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How to Automate Your Marketing

With a CRM System

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How to Automate Your Marketing With a CRM System 1

Customer Relationship Management/ kuhs-tuh-mer • ri-ley-shuhn-ship • man-ij-muhnt /

nounCustomer Relationship Management (CRM) technology allows businesses to consolidate customer data and insights to help them manage interactions and build better and more meaningful relationships with their audience.

How to Automate Your Marketing With a CRM System 2

300%Agile CRM

increase in sales conversions

Organizations that use a CRM system can expect up to a

How to Automate Your Marketing With a CRM System 3

о Gather important customer insights to empower Sales to have more targeted conversations

о Identify opportunities to shorten the sales cycle

о Uncover customer behaviors and preferences to improve marketing and segmentation efforts

о Collect valuable customer insights to help inform and improve nurturing efforts

о Identify when a lead is qualified and ready to talk to sales

о Easily identify and leverage customer advocates

о Uncover opportunities to upsell and/or cross-sell to current customers

о Track the overall health of an account

Quality CRM systems empower companies to collect information that enables them to gain improved visibility into customer behavior and preferences, streamline everyday processes, and focus on efforts that increase their bottom line.

When used to its full capacity, the data collected through CRM systems can help organizations:

This list only begins to unpack how CRM systems can help your business improve the way you understand and interact with your audience. In the next few pages, we’ll take a deeper dive into these benefits of using CRM systems and how they can better equip your organization for success.

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Consolidate and Analyze Key Customer Data

Effective business decisions always stem from data, and what better way to consolidate and dissect important information than through an intuitive and easy-to-use CRM system?

While third-party research can provide insight into industry trends and customer preferences, these findings are generalizations and should only be used as a starting point. If you want to make business decisions that benefit both your organization and your target customers, you need to get more granular with your analysis and identify pain points, behaviors, and interests that are specific to your audience. This information will help you construct more accurate customer personas and audience segments.

When you have thorough and accurate customer personas and segments you can:

And so much more!

CRM systems allow you to aggregate insights gathered through various activities in one central location. This eliminates the need to piece together information from various sources in order to construct a thorough and accurate account profile that tells you everything you need to know about who your prospects and customers are and what they care about. You can leverage this information to engage, nurture, and eventually convince your leads to convert to customers.

Develop and launch targeted marketing campaigns

Deliver personalized and targeted information and recommendations

Drive more effective conversations

Identify future business priorities based on customer preferences and needs

Gain insight into the customer journey to shorten the sales cycle

01

02

03

04

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How to Automate Your Marketing With a CRM System 5

is expected to surpass product and service as the main influencer behind a person’s purchasing decision in the next few years.

Agile CRM, 2018

Customer experience

How to Automate Your Marketing With a CRM System 6

Personalize and Refine Your Marketing Efforts

Your organization’s marketing team is on the frontlines when it comes to interacting with customers, nurturing them through the customer journey, and determining whether they’re a good fit to talk to Sales. For marketers at your organization to be able to accomplish this very important task, however, they have to know who your customers are, what they’re looking for, and the best way to communicate with them.

A great advantage of having important data in your CRM is that it empowers your marketing team to make a good impression with prospects and customers at every step of the buyer journey.

When your marketing team is equipped with important information about your customers they can:

Segment your contacts based on factors such as product interest, stage in the buyer journey, budget, and more

Develop and implement more targeted campaigns that speak to your audience’s specific pain points and interests

Deliver relevant content that addresses the questions and concerns of your audience, keeps them moving through the sales cycles, and helps them make informed decisions

Choose the best channels to engage and nurture your audience

Identify and deliver more qualified leads to Sales so they can focus their efforts on bigger and more profitable opportunities

How to Automate Your Marketing With a CRM System 7

10%McKinsey

Organizations that adopt a personalized marketing approach can expect up to a

increase in sales

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The data you collect through your CRM system can help your marketing team move beyond random acts of marketing toward personalized and timely messaging.

You can further enhance their ability to launch effective campaigns by pairing your CRM system with a robust marketing automation platform like Act-On. This way, they can use the information collected through your CRM system to automatically segment contacts, launch targeted nurture campaigns, score leads to better determine where they are in the sales funnel, and much more.

Why is this so important? When your marketing team is equipped with the tools to generate smart and effective marketing campaigns, you can expect them to generate better and more qualified opportunities that will lead to better results while also accelerating the sales cycle.

Score leads based on where they are in the

sales funnel

03

Launch targeted nurture

campaigns

02

Automatically segment contacts

01

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15%Invespcro, 2018

increase in sales productivity

Organizations that use marketing automation experience a

How to Automate Your Marketing With a CRM System 10

Empower Your Team to Close More Deals

A fine-tuned demand generation machine is not enough to drive sales conversions on its own. If your goal is to convert qualified leads into loyal and happy customers, you must first equip your salespeople with the information they need to have targeted conversations that help guide prospects toward the point of making that final decision.

A CRM system is the perfect place to provide your salespeople with the tools they need to effectively nurture and motivate customers as they inch closer toward the finish line. With a CRM system, your sales team can:

Gain Visibility Into Customer Behavior and Insights: A CRM system enables you to compile important lead information (such as contact name, industry, and location) that your salespeople need to know before they talk to a potential customer. Better yet, when you integrate your CRM system with a marketing automation platform, your salespeople can also gain visibility into a lead’s engagement and activity history to help them have more targeted conversations and refine their sales pitch.

Collaborate with Marketing for Better Results: For Sales to do their job effectively, Marketing needs to attract the right opportunities and have a good process in place for transferring those leads to Sales. Combining a CRM system with marketing automation can help get both teams on the same page, streamline processes, and facilitate leads transfers.

Invest Time on Better Opportunities: Even the best insights can’t help a salesperson who is chasing a lead that is simply a bad fit. Integrating your CRM system with marketing automation allows your marketing team to score leads and notify sales of when they’re qualified and ready to buy. This enables your salespeople to invest time on bigger, better, and more qualified opportunities — increasing their chance of success.

Maximize Customer Lifetime Value: Your current customers are one of your greatest assets when it comes to fueling business growth, so it’s important to continue to engage, nurture, and build relationships with that audience. When combined with lead scoring, your CRM can give you insight into the health of an account and help you identify opportunities to cross-sell and upsell so you can maximize customer lifetime value.

If you want to close more deals, you need to set your sales team up for success by providing the insights and tools they need to be successful. A CRM system can help you do just that, especially when it’s paired with an equally powerful marketing automation solution (such as Act-On) that can help you collect and leverage those insights.

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Why Does CRM Matter to Your Business?

CRM technology can equip your business leaders, marketers, and sales team with a full view of the data they need to make more informed decisions, have more relevant conversations, and build better relationships with your target audience.

While CRM systems are essential business tools, an important thing to keep in mind is that it provides a starting point for businesses to streamline and improve everyday marketing and sales processes. If your goal is to bridge the gap between Marketing and Sales and create seamless customer journeys, your best bet is to pair this technology with a robust marketing automation solution.

The reason that CRM systems and marketing automation platforms are better together is that the former allows you to gain a full view of the data you need to fuel your business success, while the latter allows you to actually collect that data and put those insights to work.

When searching for the perfect CRM system and marketing automation solution pairing, keep in mind that not all solutions are created equal. Act-On is committed to helping you make the most of both worlds by offering the most native integrations of any marketing automation platform so you can choose the MarTech stack that’s best for you.

If you’d like to learn more about how Act-On’s marketing automation platform can help you achieve your business goals, we invite you to schedule a time to talk with one of our digital marketing experts.

© 2019 Act-On Software. All rights reserved. | www.act-on.com

Act-On Software is the leader in Adaptive Marketing solutions that empower marketers to achieve the purposeful and personalized engagement that their business needs to thrive. Act-On makes customer data actionable, enabling marketers to strategize better business outcomes, drive more relevant multi-channel marketing, and generate higher customer lifetime value--all with the fastest time-to-value.

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