Studies show that it takes an average of eight touchpoints to close a sale. However, this number depends largely on each touchpoint’s effectiveness. Ultimately, it could take dozens or even hundreds of touchpoints to convert a potential lead into a customer. Unfortunately, customer connections take time and can quickly become overwhelming. That’s where CRM with marketing automation can help.
In this article, you’ll learn about the value of marketing automation and how integrating this strategy with your CRM platform can maximize its potential. We’ll also explore the numerous benefits of CRM with marketing automation and how many of our monday.com features can help your company improve its marketing outcomes.
Let’s start with a definition: what is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is not just a software offering, but a collection of tools used in conjunction with the company’s overall business strategy.
Marketing automation handles various routine marketing tasks, such as email marketing, lead generation tracking, and social media posting, with little to no human input.
Allowing software to handle routine tasks can improve efficiencies within your marketing department and drive better results. Automation enables your marketing team to focus on other important tasks, such as developing marketing strategies and building customer relationships.
Some routine tasks automated marketing can complete or help with include:
- Data analysis
- Lead generation
- Lead scoring
- Customer segmentation
- Behavior tracking
- Email campaigns
- Lead management
- Landing page tracking
- Content marketing
- Lead nurturing
- Social media posting
- Drip campaigns
When integrated with CRM software, marketing automation can allow your company to guide prospective and current customers through the purchasing journey by making valuable touchpoints at various stages. Though that is just one of many valuable results CRM with marketing automation provides.
What are the benefits of a CRM with marketing automation?
Not long ago, marketing automation was best for bigger companies with large marketing budgets. Today, automated technology is so advanced and affordable that even small businesses can maximize its use and reap the rewards. In fact, this marketing strategy is so popular that nearly 80% of companies now have at least some type of marketing automation plan in place. This high number is likely due to the various benefits marketing automation has to offer, such as:
Producing high-quality leads
Marketing automation not only increases your company’s potential to obtain leads, but it can help you find higher quality leads through data collection, behavior analysis, and targeted marketing campaigns. Automated marketing tools can also calculate lead scores to determine which prospects are most likely to turn into repeat customers. This type of real-time data allows your company to better choose where to spend its marketing dollars. This factor, in turn, can spur business growth, increase sales, and boost company profits.
Effective lead management
Marketing automation can enable your company to connect with customers through a targeted message at every stage of the buying journey. It can also capture lead information, eliminate duplicate entries, and collect and track customer data. As a business leader, you already understand that obtaining quality leads is only half the battle, so using effective marketing strategies to persuade potential customers is key to managing those leads down the sales pipeline.
Saving your company time and money
If your company is still manually processing emails, social media posts, and text messages, you’re taking time away from connecting with prospective and current customers. Not only can marketing automation ensure that these customer engagements remain consistent throughout the purchasing journey, but it can also help you better manage customer files, track campaign success, and gain insights into customer behaviors. Combined, this type of automation can save your company time and money.
Enhanced personalization
Studies show that today’s consumers crave personalized services. While a standalone CRM system is ideal for building relationships with current customers, it’s not enough to generate and convert new leads. This is where marketing automation can help by integrating with your CRM platform to track, monitor, and engage with prospective customers. The right marketing automation tools can help you segment your leads into numerous groups based on a wide set of demographics. Segmentation allows your company to send emails, targeted ads, and messages to the right audience.
Valuable customer insights
Customer insights are crucial when working on converting prospects into purchasers. Understanding how customers behave when shopping online, how they prefer to interact with your company, and other relevant customer data can help your company build a marketing campaign that targets your most desired leads.
Sales and marketing alignment
Your business can achieve better results and improved profits when your sales process and marketing strategies align. Without CRM with marketing automation, this type of collaboration can be extremely difficult. CRM integration with automated marketing tools can eliminate this problem by maintaining all the necessary data and files in one convenient location.
Dozens of companies offer CRM with marketing automation options. However, each company has its own set of automated marketing features, so we’d suggest checking out various companies before selecting one to work with.
What solutions offer CRM with marketing automation features?
Due to the popularity of marketing automation integrated with CRM platforms, several companies offer these services. This factor can make it hard for businesses to select the option that’s right for them. To help with this issue, we’ve compiled a list of the top solutions that offer CRM with marketing automation features.
monday.com
As a work software with a powerful marketing automation platform, our features include everything from email templates and email automation to email campaign tracking and social media marketing. Best of all, our marketing tools are fully customizable, so you can alter them to meet your company’s specific needs. Additionally, you can integrate our marketing tools with a variety of CRM platforms, including HubSpot, Hootsuite, and Mailchimp.
HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most popular CRM platforms on the market today. While it also offers some marketing automation features, many of these are not customizable. This factor can limit your company’s ability to maximize the use of these vital tools. Fortunately, many other companies, such as monday.com, fully integrate with the HubSpot platform.
Salesforce
Salesforce is another CRM platform that provides marketing automation tools, such as pipeline management, email automation, and data analysis. While this can be a good option for companies already using the Salesforce platform, it can be more expensive than other viable options.
Zendesk
As a CRM platform, Zendesk offers robust reporting and forecasting capabilities. Additional marketing automation features include lead management, email automation, and social media marketing. Due to pricing, Zendesk is best for customers already using the Zendesk CRM platform.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp began as an email marketing platform to help companies streamline their email marketing processes. It now also offers other types of marketing automation, such as lead form integration and segmentation options.
Nailing down which platform will work best for your team will determine whether you’re putting your resources to good use and achieving all your goals. To help with this process, we’ve included a short FAQ.
FAQs
Is Mailchimp marketing automation?
Technically, Mailchimp is an email marketing platform that does have automated email capabilities. While Mailchimp offers other automated tools to help track and manage leads, these features are limited in scale and effectiveness. For example, in some cases, the platform fails to detect duplicate leads, which can create a chaotic database.
Does Salesforce do marketing automation?
Salesforce is primarily a CRM platform, but it does offer some marketing automation tools, such as mobile messaging, email marketing, lead scoring, and lead management. Companies already using Salesforce should invest in learning more about the automated marketing tools it offers but may still need to seek additional tools to meet their marketing needs.
Improve outcomes with monday.com’s CRM with marketing automation
The right marketing automation tools can generate higher quality leads, align your marketers and sales reps, and improve sales results. If your company is ready to benefit from this marketing technique, monday.com Work OS has marketing automation features that can help.
Related: CRM with Project Management, CRM with Inventory Management, CRM with Order Management, CRM with Document Management, CRM with Quoting