CRM arrived in the 1990s and revolutionized Sales and Customer Management. It served as the backbone of Sales, shaping the entire process of customer engagement. It provided organizations with the resources that they needed for successful customer management. However, marketing technology had to keep evolving, keeping the demands of clients in mind.
Out came marketing automation in the last decade, and needless to say, it has benefited marketers a lot. CRM systems for all good that they have done, cannot support the demands of today’s marketers. CRM doesn’t deliver much value to marketers, so marketing automation is there to help you out.
Essentially your CRM system just organizes your information. When it comes to engagement and execution, CRMs fall short of what is required. That is simply because these systems are incapable of that.
So, you need marketing automation. You need both, though, for betterment. CRM will organize everything, and automation will help you execute campaigns and engage more people.
Let’s take a look at why you need marketing automation along with your CRM.
Websites
With marketing automation you can use dynamic content to create unique webpages for your visitors. You can track every one of them even before they become leads. You can track their actions, you can ask them for their information and once they opt-in, they enter your sales funnel. CRM is incapable of such actions.
Campaigns
You get access to craft different marketing campaigns something which you don’t get if you use CRM. You want to use a drip campaign to nurture leads, you got it. You want re-engagement campaigns to get back to leads who went cold, automation has got you covered. Trigger campaigns too can be crafted for prospects who will become part of a campaign because their action triggered it.
Segmentation
CRM doesn’t allow you lead segmentation based on many important attributes like time on site, specific page visit, last interaction etc. But automation platforms do. With effective segmentation, you can segment different prospects according to their requirements. You can send them emails accordingly, and gain brownie-points because every email will be personalized.
Emails
CRM lets you send individual emails. But when it comes to group emails, you better opt for your automation platform. Your groups might be based on the segmentation that you did. Better for you and your team!
Forecasting
Forecasting is the forte of a CRM system, but if you integrate it with your marketing automation platform, your forecasting abilities increase many times over. Hence you can clearly infer how a CRM’s functionality improves by a mile when you integrate it with an automation platform.
Lead Management
From the moment a lead enters your database, you have to nurture it and qualify it for sales. With a CRM system you cannot do any of those. All you can do is qualify the leads and hope Sales accept them. However, with marketing automation you can actually see a lead move through the sales funnel. Depending on their position on the sales funnel, you can feed them content, take actions accordingly. You know when they will qualify with the help of the lead-scoring models. Of course SDRs can do all of this but then it won't be real time. Also, there are no manual errors when it comes to qualifying leads anymore. Sales are handed leads that have been qualified and Sales too can follow the journey of every lead through effective CRM integration.
Forms
You can use both your CRM and Marketing Automation platforms to create forms in order to capture information. You can feed in the information to your CRM or automation platform and then work towards retaining as many prospects as you can.
Social Media
Social media has become a dominant platform for both organizations and consumers. Marketing Automation platforms allow you to control all your social media accounts from one single dashboard making communications over these channels easier. CRMs are shabbily integrated with social media channels making it difficult to monitor what people are saying about your organization online.
Changes in buying behaviour has resulted in reducing the functionality of CRM systems. But their use is far from over, in fact growing every day. If you implement a marketing automation solution for your organization, you can use that to integrate with your CRM and that will result in effective campaigns. It will promote harmony between marketing and sales and improve the quality of leads overall. What more can a marketer want?
