Have you recently eyed that perfect level of synchronization between your sales and marketing teams? Surely, you are always striving for that optimal space where both the functions read from the same page concerning customers?
In the current competitive market, every single customer has to be handheld efficiently by both the teams without a hiccup – starting from the initial contact and welcome mail to post-sales services and offerings. Insights on the value of sales and marketing alignment indicate that businesses that achieve this goal stand to enjoy 36% higher customer retention, among many other benefits.
CRM-Email Automation Integration: A Sure-shot Key to Success
One of the starting points to map out a shared route for sales and marketing would be an integration of two key functions: CRM and email marketing. This can be achieved through three simple steps:
- Step 1: Set up an optimized process to manage interactions with your contacts /customers. Build and amplify customer relationship management with a suitable strategy and an apt CRM technology.
- Step 2: Leverage your email marketing function and boost it with an automation tool that drives down the costs of time and effort.
- Step 3: Create harmony between your sales and marketing functions by integrating your CRM and email automation tools.
Of course, each of these steps has to be broken down into multiple requirements. But, once you have those micro-strategies in place, you will see a coherent and continuous function and feedback loop between your sales and marketing teams. Every effort and result of the two teams can drive the other’s campaigns. They can also coordinate every single piece of customer-focused communication and work together on the sales conversion process.
Here are some of the ways an integration of your CRM platform with your email automation tool will reap big benefits for your business.
For Sales
The sales function is essentially tagged to manage the conversion of high-potential leads sourced and primed by marketing. A CRM system working in isolation would be shooting in the dark with regard to insights on customers. Or, they may have to work from scratch to develop customer insights. But, once your CRM is integrated with the email automation tool, sales can leverage a data-rich handoff from marketing. How, you ask?
Essentially, the metrics tracked and recorded by your email automation tool—on leads’ demographics, browsing patterns, CTRs and email-open rates, etc.—can be bundled up as marketing reports by your CRM platform. These reports can then serve as launching pads for your sales team while engaging in conversations with prospects. An integration of CRM with email marketing can also result in other automated business alerts for the sales team.
The below mail sample sent out by Rogue American, for instance, could be driven toward a TG that has exhibited purchase patterns in line with the new sales campaign.
Source: Reallygoodemails.com
For Marketing
With an integration of their email automation focus with the larger aspects of CRM, marketing, too, benefits from a diverse data flow. The final results achieved by sales with regard to leads can help marketing with future campaigns and outreach efforts. They become aware of those leads that have panned out as high-potential customers and can target their email marketing to achieve upselling or cross-selling. The clues and inputs on customers gathered by sales on the CRM platform can also help tailor post-sales communication around marketing’s events, promotions, birthday offers, etc. The below mail, sent by WebinarNinja 5.0, shouts of a keen cognizance of the criticality of sustained customer outreach. Sales is aware that CRM does not stop with a successful conversion. By curating an interested subscribers list, they are in a position to drive further email marketing communications
Source: Milled.com
The insights curated by sales can also direct email automation efforts on retargeting or revitalizing old leads by scouring and analyzing every CRM-recorded pattern. At the end of the day, marketing can drive all information resources towards successful lead engagement and maximizing conversions.
For Customers
When marketing and sales march to the same drumbeat, the customer is one of the biggest benefactors. When CRM is integrated with email automation efforts, a business can offer an overall better experience for customers. In the absence of bifurcated communication, the information flow from the organization to leads becomes crystal-clear. The customer can also enjoy resourceful and insightful support, all of which is backed by the data gathered by both the CRM and email automation platforms.
Gone will be the days of information overload – no more accidental inundations of leads with repetitive communication. In tandem, sales and marketing would be able to leverage insights and address every primary pain-point of the customer. Which product among a choice of multiple iterations or versions do they prefer? What are the types of after-sales service are they looking for? Are they any updates to the product or service that would benefit them? What are some offers that would motivate them to continue patronizing your business? All these queries can, in all probability, be answered by integrating your CRM and email automation functions and software.
The end-result: an efficiently managed and optimally short purchase cycle for the customer and a smooth sales funnel and conversion for the business.
For the Organization
Integrating your CRM and email automation efforts will drive a plethora of upsides for the organization as a whole.
- Teams working in tandem
- Opportunities to course-correct
- Data hygiene and integrity
With the integration, team efforts are boosted and amplified and become hitch-free. Marketing and sales can work with noise-free channels of internal communication. By gathering all their starting-points, information, and strategies in one spot, they can sync up as well as level up their individual efforts into one cohesive and comprehensive campaign after another. They can also track, monitor, and tweak on the go, guided by the metrics and records of the CRM and email automation tools.
All of these positives are driven from and work towards one of the biggest plus-points of the integration: data. Marketing and sales are required to input information collected through their engagement with leads and customers. But, in a fast-paced world, reps are often pushed to enter just enough opportunity data to meet their reporting requirements. Further, a typical need to serve multiple systems often results in poor data hygiene. Teams can then suffer from duplicated and duplicitous data that misdirect campaigns and will ultimately lead to a depletion of the customer base. With a sync of the two platforms and functions, the data pool on leads and customers can be corrected and coalesced at every stage. What’s more, this process of data gathering can be automated with little need for human intervention. Marketing and sales are then freed up to focus on more customer-centric, critical functions.
Wrapping Up
So, there you have it – four key areas that are positively impacted by an integration of the CRM platform with your email automation tool. It cannot be overstated that the most significant and most overarching pro of the integration is automation. Once the sync-up of the two pieces of software is set in motion, the entire process of coordination between sales and marketing is also automatic and self-directed. You can then sit back and watch your business transform into a healthy organism – one that is fueled by powerful, coordinated cells of data and purpose-driven campaigns.
Need pointers on integrating your CRM and email automation tools? We are here to help.