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Gain and retain customers by increasing marketing efficiency: Marketing automation and CRM best prac
Marketing requires careful strategy, planning, and creativity, but at the same time, its implementation involves many tasks that are highly repetitive, and can easily be automated. Marketing automation delivers several advantages, not the least of which is saving time and money. Better yet, the practice can lead to more efficient CRM and better customer management, better sales conversion rates and more repeat sales.
As with any business process, there are host of best practices that can ensure success. Some best practices in marketing automation include:
Make a roadmap of your marketing processes
The marketing function is often disjointed and uncoordinated between departments. Before automation can be applied, it is always a good idea to map out the function from a multi-departmental perspective. Doing so will often highlight redundancies and opportunities for automation and data sharing.
Manage your content more effectively
Customer-facing content can easily get overwhelming. Chances are that a high number of existing marketing assets are not in use, either because they are redundant, no longer relevant, or their existence is unknown to sales staff. A content manager used in conjunction with CRM will help keep track of, and make better use of, existing marketing collateral, and lower costs for content development.
Promote global use and access of data
Data quality can be inconsistent between departments, often resulting in inaccuracy or redundancy. Marketing automation requires an enterprise-wide approach, which standardizes data entry and search strategies, and promotes sharing of data between departments.
Effective lead management
CRM and lead management work hand-in-hand. Existing and prospective customers may present sales leads to any one of several customer-facing departments, and these opportunities need to be funneled effectively and automatically to the most appropriate salesperson. In addition, that funneling needs to be supported with tracking, to show who owns a particular lead; and a record of previous interactions so that the salesperson can present the most effective presentation.
Integrate marketing automation with CRM
The marketing automation function is highly dependent on the existence of good information, and this requires a two-way communication between marketing automation and CRM. Sales leads can be further nurtured by flowing that information into the CRM system, so that when a lead does develop into a sale, more information will be available. At the same time, the CRM system can send the lead back to the marketing department for further contact if a sale is not imminent.
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