Marketing Automation refers to a platform that can enable you to automate your diverse marketing tasks based on preset rules and triggers. For instance, automation tools can allow you to deliver an email automatically to subscribers if they abandon the shopping cart without making a purchase based on preset triggers.
On the other hand, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool indicates the system which is created to collect, save, process, and analyze customer data to build better and long-term relationships throughout the customer journey cycle.
What are the differences between CRM and Marketing Automation?
The main functions of marketing automation systems are carrying out repetitive activities, monitoring, measuring, and improving overall customer engagement and sales conversions. When your marketing process becomes more extensive and complex, you can make use of a marketing automation platform to free some tasks from your hand so you can find time for strategic and creative pursuits.
By performing your repetitive marketing tasks such as creating, optimizing, scheduling/automating and managing your social media posts, emails, and other marketing activities, marketing automation systems can make your marketing process easier to manage.
The best part of these marketing automation platforms is that even though the software automates your marketing tasks, those activities are also accurately personalized. That is why you should choose marketing automation systems to carry out your email autoresponders, prospect emails, lead nurturing, leads scoring, and qualification to move your leads through the customer journey.
So, what differentiates a marketing automation system from a CRM?
The features that mainly differentiate an automation system from a CRM software is that you, as a user, will be able to monitor the behavior of your engaged prospects and customers as well as sync their insights with the automation platform to start automating optimized lead nurturing campaigns based on those lead data.
The big difference is that a marketing automation system is mainly used to perform top of the funnel marketing tasks whereas, a CRM system is mostly used for carrying out the bottom of your funnel activities such as lead data management, building, managing and improving customer relationships, sales management, managing engagement from potential and current leads.
The goal of a good CRM system is to improve your ability to target profitable customers, boost your sales efficiency and effectiveness, enhance customer service, and build more customer-centric offers, products, and services. Moreover, a CRM also helps you connect with your customers across diverse channels from a single marketing platform.
This type of software can help you create, organize, manage, ideal customer profiles to keep track of your customers. A CRM system stores contact details, including email addresses, phone numbers, and mobile numbers, website addresses, job titles, industry, and contacts’ social media profiles and many others. These contact details can help you to create thorough customer profiles and maintain a clear view of each customer journey.
Also, you can see if you have already made contact with them and their responses. Thus, you can capture interactions and personalize your sales process based on the insights on their responses to ensure better relationships with your customers.
Why does your business need a marketing automation system?
For managing email list and segmentation
Marketing automation systems feature email marketing tools that will enable you to manage your email list database as well as help you segment the email list database. An automation system can double as a ‘compact CRM’ which is designed to store and segment your subscribers’ data based on their prior engagement, demography and types of users such as if they are your existing customers, free trial users, blog subscribers, or content or lead magnet downloaders.
Email marketing automation tools can allow you to manage your subscribers and customers based on their interests and behavior so that you can send them personalized content that resonates the most with their unique interests.
You can leverage your contact details to segment your emails based on demographic and behavioral information such as their age, content they downloaded, their subscription date, their job function, geo-location, and other details. Using these customer and prospect insights, you can send personalized and relevant offers depending on where they stand in their customer journey.
Take advantage of email autoresponders.
Your marketing team might find managing the entire email marketing operation process difficult to manage manually. On the other hand, using an email marketing automation can help you to configure triggered emails and automate to send on the event of specific customer actions such as –
- Filling a contact form
- Subscribing to your newsletter,
- Placing a purchase order
- Booking demo request or a meeting appointment
- Signing up for a webinar
- Attending a webinar and asking questions
- etc.
Email autoresponder tools will help you automate your email confirmation to respond to your prospects and customers instantly at their preferred times.
Nurturing your leads
Marketing automation systems can be your ideal tools to communicate with and nurture your leads in order to qualify them before sending them to your sales team. This is the best way to ensure you are getting optimum output from your investment in your lead generation efforts.
These automation tools can help you nurture each lead and will not waste any single lead. The lead nurturing process will add qualified leads to your sales funnel when they are ready to convert and talk to your sales reps. Through various stages of lead nurturing, you can:
- Perform proper introduction of your brand to your leads
- Deliver content only which will resonate with their specific interests
- Guide your leads through different stages of the customer journey to the sales funnel.
Thus, you can earn their confidence and trust to build your thought leadership and long-term customer relations.
Make use of analytics.
The automation software features a one-stop dashboard for different marketing analysis types and generates diverse reports to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. A marketing automation system aids you in focusing on important KPIs, which actually matter for your campaigns.
Its analytics share data in context so that you can easily understand and measure your campaigns or your team members without needing training as a data analyst. A thorough analysis of your campaigns using important KPIs can help you determine what strategy and aspects are working in generating engagement and revenue and where you need to improve, optimize, and modify them. Therefore, you can base your campaigns purely on campaign and customer data instead of guesswork.
Why does your business need a CRM?
Get a clear view of the customer journey
Your sales reps can track where prospects and customers are in the sales funnel to be able to close the deal based on the customer journey roadmap that a CRM system features. CRM provides insights on each customer and prospect with a clear visual overview on:
- How your customer experience appears
- Identify downfalls, if any, in their journey
- The right steps needed to convert prospects into customers
Integrates with different marketing channels
Around 94% of businesses use a company website, and 83% implement email marketing campaigns, while 79% use social media marketing strategies, as per Salesforce. So we suggest you take a combined approach by using all these three marketing strategies.
At that, a CRM platform will help your team compile and integrate insights from all these marketing channels by syncing these marketing activities in each customer journey to help you take all-encompassing data from one place. CRM starts tracking your leads right from when they like your LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram page, visit the company website, send inquiries via the contact us page, start chatting via chatbots, or sign up for a product demo.
All of these interactions and actions of your prospects and customers via all marketing channels you are running are synced with the CRM software.
In addition to these features, a CRM tool can also help you automate tasks related to closing a sales deal such as getting forms filled, building invoices and legal documents to be sent, and similar other tasks that are repetitive in each sales process that are highly time-consuming. By taking care of these dull and repetitive tasks involved in your sales process, CRM helps you put more focus on resolving customer problems and close deals.
Conclusion
Your marketing team needs to continuously align and work with your sales team to measure and improve lead quality – therefore, use both a CRM and marketing automation tool to improve the quality of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), shorten sales cycles, and boost sales conversions.
