How do CRM and Marketing Automation Work Better Together?
Jul 08, 2024
10 min read
Pitting CRM against marketing automation is like measuring a tight end up to a quarterback.
There may be some overlap in functionality, but both complement each other, and neither can be an out-and-out replacement. Understanding the role and objective of these “sister solutions” can help you get the most out of each system.
In this blog, we’ll clear up the differences between CRM and marketing automation, the benefits each can bring, and how you can get the best of both worlds.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is a suite of tools that help you analyze, automate, and streamline workflows and marketing tasks. You can follow prospect activities such as website views, blog reads, email opens, and form fills.
These tools schedule and track email campaigns and mass communications.
Benefits
Key benefits of marketing automation include:
- Improved customer engagement: Segment prospects based on past interactions or their interests and preferences.
- Lead scoring system: Identify the most promising leads with greater conversion chances.
- In-depth analytics: Reflect campaign performance and deliver insights.
- Automated triggers: Send emails when prospects are most interested in a product or service or schedule email series in a “drip” campaign.
Do You Need a Marketing Automation System?
Invest in a marketing automation platform if you check off the following points:
- You can’t manage your customer list manually.
- You want to quickly promote carefully crafted content to the right target audience.
- You want to feed more leads to sales, but your customer list is too small.
Marketing Automation is a valuable business tool for streamlining marketing processes, enhancing customer engagement, and driving revenue growth. Utilizing marketing automation services can lead to increased productivity, improved ROI, and a competitive advantage in the market.
What is CRM?
CRM is a tool that helps you handle customer relationships, manage contact and sales, and improve agent productivity. You can store information about contacts, including their purchase records, phone conversations, and records of inbound emails.
Most importantly, a CRM lets you optimize one-on-one client interactions, enhancing customer satisfaction and increasing sales.
Benefits
- Internal alerts: Remind sales reps about call schedules, account renewals, and customer birthdays or anniversaries, prompting them to contact customers at the optimal time.
- Integrated workflows: Automate time-consuming everyday tasks to save time.
- Social media sync: Recognize the channels that drive the most traffic and know what people say about your business.
- Targeted promotional content: Increase conversion rates and build customer trust.
Do you need a CRM solution?
Most likely, your business needs to invest in a robust CRM platform if:
- You can no longer handle all your leads using a spreadsheet and need technical help to track customer data.
- You’re receiving reports about unsatisfactory customer experiences. Systematically reach out to unhappy customers and resolve their issues using omnichannel support.
- You’re losing track of customers during their journeys. Use pipeline management to track each customer throughout the sales pipeline and optimize customer experience.
CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a strategic approach businesses use to manage and analyze customer interactions. SaaS automation tools enable companies to streamline sales, marketing, and customer service processes, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
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CRM vs. Marketing Automation
Understanding the distinctions between Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Marketing Automation is crucial for optimizing your company's operations and growth. Let's delve into the comprehensive guide that will unravel the unique benefits marketing automation and CRM bring and how each can revolutionize your business strategies.
What are the key differences?
Drilling things back to the basics, marketing automation helps users manage digital campaigns, email marketing, lead tracking and scoring, and landing pages. You can check out our list of marketing automation features for a full rundown.
CRM covers the entire sales pipeline process, from individual emails to lead status tracking, task management, opportunity tracking, and pipeline reporting. Get an in-depth view of our must-have CRM features here.
CRM drives and increases sales, while marketing automation helps generate and nurture leads. We’ve outlined the differences in three major factors below:
- Target Audience: A CRM platform broadly caters to sales reps, providing them with tools to manage customer relationships and improve their performance and productivity. A marketing automation (MA) system helps team members focus on marketing, specifically in B2B SaaS industries, to generate qualified leads and improve conversion rate optimization .
- Purpose: A marketing automation tool enables businesses to automate marketing campaigns using predefined conditions and triggers, making it ideal for short purchase cycles and optimizing marketing efforts in SaaS industries. On the other hand, a CRM helps businesses manage sales processes, assign tasks to sales reps, and maintain an organized database to streamline customer relationship management.
- Goal: The primary goal of a CRM solution is to manage customer relationships, improve sales reps' performance and productivity, and ultimately contribute to business growth. On the other hand, a marketing automation platform helps businesses measure marketing's contribution to the overall ROI, generate qualified leads, and improve workflows between sales and marketing teams, particularly in SaaS marketing environments.
Do you need both?
There’s no easy “yes” or “no” answer to this question, as it depends on your customers' stage in the sales funnel.
Syncing data between both platforms is the secret third option to access all your data through one solution.
If you want a perfect combination of marketing automation and CRM without investing in two separate systems, you should consider integration or choosing a system that offers functionalities of both solutions, such as marketing automation in CRM.
How to integrate CRM with marketing automation software?
Integrating CRM and MA solutions helps improve the customer experience and increase your business’s efficiency, leading to improved ROI. Most importantly, it helps maximize their benefits by combining their strengths. Using them together, you can:
- Assign lead scores
- Nurture prospect relationships
- Glean analytical reports and track progress
- Enable sales reps to visualize lead journeys
- Communicate consistently and seamlessly
Understand the Integration Process
Here are a few tricks to help you align the two platforms:
- Personalized Messaging: Engage with the target audience better and increase the chances of lead conversions through personalized messages when using a CRM and an MA system.
- Quick Lead Scoring: Assigning scores to leads ensures increased conversions. Using both platforms, it’ll be easier to identify users who are most likely to convert.
- Duplicate Elimination: Using the platforms in tandem means easy access to centralized data, which can lead to overlaps and accidental duplicate tasks. Monitor the systems closely to ensure no duplicate data.
- Robust Planning: Design and follow a plan to identify, implement, and address changes to your marketing and sales efforts, making them cost-effective and efficient.
Examples of CRM and marketing automation
Finding a solution with CRM and marketing automation capabilities is like getting a glimpse of the Loch Ness monster. However, unlike the Scottish legend, platforms with the functionalities of both solutions do exist. Here are a few examples:
- HubSpot Sales Hub: Combine the power of a unified CRM with sales automation processes to eliminate data silos and increase efficiency.
- Salesforce Sales Cloud: Salesforce’s enterprise suite and Lightning builder provide access to limited marketing automation functionalities.
- Active Campaign: This MA solution doubles as a marketing-oriented CRM with lead qualification, contact scoring, and sales task management.
- Zendesk Sell: Add a marketing automation module to real-time insights from your sales, marketing, and customer support departments.
Integrating CRM and marketing automation can provide a holistic approach to managing customer relationships and marketing strategies. By combining these tools, businesses can optimize their marketing efforts and enhance customer engagement through personalized and targeted campaigns.
Conclusion
Choosing CRM over marketing automation can feel like picking a favorite sibling. With CRM automation, businesses can combine CRM and marketing automation functionalities to streamline processes, enhance customer relationships, and boost marketing efforts for greater efficiency and success in the digital landscape.
Nailing down your needs goes a long way toward investing in the right solution. Schedule a free call to understand the need for CRM and marketing automation for direct insights on actionable steps to take in your software selection process.
When comparing CRM vs. marketing automation, would you prefer a system with combined functionalities, or is it better to opt for two different solutions? Let us know.
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5 best ways of Acquiring More Patients Online for Your Dental Practice
Having a perfect smile is a dream that the majority of the population chases. Your dental practice helps get rid of the pain and insecurities of the people. Picking a dentist is like buying a car, it’s a long term commitment, and only when a person completely trusts the functioning of a vehicle, he/she will then purchase it. Same is the case with your clinic, only when patients completely trust your practice, will they choose to come to you for their problems. How do you get people to trust your practice is the real question. The internet is the best way to gain and retain patients nowadays. If you're not utilizing online marketing, you are missing out on patients (and money). Here is a comprehensive guide on how to acquire more patients online for your dental practice, along with some dental marketing tips. 1. Create an Effective Website The majority of patients today search for clinics online. If you don't own a website yet, you’re basically invisible to a lot of potential patients. Creating a website that displays all of the information regarding the location of your clinic, phone numbers, hours of availability, services provided, prices, and other important details prove your digital and physical existence. On the main page itself, try to include unique aspects of your business, such as the field you specialize in and also specify the procedure on how patients can schedule appointments.At the same time, you should keep in mind that your website should look and feel engaging and interactive. Staying up to date with the present generations trends is very important. You should regularly update the key aspects of your website. Updating your website from time to time, giving it a fresh new look, proves that you are digitally active and dedicated to providing services to the people. The online world is always changing and evolving; your business needs to adapt to this environment. Let all creativity loose when it comes to making an awesome website. Staying relevant is key if you want to survive in a cut-throat environment, and it can only be achieved by regularly pushing out new content on your website. For a start, you can add infographics, creatives, videos, patient testimonials, and relevant blogs etc. There are a number of companies that provide services, which you can use to build a creative and informative website. Digital Marketing companies are built around the idea of creating interactive and effective website plans. By opting for these services, you need not worry anymore about your online presence; you can then put in 100% into your practice. 2. Create a Social Media Presence Social media platforms are in abundance. People are addicted to the online world and according to research, “In 2018, an estimated 2.65 billion people were using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to almost 3.1 billion in 2021.” There are a number of different social media platforms available for you to advertise your business on. In this modern age, for people to know that your business exists, you need to have an active social media presence. Users only want to view content that is relevant and engaging to them. Your posts need to be both informative and creative at the same time. Get creative! For you to gain more patients, you need to portray your business in the best possible manner. Take the assistance of companies that provide Social Media Marketing services, as they are equipped with the best of strategies and plans. A well planned marketing strategy can greatly benefit your practice; by increasing traffic on your website, creating a strong online presence, boosting trust and credibility, and most importantly increase the amount of patients. Source 3. Utilize Reviews When people compare options for dental services, they look at reviews to see what other people have to say about different dentists. The reviews that patients post is very crucial for your business’ reputation. Encourage patients to provide you with feedback for the services they receive. If those reviews are in a good sense, publicize them on your social media and website. Make sure to use recent reviews and the ones with positive feedback. If you do get a bad review, device ways of turning them into positive ones. Provide answers for the negative feedback and give a statement of regret where necessary. Reach out to them with customer service and do what you can (within reason) to satisfy your patient. 4. Email Marketing Everyone utilizing the internet, has an email today. Most people will enter their email down to sign up for an appointment. Once you have their email address, you should use it to send them reminders about appointments and any discounts you might be offering. Similar to social media, you need to maintain a balance between sending enough emails and too many. Spamming should be avoided at any cost. You should keep people engaged and informed without forcing them to unsubscribe. If you can, give the patient something in the email that will encourage them to stay subscribed. Plan an email marketing strategy in such a way so as to keep yourself far away from the spam folder. 5. Answer Popular Questions Majority of the population turns to the internet to get answers for their questions regarding their dental issues. By taking the initiative to answer those questions, you build trust and credibility. At the same time, you can advise those people to visit your clinic to receive expert guidance and care. Use your social media presence to solve patients dilemmas and at the same time, advertise yourself. When professionals answer questions, their word is taken seriously by the majority, and you can use your knowledge to disregard incorrect online information. You can help people to get a proper understanding of specific topics with the help of detailed blogs, articles, videos, creatives, infographics etc. It's All About Branding When utilizing online marketing options, it's important to keep your business’ goals and objectives in mind. There are a number of different ways to establish your practice. You need to think of the manner in which you want to portray your business. Once your online presence is established, you need to ensure that everything and anything that you post is in total relevance to your practice. Your main objective is to gain more patients, and to achieve it you need to have a strong marketing strategy. For instance, if you want to target families with children, then your content should be according to certain specifications. You will need to create content that would engage both the parents as well as the kids. So basically, when targeting different audiences, you need to keep in mind their preferences and accordingly make them interact with your content. The internet is a very valuable tool, and your dental practice can really take advantage of the marketing options that it provides. These creative dental marketing ideas are sure to increase the number of patients you currently have. If you utilize these tools with a well-planned marketing strategy, will business will definitely grow. Creating a strong website and an effective marketing strategy requires to be done by experts. Check out the services we provide, it will really help you. ...
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Top 7 Future Web Design Trends (Updated)
A new year always means expecting new, unique, and trendsetting things. The same happens for web admins and web designers. They look forward to refreshing, fresh, and the ?best website trends that may be the future revolution. There is an ample number of advancements in technology that get introduced every year. Web designers, developers, and masters understand the fact that the only constant thing is change. Also, they must keep up with the ?best website trends and be enriched with knowledge of their field. They must revamp their ?current web design trends and techniques.Website design can not be overlooked as it has become essential in creating an identity and promoting a brand. According to a survey conducted by Popsugar, 37.5% of American women prefer visiting a well-designed website more frequently. Apart from web design, website navigation and overall usability play a vital role in the success of an online business. According to another study conducted in 2018, around 60% of the respondents feel that website usability is the most crucial element of an online shop. Similar to any aspect of a business on an online platform, website design trends keep changing. One must keep themselves updated with the evolving landscape to stay ahead of the curve. Therefore, providing a unique, accessible, and user-friendly web design for the target audience is essential! Source: Pexels 7 Future Web Design Trends That You Must Consider In 2021! The web has witnessed enormous growth since it was discovered. Mobiles have reigned us, and with time, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, and Artificial Intelligence is taking over the business landscape. As advantageous and needful, these technologies have been, their actual impact is seen only in a few aspects of which web design trends are a significant area. Here are the top web design trends to know that would help us set a benchmark in 2021.1. Get Creative: Rethink Your Current Web Design Trends And Techniques! Every new creative discovery requires a bit of courage for implementation to make the business stand out of the crowd and to project itself to the world! Similarly, creativity would make the website designs take a bolder step- a more significant leap in 2021. The unique and rarely used asymmetrical layouts will be seen on the websites. An increase in their usage is due to the more substantial amounts of enthusiasm, fun, rarity, and individuality of the brand. Thus, it’s a new trend in web page design that has a far reach and greater appeal on all websites, especially on personal websites. 1. Utilize 3D Technology! Adding yet another dimension is always beneficial – be it life or technology! 2021 would witness the rise in the usage and popularity of 3-Dimensional modeling and render in their website designs. 3D modeling and rendering would become more accessible and affordable, even for those lacking specialized 3D training. Defy, and Adidas have adopted 3D modeling and showcased it on their websites. Many more are predicted to follow the same trend. It is undoubtedly one of the most significant emerging website trends in 2021. 2. Add Engaging Visuals And Videos Videos are a must in this time of cut-throat competition and decreasing attention span of the target audience as it quickly engages the audience and markets the brand more efficiently. This element of video addition is not a new one, but people have great expectations for this new year 2021. So, videos are inevitable and must-haves for the web page. You must plan the design, content of the video, and the quality of the video properly. The meaning and purpose of the video must be evident. The videos must be aptly handled as representatives that visually carry forward the spirit and overall goals of the brand. The video addition must be so that the target audience can’t skip it, and they should come back for more! 3. Implement Motion GIFs We live in a fast-paced and digitized world. As a result, impatience has dawned on us and has become a part of us. We expect even the search engines to load much faster and answer our queries more quickly. We need everything instantly! A website designer obviously should take advantage of this behavior and leverage it efficiently by including motion design on their site. Motion designs immediately provide information that’s engaging too. They help convey a message in a far better way than the textual and pictorial content. GIFs can be the best example of exemplifying the usage of motion pictures. GIFs load faster than videos and communicate everything briefly, though the information is highly complex. Additionally, GIFs work well in all screen sizes too. 4. Enhance Voice-Search Compatibility Many gadgets are currently equipped with virtual assistants like Google Now, Cortana, and Siri. These Smart assistants have set a new trend – an increase in the number of people who use voice queries rather than text. The convenience rendered through voice queries makes people switch to it over manual text. Website developers and designers should provide the best voice-user interface with this increasing popularity of searching with voice. It must offer a great user experience that is more customized and is responsive across all screen sizes. Be prepared for this trendy website design with great innovation! 5. Infuse Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Big data is the basis of our sustenance today. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are the basis of handling big data. Webmasters and designers need to stay updated and adapt to these technological trends as in the recent future; the user interface can be influenced and dominated by these trending technologies. Advanced machine learning and AI must be mastered by web designers and infused with web design trends that would help target the users better and offer a customized experience to them. AI and machine learning are set to change the web designing landscape more drastically and uniquely than others. 6. Try Smart CSS Grids Before, web designers had to make a crucial decision – whether they had to design a webpage for the computer or mobile. Also, the most significant task is that they want to develop the website so that it should figure out the device in which it is opened and then adapt to the device. Yes, the website needs to be responsive. Using smart CSS grids helps in designing such a flexible webpage that is so much easier. The latest technology allows the excellent organization of content, highest and unmatchable quality of user experience. The website becomes highly adaptable on all desktop and mobile versions that suit a user’s screen. Conclusion New and creative website design trends have been admired by people every year. The website designers should keep in touch with these updates to be relevant and helpful to many users. 2021 would be another advancing year in technology where only the best user experience providers can withstand. Hence, you can implement these 7 future web design trends to renovate your website successfully. Tweak your current web design trends and techniques to make the most out of your website. Make use of the above said far-reaching technologies and be dominant in the market! Are you looking for a robust team that can help you develop a feature-rich website? Contact us now! ...
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Google Data Studio Reporting: A Game-changer for digital marketing!
Along with the fluctuating market trends, analytics is one of those areas where most of the people find themselves in a challenging situation. They find analytics to be confusing, difficult to decipher, and sometimes overwhelming too. In some cases, digital marketers don’t even report back to their clients because they don’t know how to begin on the right foot. To make matters worse, it is almost impossible for digital marketers to provide a report to companies on their ad campaigns and promotions that can be easily understood. If you are a digital marketer who is required to provide analytics on a regular basis then you must be dealing with complicated and lengthy Google Analytics data and then combining them so that you can forward it to your client. Thanks to Business Intelligence teams using Google Data Studio reporting that has allowed digital marketers to get better and detailed metrics instead of dealing with data for the whole day. What is Google Data Studio? Google Data Studio is a reporting solution that is used by business intelligence teams who want to go beyond the simple reporting of Google Analytics. The Business Intelligence team is the real hero behind using Google Data Studio since they are the one using the GDS platform for coming up with metrics and other detailed reports. It is the Business Intelligence team that is able to use interactive controls and customization options in order to come up with detailed analysis and reporting of data. How does the business intelligence team make the most of Google Data Studio? The Google Data Studio offers everything that a digital marketer needs to transform the analytics into an easy to understand and informative report with the help of visuals. The reports generated by Google Data Studio are not only easy to read but they will also save time for both clients and digital marketers. There are a few unique features of GDS that have allowed businesses to understand the true impact of digital marketing. Highly customizable There are various options for presenting the data like in charts, line graphs and these options make the life of digital marketers much easier. We can say that Google Data Studio is acting as a panacea for all the issues related to analytics for digital marketers. Along with this, one can also change the colour, fonts and even brand logos on the report with the help of Google Data Studio (GDS). You can even customize the whole report for emails, PDF, and other formats. Even the easy drag and drop option will add value to better report analysis. Multiple data sourcing Image Source: Google Data Studio One of the coolest things about Data Studio is you can get more data than what Google Analytics expert has to offer you. For example, you can even import detailed Facebook data in your GDS reports. That’s true! Any reporting data that can be fed into Google Sheets can be easily included in your GDS reports. There is also a feature called ‘Connector’ in GDS that will allow you to pull data from various other sources like Stripe, eBay, DoubleClick, Twitter, and much more. Dynamic reporting The reports generated by GDS are dynamic as well and this means that with an update in the data source, the information in the report will be automatically updated. This will minimize the manual workload for digital markers and they will not have to deal with making changes in both the data source and the information in the reports as well. Making these changes manually might sound very easy but it becomes challenging while dealing with a large amount of data. Easy collaboration Saving time with GDS becomes more efficient because of easy collaboration and sharing. Just hit the share button and start working with other people on the same reports. Everyone can contribute to the dashboard but you will have full control over the access since you can set permission. From making changes in real-time to sharing the reports through emails and print formats, there are many features of GDS that makes collaboration easy and time-saving. Some Google Data Studio reporting features that will be beneficial for understanding digital marketing analytics in a much better way Scorecards A scorecard might look like a simple number given in the Google Data Studio reporting like the conversion rate but there are many things that you can do with scorecards in order to understand the impact in a much better way. For example, you can easily set a date widget in order to make the data interactive. After that, you can check last week’s rate or February’s rate, just by making changes to the date column. With the help of blended data, the scorecards can also be used to show calculated fields and this specific feature of Google Data Studio reporting will make it a more powerful tool for reporting in Google analytics services. Heatmaps Heatmaps will make changes to the formatting of the table in order to show the relationship between the column values. Imagine having a column that will contain all your webpages and against each web page row, the number of visitors visiting the page will be displayed. The heatmap will show your 5 web pages in red, middle-ranked web pages in pink colour and lowest-ranked pages in white colour. This will help you in analyzing the hotspots of your website in a much better way and you will not have to spend time categorizing the web pages according to the number of visits. Even a Google Analytics expert can easily understand these heatmaps. Interactive elements The GDS is looking forward to making changes in their report so that they become more interactive and there are already many interactive elements in the GDSP reports. For example, generally, people use a drop-down list in order to decide how data will be displayed in the reports but in GDS reports, you can make tables including clickable elements that will change the way the data will appear in the report. You will need to just click on Facebook in your report in order to see data related to Facebook only. Google Data Studio will not only solve issues related to analytics for digital marketers but it will equip businesses with a much detailed report on their digital marketing efforts. People will be able to unravel many metrics and trends that were earlier not accessible because of limited reporting and complex data. With the power of GDS, even Google analytics services will improve. If you want to know more about Google Data Studio or wish to talk to our experts about business opportunities regarding this, then please contact us today! ...
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