Posted by Conversion Leadership IN Activation, Articles

Marketing Automation and CRM Integration: Like Netflix and Chill

15 February 2016

Some would say there are few things in this world that pair better than Marketing Automation and CRM integration. Except perhaps Netflix and chill (and possibly pizza and beer).

Each element complementing the other perfectly in a way that, when you put them together, you get a whole that's certainly greater than the sum of its parts.

The same is true for marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) as well.

Each tool handles its own functionality well, but when they're integrated together, the results can be mind-blowing and out of this world.

Marketing automation and CRM integration is a common practice in businesses, with Emailmonday reporting 56.1 percent of mid-sized businesses use this combination.

Here are five ways marketing automation and CRM integration improves your marketing and sales strategies.

Triggered Emails

Marketing automation tools can track buyer behaviour when customers interact with your content, browse your website and take other actions.

Instead of manually sending an email from the CRM when a specific behaviour condition is met, your marketing automation tool pulls the contact information from the CRM and sends a triggered email.

You might see this when an e-commerce cart gets abandoned, a prospect has performed a certain sequence of tasks or maybe they've just filled out a form on your website.

The marketing automation tool sends a triggered email after a set period to jog a customer's memory and provide them with more useful information.

Lead Scoring

Not all leads are created equal for your sales efforts, but you run into problems when the marketing department fails to qualify leads before sending them into the sales pipeline.

Infusionsoft report that only 23 percent of sales professionals say marketers consistently deliver sales-ready leads.

Integration between the CRM and marketing automation tool allows the CRM to pull lead data and assign a score to a lead. Sales staff can focus on the leads closer to a purchasing decision while continuing to nurture prospects that haven't quite reached the purchase decision stage.

Better Buyer Education

Lead nurturing improves your chances of closing the sale, but doing it manually takes significant resources.

Marketing automation integration can track where each prospect is at in the marketing funnel or sales pipeline and automatically send the most appropriate content.

A prospect who just entered the marketing funnel needs general education on addressing the problem they're encountering. Once the prospect reaches the middle of the funnel, they start looking for specific solutions to the problem.

Each phase requires different lead nurturing content, which gets delivered by marketing automation tools at the right time.

Visibility into Customer Interaction

Your CRM can gather a lot of information on your customer, but having access to more data is almost always better.

You enhance your existing customer records with information from the marketing automation tool, detailing the interactions they have on their journey; emails opened, links clicked, websites visited.

You're able to see the content the customer interacted with, the channels they prefer and other vital pieces of information.

Seamless Follow-up

It doesn't matter how great your product or service is, many prospects are going to drop off without making a purchase.

Whilst you may not have the time to spend hands-on resources tracking dormant prospects or sorting through the last contact dates, the marketing automation tool can be constantly scanning your CRM database and sending out follow-up emails to try to recapture some of these leads.