CRM and marketing automation work, and help you know which tools are best for your business. Increase efficiency and maximize productivity by combining sales and marketing efforts on a single platform. A good CRM is Centrahub CRM, which is highly scalable to match your business needs. Marketing automation in CRM boosts your product awareness, enhances lead generation and nurturing. Achieve goals only by orienting marketing around data-driven insights, and flexible processes. Aspiring to excel in marketing automation? Comment below to express your views and ideas.
