What is CRM Marketing Automation? - Everything You Need to Know

Business owners often struggle to make customer connections that can lead to sales. Numerous interactions are needed, continually taking up time and energy when it could be spent on other pressing needs. Research shows that it takes an average of 8 touchpoints to close a B2B sales deal. This time-consuming process can take hundreds of customer interactions and overwhelm business owners. 

This need not be the case, however. CRM marketing automation is rapidly becoming popular for companies looking to optimize their performance in this area. A research estimation suggests that automation can increase the average order size by more than 360%.

Therefore, to widen the horizons of your business scaling, this blog post will explore the nitty-gritty of CRM marketing automation, why it's so beneficial, and how it can help your business streamline its customer engagement process. We will also undermine how CRM with marketing automation can help reduce the time and effort needed to close deals.

What Is CRM Automation?

CRM automation automates customer interactions such as emails, notifications, and messages sent to customers. As a result, CRM marketing automation simplifies the process of customer interaction, streamlining communication and potential for data capture.

Without direct input from humans, tasks like email campaigns, traffic tracking, and social media updates are taken care of, giving more time to focus on higher-level marketing strategies. Not only does this free up the schedule of the marketing team, but it also helps ensure that the processes in place are more effective - leaving them with better results than ever before. Here’s how it makes the two major marketing divisions work effectively.

Makes Sales Rep Practices More Efficient

CRM automation can significantly reduce the amount of time sales reps spend on mundane, repetitive tasks. 

• By automating many more tedious processes, such as lead scoring and customer segmentation, sales reps are freed up to focus on higher-value activities that require human input, such as building and nurturing relationships with prospects. This not only lets representatives get more done in the same amount of time, but it also increases their overall productivity.
• Additionally, automated CRM processes can help to improve customer experience by ensuring that prospects receive timely and relevant communication throughout their journey with a company. Automated follow-up messages, reminders, and other touchpoints can be programmed into the system to ensure customers are always kept in the loop. This helps to create a more personalized and memorable experience for customers, increasing their loyalty and satisfaction.

Automated Marketing for Conversion

• Automated marketing can also send personalized emails and track response rates, enabling sales reps to target their leads and engage in meaningful conversations. 

• Automated drip campaigns can help keep prospects involved over long periods and ensure they receive timely follow-up communications from the sales team.

In short, automated marketing allows sales reps to focus on the critical tasks that only humans can do - like forming relationships and presenting solutions - rather than wasting time on manual data entry or other mundane tasks.

Differences Between Marketing Automation and CRM Software

Marketers can use automation software to revolutionize their content process, gathering data from the moment a potential lead visits the company's site, opens an email, finishes a form, or reads one of their blog posts. Such programs give useful reports that guide businesses toward a more designed approach to connecting with and nurturing customers. 

It essentially enables organizations to effortlessly follow up on prospects' behavior and leverage this information to create personalized leads, all set for conversion. Among other advantages, automation software makes it possible to save time, and money and turn out far better, more successful results.

But understanding the differences between CRM and marketing automation software can be overwhelming. Thus, it is crucial to understand them before implementing either in your business processes. 

1. Action Driven in Different Aspects

The main difference between marketing automation and CRM software is that the former focuses on identifying, targeting, and tracking customer behavior to create tailored messaging that encourages customers to take certain actions.

On the other hand, CRM software is concerned with managing customer relationships. It captures customer data, such as contact information, preferences, and buying habits.

2. Campaign Execution vs. Data Collection 

Marketing automation software focuses on executing campaigns and messages, while CRM concentrates on storing customer data and managing interactions with customers.

In addition, marketing automation is aimed at providing detailed analytics of the effectiveness of campaigns and messaging strategies, whereas CRM provides insights into customer behavior that can be used to create targeted strategies.

3. Analytics against Customer Management

Finally, marketing automation software is typically more expensive than CRM due to its advanced analytics and automation capabilities.

On the other hand, CRM tends to be more cost-effective as its primary purpose is focused on providing customer management and data storage solutions.

Benefits of Integrating Your CRM with Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is an essential technology for businesses to stay ahead in the current times, but only if it can be customized suitably. CRM-centric marketing automation platforms offer features like triggered emails and lead and quota management, assisting you in providing far better service than your competitors and giving you an edge in customer satisfaction. 

Some of the benefits of CRM marketing with automation are:

1. Offer Better Visibility to Marketing and Sales Teams

Integrating CRM with marketing automation will create better visibility between marketing and sales teams, allowing both sides to work together effectively. 

• By accessing data such as customer profiles, interactions, and sales performance levels, teams can streamline communication and coordinate efforts that create a smoother product launch or service rollout. 
• And when the collaboration is transparent between departments, business owners can have more accurate insights into what's needed to make their products competitive in the market. 

To prove this, a report by Oracle shows that a massive 80% rise in lead quantity was observed when marketing automation was integrated into practice, and an even more impressive 3/4th marked improvement in conversions.

2. Shorten the Sales Process

Integrating your CRM with marketing automation can shorten the sales process, making lead generation and customer conversions quicker and more efficient. Almost 35% of survey participants from a research program feel that marketing automation streamlines marketing and sales efforts dynamically.

By combining CRM software and Marketing Automation, businesses can gain improved insights into customer behavior and get to know their customers better. 

• This combined data enables more personalized marketing campaigns that lead to an improved customer experience. 
• Plus, with access to detailed sales pipelines and essential data points such as:

• Touchpoints, 
• Customer actions, 
• Inquiries, and 
• Product interests, 

…companies can instantly prioritize qualified leads and shorten the sales process significantly.

3. Provide Consistent Messaging

Many vendors now offer features beyond the standard marketing automation software functionalities, such as A/B testing, audience segmentation, and automated email responses. This demand for improved content creation capabilities and more efficient email workflows is growing, with 35% of businesses seeking consistent, results-driven solutions. Marketing automation is the perfect solution to provide this consistency with its powerful messaging capabilities.

4. Unify Your Data Management

Businesses that unify their data management processes to achieve result-driven outputs are commonplace among leaders in their field. Therefore, it is not surprising that marketing technology solutions, such as: 

• CRM
• Digital Analytics
• Content Management Systems (CMS)
• Email
• Social Media, and
• Search Engine Marketing, are used ubiquitously.

Furthermore, according to a recent study, those companies who have achieved success pertaining to their online strategy goals are 3 times more likely to use a marketing automation tool than those who haven't had the same degree of success. Additionally, it was discovered that companies with larger budgets tend to deploy such tools twice as frequently as those with smaller budgets.

5. Enhance Pipeline Management

Enhance Pipeline Management can lead to prosperous results if done properly. It is the practice of understanding, tracking, and optimizing marketing and sales activities to increase conversions. When utilized efficiently, marketing automation can help your business build successful pipelines with expanded visibility for your team to refer back to when making decisions or assessing performance. This unified view helps organizations plan better strategies and leverage the data collected from consistent sources.

A survey shows that 64% of e-commerce marketers say email marketing and marketing automation contribute to more sales, increasing web shop visitors, engagement, and better insights into the target audience, followed by 37%, 30%, and 24%. Therefore, if numbers ring a bell to you, enhancing pipeline management must be your go-to business approach.

What Solutions Offer CRM With Marketing Automation Features?

Here are a few solution-driven platforms to consider while leveraging the best of CRM software and marketing automation. Have a look:

1. Revenuehero

RevenueHero is a roundtable Lead Routing Automation tool for any business looking to optimize its lead distribution system. You can create and tweak your distribution logic to match the way your sales team is setup. And that can be done without a single line of code.

With RevenueHero, businesses can streamline bookings, and meetings with prospects, analyze routing data, create personalized templates, and access an automated dashboard for monitoring performance. All of these features enable businesses to maximize ROI and drive increased sales through effective marketing automation.

Notable Features

• Round Robin
• Lead distribution
• Instant lead qualification right on the website/landing page
• Automated Meeting Workflows
• 100% customizable meeting widgets
• Funnel analytics

Pricing

• Growth Plan - $99/m (upto 200 meetings)
• Pro Plan - $199/m (upto 500 meetings)
• Enterprise Plan - $499/m (unlimited meetings)

Integrations

• Salesforce
• HubSpot
• Google Calendar
• Zoom
• Google Meet
• Slack
• Intercom

2. Hubspot

HubSpot is another popular CRM with marketing automation capabilities. It provides tools designed to help businesses attract customers, increase engagement, and streamline operations. With HubSpot's integrated platform, users can create stunning websites and landing pages, develop targeted campaigns, track customer journeys and automate segmentation, measure performance metrics with advanced analytics, and more.

Notable Features

• Drag-and-drop website creator
• Advanced analytics and reporting
• Smart content personalization
• HubSpot CMS Hub for creating SEO-friendly pages
• A/B testing to optimize campaigns and content
• Marketing automation with automated lead scoring, segmentation, emails, and notifications.

3. Salesforce

Salesforce is a popular cloud-based CRM with marketing automation capabilities that helps businesses manage customer relationships and processes better. Their platform enables users to easily collect, analyze, and act on customer data in real-time - enabling sales teams to quickly identify opportunities and automate activities such as segmentation, campaigns, lead tracking/scoring, reporting, and more.

Notable Features

• Real-time insights & reporting
• Lead management and scoring
• Marketing automation with automated segmentation, campaigns, and notifications.
• Integrations with popular third-party services
• Interactive dashboards for tracking KPIs
• AI-powered customer service

4. Zendesk

Zendesk is another CRM with marketing automation capabilities that provides businesses with an integrated platform to better understand customer needs and automate customer service processes. With Zendesk, users can create automated workflows and campaigns, personalize conversations based on user data, track performance metrics, and more.

Notable Features

• Campaigns & Automated Workflows
• Real-time customer insights
• Instant notifications & Surveys
• Data tracking & Segmentation
• Integrations with popular third-party services
• Advanced customer analytics & reporting

5. Mailchimp

Mailchimp enables businesses to easily create, send, and track emails. With Mailchimp's integrated platform, users can quickly design stunning newsletters and campaigns, automate segmentation and personalization, measure performance metrics with advanced analytics, and more.

Notable Features

• Drag-and-drop newsletters & campaigns
• A/B testing to optimize emails and content
• Advanced analytics and reporting
• Automatic segmentation based on user data
• Integrations with popular third-party services
• Mailchimp automation for triggered emails and notifications

Practical Use-Case Examples of CRM Marketing Automation

Using marketing automation and CRM in tandem can boost sales, so let's look at some examples.

1. Onboarding

• Data source: CRM 
• Channel: Email/push notification
• Trigger: New signup / first purchase

Once a sale is validated in the CRM, the marketing automation will kick off the onboarding phase for new customers. Therefore, it is imperative that you provide useful information and equip them with your products for effective onboarding.

For example, Ultimate conducted a successful campaign allowing participants to rise up the prelaunch waitlist queue by referring their friends. This amazing endeavor resulted in more than 100,000 referrals within only four weeks and received 200,000 participants.

2. Upsell

• Data source: CRM
• Channel: Email
• Trigger: Customer segment: loyal clients

Your company has landed a great segment interested in making more purchases. Pull out the necessary data from your CRM, which will show who is amongst those customers who have already bought from you at least three times. To ensure they benefit from your upselling campaign, write them a special discount code, and don't forget to set an expiry date. Ensure the offer's value is obvious, and they don't pass up the opportunity.

After a couple of days, it might be beneficial to remind customers who didn't take advantage of the first email that the campaign is approaching its conclusion. Not only does this offer a unique opportunity for segmenting loyal customers into platinum-level status, but it may also present a means for decreasing the status of those individuals who don't purchase from the campaign.

3. Birthday Gifts

• Data source: CRM
• Channel: Email/SMS
• Trigger: Customer's birthday

It's important to stay one step ahead when showing your appreciation for your customers - especially when considering those who are celebrating a special day. Automate weekly checks of your CRM to identify customers who have a birthday or anniversary of their first purchase coming up in the next few days. Then, send them a personalized letter to remind them of their special day and outline the benefits they can seize if they take advantage of your offer. Doing so encourages customers to get ready for the event, thus increasing the likelihood that they'll participate in any promotions you're running!

4. Waking Up Inactive Clients

• Data source: CRM
• Channel: email / SMS
• Trigger: Condition

It is advantageous to use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to identify customers who may have been inactive for a period of time. Those customers can then be targeted with personalized messages to reignite their interest in your business and remind them of its benefits. For example, sending a WhatsApp message offering free delivery could effectively influence this cohort of passive shoppers. Crafting a message conveying the value of returning is key and should be considered when reaching out.