Integrating CRM Systems with Marketing Automation: Streamlining Lead Management      

Finding new prospects and nurturing them into repeat customers is a process requiring multiple teams, touchpoints, and mutually beneficial value exchanges. Building strong, positive connections with individual customers and delivering personalized journeys is challenging to complete at scale. That is, unless marketers integrate their CRM platform with marketing automation. 

Here’s how marketers can streamline lead management and deliver better customer journeys by linking their CRM with marketing automation:  

What is marketing automation? 

Marketing automation helps businesses reach more customers with fewer physical resources by leaving repetitive tasks to software and digital applications. Many elements of content marketing, customer segmentation, email marketing, and more can be handled with minimal human input. This gives marketers more time to focus on honing marketing strategies with more impact on revenue and growth. 

Why connect a CRM system with marketing automation? 

A customer relationship management (CRM) system is a crucial tool to build strong relationships with your audience. By capturing and organizing customer data and storing it in a central, unified location, the whole company can better understand its audience. By analyzing behavior patterns and buying trends, brands can identify impactful ways to improve the customer journey and overall brand experience. 

Introducing marketing automation to your CRM system allows businesses to deliver timely and personalized communications and content at scale. Providing a seamless journey across touchpoints and channels helps customers feel engaged and valued, leading to greater acquisition and retention. Simply put, CRM systems and marketing automation are a match made in lead management heaven. 

And that’s not all, here’s a round-up of good reasons why linking a CRM system with marketing automation software can streamline lead management: 

Know who to look for 

Linking a CRM system with marketing automation can help target the right people with the right message. 

Identify high-value customers 

What do your highest-value customers look like? For successful customer prospecting, it is crucial to know the identifying characteristics of customers that present a greater return on investment. Automated processes can review the data in your CRM to determine customers with high lifetime value (CLTV) and what makes them unique. 

Identify typical customer behavior 

Not only can marketing automation identify customer characteristics, but it can also analyze typical customer journeys and purchasing behaviors from your CRM. Some demographics may not be the most responsive or may have preferences for specific communication channels – but they are still high-value customers. Automation can predict a typical journey and flag if leads need some added incentive based on lookalike audiences. 

Nurture leads with the highest potential 

Build strong, positive relationships with prospects by linking your CRM platform with marketing automation to turn leads into clients. 

Increased personalization 

Customers now expect a personalized service. Integrating marketing automation with your CRM can track prospects’ actions and engage with journeys tailored to individual interests and preferences. Automation can help segment leads, delivering highly relevant messaging to the right audience at the right time for maximum conversions. 

Engagement scoring 

Analyze historical engagement behavior to identify customers’ individual communication channel preferences. Knowing the behavioral combinations that correlate to the highest profitability allows marketers to design customer journeys to optimize brand engagement. Automated marketing tools can generate lead scores to determine which prospects have the highest potential for repeat business and should be the priority. 

Streamline your processes 

Optimize staff time 

The more repetitive, manual tasks your team have to complete, the less time they have for marketing strategy and initiatives that will make an actual difference to the bottom line. Implementing marketing automation effectively will make sure customer communications are consistent, track campaign results, and manage customer records. Together, this saves time and increases efficiency.  

Connect sales and marketing 

It’s easy for data to become siloed into separate systems and nowhere is this more common than sales and marketing. Introducing automated processes into your CRM will ensure that all data and files are accessible to everyone who needs them. Without this issue, sales processes and marketing strategy will naturally become more aligned. Bridging this data gap will create better collaboration and communication between teams to streamline the lead management process. 

Better attribution 

Knowing which marketing campaigns, activities, and initiatives delivered the best return on investment helps marketers know how to optimize campaigns. As CRM platforms can track the lead management process, use key signifiers to attribute actions and conversions to specific campaigns and initiatives. Automating this process at scale can show marketers which activities are pulling in new leads. 

The Round-Up: Streamline lead management processes with Allant 

To truly nurture your leads, you need a marketing strategy focused on relationships, not transactions. Determine your highest-value customers and foster a valuable and meaningful relationship to achieve increased engagement, insight, and data quality. Allant supercharges the customer journey to turn new prospects into loyal advocates. 

Would you like to learn more? Contact US to discuss how we can help streamline your lead management processes.