Last year alone, marketing automation CRM was worth over $6 billion. With such a high market value, there’s a clear financial benefit to automation. But how does this investing in it benefit your customer relationships?
Please read this guide to learn about marketing automation and its impact on client interactions. You’ll be more than convinced of its usefulness once you discover its advantages.
How Automation Enhances Inbound Business Marketing
Inbound marketing focuses on improving customer relationships. For marketers, that means more work at the top of the funnel. But, of course, this work quite literally pays off with lead conversions.
The need to engage customers on a personal level is on the rise. You can’t waste precious time advertising to people interested in your business offerings. Inbound sales and marketing strategies address the need for a personal touch.
Target audiences will ignore one more random ad in their newsfeed, inbox, etc. Working with inbound strategies ensures ads and prospecting efforts are more effective. Following the customer’s purchase path means salespeople and marketers are more aware and present.
Your main focus with marketing automation should be heightened customer engagement, nurtured leads, and buyer journey support. Learn how automation impacts these below.
Customer Engagement
The best way to engage customers is to meet them “where they are” in their purchase path. Drip campaigns in automated email marketing can create seamless marketing paths. Automation helps ease this advertising process.
With segmented customers, you can send email workflows by client type or buyer persona. Whether it’s a follow-up after downloading freemium content or post-purchase, automatic emails encourage response. In addition, when you target consumers based on behaviors, emails feel far less like spam.
Lead Nurturing
Your primary goal for inbound marketing should be customer relationship management. Nurturing inbound leads means paying attention to their individual needs. Find their communication channel preferences to avoid feeling spammy.
Lead nurturing eats up time if you lack data-driven insights. But with the right marketing automation CRM, you’ll learn vital data. The more you align sales and marketing, the more your messaging, marketing, and prospecting convert leads.
Customer Journey
With the right insights, your business marketing targets multiple buyer personas. Of course, these personas depend upon your customer research. But the more you carve out niches in your market, the better you can advertise, sell, and convert.
Today’s customer journey involves heavy interaction with marketing and sales. That means both teams need to connect with customers to carry them from the top to the bottom of a funnel. Consistent messaging keeps customers supported and your company on the same page.
What Is Marketing Automation CRM Integration?
CRM stands for customer relationship management. And any good marketing automation platform includes this as an integration. A good CRM platform allows you to align sales and marketing campaigns through seamless integration with your preferred marketing tools.
Some CRMs don’t accommodate marketing data and metrics. These are not ideal for most businesses, especially those seeking to tailor ad campaigns to the buyer’s journey. Any good platform offers key features like the following:
- Lead nurturing: automated emails to boost engagement based on tailored personas with targeted content
- Customized email marketing: email personalization to target content for different client types
- Campaign management: run campaigns alongside sales cycles with streamlined email contact
- CRM integration: transfer lead information across sales and marketing teams
These key features serve as a basic standard for any marketing automation platform. Different platforms offer different features, each of which can meet specific content and messaging strategies. To clarify, CRM integrations are critical for aligning marketing campaigns.
Key Marketing Automation Features for Improving Customer Relationships
Aside from the features listed above, your CRM integration can go even further with a few additional features. For example, when looking into customer relationship management, you need insights. And the best platforms provide valuable information to help you better reach prospects.
Lead scoring and management are valuable for saving time and enhancing targeting abilities. Insights from these features generate solid, qualified leads. This makes conversion and closing that much simpler, too.
Social media management within an automation platform streamlines content distribution. Additionally, some automation systems include forms and landing pages. For business marketing, the more seamless your CTAs and redirects, the better.
Lead Scoring and Management
Scoring leads is critical to building reliable processes. Marketers and salespeople alike can’t attract and convert unqualified leads. When you lead the score, you define each teams’ likelihood of hitting performance goals.
And managing these leads means every team member ends up more successful. Therefore, managing qualified leads is an essential part of any marketing automation CRM integration.
Forms and Landing Pages
Your redirects and CTAs are worthless without a conversion point. The right automation system offers built-in forms and landing pages to simplify conversion workflows. In addition, nurturing leads is easier than ever with targeted emails and follow-up pages or forms.
Social Media Management
Converting leads through social media is simple, too. Inbound business marketing meets customers on their preferred communication channels. Integrated social media management ensures simple and direct communication by preference.
Email Campaign Management
Automated emails are invaluable tools. But the right marketing automation CRM also includes email campaign management tools too. The more integrations at your disposal, the easier your job is in reaching customers.
