Marketing Automation: CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Integrating marketing automation into your CRM strategy can improve efficiency, streamline workflows, and make communications more consistent.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about different types of marketing automation, why you should be considering them, and what they can do for your business. Today, we’re talking about customer relationship management (CRM) — an area where you may not have realized that automation could help. Integrating marketing automation into your CRM strategy can improve efficiency, streamline workflows, and make communications more consistent.

So how does integration of CRM and automation look?

Pardot blogger Jenna Hanington explains it like this: “Automation … is the marketing counterpart to your CRM, focused on lead generation and personalized, one-to-one communications powered by the data collected through prospect and visitor tracking.”

Your CRM is a database, and marketing automation is “the tool that allows you to execute on the information stored in that database,” writes Hanington. Integrating the systems has the potential to cut costs and make big gains in terms of productivity. According to Salesforce blogger Matt Wesson, “Marketing automation and [CRM] are complementary tools that only reach their full potential when paired together.”

Combining CRM with marketing automation has the potential to give you more organizational bandwidth, more precision in your messaging and lead nurturing, and more measurable value in your campaigns. Here are a few examples of how CRM and marketing automation can work in tandem.

3 ways your CRM and marketing automation can work together

1) Track behavior

Combining automation with your CRM allows you to go beyond basic demographic data. You can see things like what pages your prospects are visiting, what types of content they’re interested in, and where they are in the buying cycle.

2) Tie revenue to campaigns

Marketing professionals often run into the problem of not being able to specifically tie their efforts to ROI. Creating a campaign in your marketing automation system maps it back to your CRM, so you can correlate closed deals directly with the campaigns that created them. This means you can attribute revenue directly to campaigns and more accurately measure your ROI.

3) Send targeted messages

You can use the behavioral information collected by your marketing automation tool to create and send targeted messages that are customized to your prospects’ interests and stages in the buying cycle. This means your prospects will find your messages more relevant and engaging.

In summary, integrating marketing automation with your customer relationship management database can save you time, make sales and marketing more effective, and better track ROI. This one is a no-brainer.

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