30-second summary:
Automation can assist in marketing tactics, eliminating the need to carry out repetitive marketing duties that detract from more important endeavors such as capturing leads and nurturing client relationships.
Automation software can assist in narrowing down your target audience. It’s important to market to a specific group of customers rather than promoting products or services to the void, as it would defeat the purpose of lead capture and could have a reverse effect on business growth.
Having a library of email templates available in your CRM streamlines the communication process and shaves so much time off drafting an original email every time a lead or a customer needs to be contacted.
SEO assistance is a game changer in the CRM industry. The use of SEO in a marketing campaign can mean the difference between a significant increase in traffic to your website and minimal traffic. It’s all about finding the right keywords that best reflect your brand.
Investing in Client Relationship Management (CRM) software is a game changer for your business. Not only can you automate such tasks as invoicing, payments and messaging, but CRMs play a significant role in helping you plan your marketing strategy.
You also want to ensure that your CRM, along with its marketing features, is capable of completing the same amount of tasks on your mobile device as well as your desktop, making it easier to keep your business operating smoothly while you’re on-the-go.
Especially in these unprecedented times where companies need to keep their customers informed about COVID-19.
For example, businesses can schedule certain texts to be delivered in a timely manner to ensure their customers see them at the most opportune times.
This way, everyone knows how the pandemic is affecting certain businesses in different ways and which safety measures need to be taken in order for the business to stay up and running or if it needs to temporarily shut down.
Check out the following ways in which CRMs and marketing automation platforms coexist to help your business run more efficiently:
Automate your marketing tactics
When you decide to automate some of your more repetitive marketing duties such as data entry, you will find yourself spending less time copy and pasting messages, manually following up with leads and clients, and more time nurturing your business relationships.
This will help you prevent your leads from falling through the cracks. You can automate when to send texts and emails to new leads with pre-written emails you can personalize that guide your lead to the next step with pre-formatted templates.
Having an automated marketing assistant in your CRM smoothly transitions leads to the logical next step in the sales funnel, creating a repeatable sales process that triggers automatic emails to be distributed when you move a lead from one stage to the next.
You can also customize standard tasks and checklists to ensure your team delivers consistent service each time.
Essential marketing features of a CRM
Leveraging automation
With automation, you can assemble a sequence of email messages based on certain actions made by clients or leads, such as booking an appointment, downloading an ebook or signing up for a webinar.
Customizing automation will help businesses avoid losing track of where their leads and clients are in the marketing process, giving business owners a better idea of their lead scoring and sales forecasts.
App integration
Speaking of integration, an advanced CRM allows you to integrate a variety of applications and programs including the following categories:
Ecommerce
Landing pages/forms
Lead generation
Mail
Membership
Reporting
Scheduling
You can integrate your CRM message feature with Outlook or Gmail, for example.
Combining marketing automation tools with sales CRM software will give business owners the most comprehensive understanding of who their target audience is, what their pain points are and how their business can help improve their clients’ lives with their products and services.
Finding your target audience
Marketing CRM software plays a significant role in helping business owners target and segment their leads and customers in an effort to organize data more efficiently, helping business owners to manage multiple groups by filtering them into separate categories.
The marketing automation features will help business owners focus on the segmented groups and target each one with messages that specifically cater to what they are looking to get out of your business.
Marketing metrics
It’s essential to automate the way in which your business data is gathered and organize it in a way that is accessible and easy to interpret with your marketing CRM software.
Automating your analytics will help sales forecasts be more accurate by being able to observe buying behaviors, helping goals become more attainable by helping business owners determine certain trends among their target audience and how they’re moving through the sales funnel.
Being mindful of metrics places emphasis on all the correct areas, narrowing down which client relationships need more nurturing.
Tailored templates
Customizing your website is essential to your brand, as you want visitors to automatically recognize your products and know they are in the right place when they click on your website.
Including proprietary messaging on your homepage, navigation bars and email campaigns increases the probability of interaction with your business, which can all be possible with pre-formatted templates.
Leveraging the power of templates for your website and your emails is an extreme time saver, as you can customize them one time as a “set it and forget it” type of deal or you can come back to it and redesign it however it’s necessary.
You can also create templates for text messages as well as the ability to edit templates for one-off personalization. The template provides a starting point, but you can make it as specific to the person you are messaging as possible.
The goal is to make your email messages as personal as possible so your readers feel they were crafted specifically for them.
Implementing your branding’s color scheme and logo will also make the emails feel more recognizable, preventing your emails from ending up in the junk folder or being deleted altogether due to lack of familiarity.
Email marketing campaigns
Having the ability to automate email campaigns is another essential feature that should be included in marketing CRM software. Sending regularly scheduled emails out to your customers is a great way to maintain engagement and stay top of mind.
Using a marketing CRM assists with gathering and prioritizing customers’ data that helps the software interpret consumer behavior on the website, thus allowing business owners to fashion emails that target specific customers with promos in which they would be interested.
Once the buyers’ behavior patterns are determined, it’s easy to send an email campaign with product recommendations based on past searches or purchase history, including a prominent call-to-action (CTA) directing users exactly where to go to complete a conversion within the email or on the website.
Lead capture
Landing pages can be a robust lead magnet for those visiting your website for the first time. An efficient way to capture leads’ contact information is to code an interstitial, or a popup, asking for a lead’s email address in exchange for valuable content such as a newsletter subscription, a free trial or video demo.
Some best practices to apply to your popups include:
Selecting a sufficient amount of fields for appropriate data gathering.
Only ask them for their email address when signing up for a newsletter.
Consider exit interstitials over entrance pop ups, as they won’t be so disruptive to the customer’s browsing experience.
Offering compelling content will educate your audience about your brand and your products, helping them feel less pressured to make a purchase.
Even if their intention wasn’t to actually buy anything upon clicking over to your site, their piqued curiosity may be enough to motivate them to fill out the form and hope you reach out.
SEO assistance
Employing SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, to your marketing campaigns will yield a significant increase in traffic to your website.
Marketing CRM software that features SEO assistance will provide trending keywords, both short-tail and long-tail, to your promotion copy including your website’s landing pages, blog posts and back end metadata for multimedia such as videos and podcasts, that will help your company rank higher in online searches.
Using the right keywords associated with your brand will increase the chances of your company getting indexed by Google, so when users do a search for a certain product or service, you want to ensure your business is always trending within the top 10 rankings.
Going forward
By now, it seems CRMs and marketing automation really do go hand in hand, as their symbiotic relationship is what it takes to run a successful, streamlined organization to ensure you’re keeping up with your clientele, helping them feel more nurtured along the way, and increasing brand loyalty toward your business.
The post Why CRM and automation platforms go hand in hand appeared first on ClickZ.
Source: ClickZ
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