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More often than not, people take CRM and marketing automation to be the same. However, the two are different, and they serve other purposes. Today we want to help you appreciate the difference between the two aspects. This complete guide will discuss each aspect independently, the key differences and the similarity.
What is CRM?
CRM is an abbreviation of Customer Relationship Management.
If you are still struggling and asking yourself how you can always track conversations with your customers and feedback about your products, CRM is the answer.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with existing and potential customers to improve business relationships to grow your business. This encompasses all tools, skillsets, and tricks you use to keep customers.
Good CRM encourages brands to keep linked to their existing and latent customers, builds faithfulness, crafts customer relationships, and supports joint customer service, increasing sales and productivity.
CRM supports small and medium enterprises in many ways, such as managing operational challenges. Some case studies have shown that SMEs that use CRM have seen an increment in their sales by 29%.(convergeHub). Small businesses should grow to start investing in areas that give back quick and significant returns; using CRM brings back your investment return so fast that this is a good deal for any small business owner.
Customer relationship management usually concerns questions about customers, for example;
Who are your customers?
How do you get in touch with them?
How do you interact with them?
What is their perception of your business?
What do they do for a living, how often do they visit your business,
How satisfied are they regarding the services and the products you provide with them?
Plus, other aspects like tracking sales leads, marketing, and pipeline and delivering actionable data are all managed and controlled by CRM. The system usually focuses on individuals, for example, existing customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers, finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship.
CRM software tools that are commonly used by businesses to manage their customer data and relationships include;
MonkeyPesa: MonkeyPesa CRM is an all-in-one business automation tool. From sales marketing, automation or customer support. With its devotion to helping Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), MonkeyPesa is a user-friendly tool. The pricing, features, analytics, and easy-to-interpret dashboard make it ideal for you.
Pipedrive; Pipedrive is a cloud-based software that helps manage client contacts, automation, lead management and communication tracking. The software offers a free trial for first-time users.
Salesforce; Salesforce is a marketing automation software used to track and monitor customer service, commerce, service, IT, sales and marketing activities in a business or company, alongside helping teams work from anywhere and keep in touch with customers.
Freshworks; the software gives you a complete view of customers' interactions to deliver a personalized experience. This allows you to close deals faster with a 360-degree view of your customers. In addition, the marketing automation software has inbuilt tools, for instance, phone and email, dashboards, customizable visual reports, visual deal pipelines, intelligent workflow automation, and artificial intelligence based on lead scoring.
Hubspot; Hubspot is a free CRM tool that gives real-time updates on your sales pipeline via virtual dashboards. The software supports many contacts but also does deal tracking.
The benefits of using CRM for the business
Using CRM has many associated benefits that can help you save big in terms of time, money and getting lots of conversions. Some of the benefits include;
1. Customized communication
CRM has tools that allow the customization of messages to customers (receivers). This helps improve conversion rates and sales since most people pay attention to messages that bear their names. Research from Infosys shows that about 86% of customers make up their purchase decisions based on customization.
2. Creates organization
After entering the system, CRM software tools put together information and track and organize contacts and other customer data. CRM has a central system where information regarding phone contacts, names and email addresses is kept and stored. This helps improve organization and customer service and helps the business get more leads.
3. Improves sales
CRM monitors the purchasing behaviour of your current clients and gives you insights into themes and trends. These can be used to grow marketing strategies and lead generations, which are strong characters in getting new leads and customers.
4. Enables easy sales progress tracking
CRM allows you to track how sales are going throughout the business. This helps you pinpoint areas you think might need or require improvement, such as monitoring customer journeys, assigning leads to reps, and closing sales.
5. Task tracking
CRM automates activities and processes. This helps to reduce the amount of work that has to be done manually hence freeing up for employees to do other activities.
6. Boosts and improves customer experience
CRM improves customer engagement and boosts customer experience by sending consistent and targeted messages to customers. This helps retain customers who may continuously support the business hence more sales, profits and revenue.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation refers to advanced technology that automatically controls all marketing activities through advanced machines/technology.
With marketing automation, everything is done by software or a set of tools. This goes in tandem with quick replies, quick actions, quick responses to customers’ queries, quick updates to customers in case of any changes in the services or products offered, and any other essential communication regarding the company itself.
Marketing automation simplifies and shortens the marketing process seamlessly. As a result, communication and conversions happen a lot quicker.
Marketing automation is what marketing automation does to get your email, deliver web information automatically, and automatically send social and text messages to your customers through workflows.
Marketers and sales personnel commonly use marketing automation to control a company’s online marketing activities. For example, campaigns help reduce the chances of human errors and are an excellent labour-saving technique that maximizes efficiency and effectiveness, thus delivering maximum revenue for the company-the overall goal. If you need to measure your return rate on investment, you have Marketing automation at your disposal; it's timely, cost-saving, and grows the organization/business as fast as possible because promotions are provided for, aiding with lead generation and scores. A good company goes along with good marketing automation.
Benefits of marketing automation
Businessmen and women keep wondering why they should use marketing automation. Marketing automation has many associated benefits, and these include;
1. Boosts the effectiveness of sales teams and sales cycles
It's easy to identify a qualified lead through progressive web form profiling, lead scoring, visitor tracking intelligence, email marketing, and CRM integrations. This aids in reducing time wastage and makes the process of selling easier.
2. Improves the efficiency of the marketing function
Marketing automation helps to convert leads on the landing pages at a higher rate, automates processes and nurtures leads, does social media management, and improves client management.
3. Saves time and money through automation of manual activities
Marketing automation aids you in automating marketing administration tasks which would be time-consuming and tiresome. The activities include; ensuring that marketing lists are kept safe and in one place, sending customized emails to people (intended customers), managing campaigns, reporting, updating CRM software systems, and other tasks.
4. Marketing automation delivers better targeted and relevant messaging in your demand generation program.
Marketing automation allowed you to use segmentation and programmed campaigns to send better messaging to your customers depending on their interests. This is done to enhance customer relationships.
5. Improves revenue
Marketing automation saves time and increases efficiency and how systems work, reducing wastage. Such improvements cause an increment in revenue since more time is created for people to engage in more money-making activities. In addition, customized communication increases conversion rates, which translates into revenue once purchases are made.
6. Boosts close rates through sales automation
Marketing automation helps to improve the rate at which sales deals are closed. Marketing automation software enables you to identify the lead's stage in the sales process, making following up easy. Knowing the lead's stage in the sales funnel enables you to choose what content to market to convert to buying or make quicker purchasing decisions.
Marketing automation software tools include;
MonkeyPesa: MonkeyPesa possesses an email marketing service that helps you build an email list. You can use your email marketing service to manage your email list in one place. It will also allow you to create email campaigns and send them to your email list at once.
Marketo: Marketo is a B2B marketing automation leader that offers content personalization, experience automation, marketing data environment, marketing impact analytics, sales partnership, cross-channel engagement and more. Marketo simplifies a customer's journey, which fastens the deals' rate.
Customer.io: Customer.io is an automated messaging platform for tech-savvy marketers who want more control and flexibility to create and deliver data-driven emails, push notifications and SMS messages.
Constant Contact: Constant Contact is a marketing automation software that makes your business smart. Constant Contact helps you launch email marketing campaigns to engage clients, craft awesome websites, uploads products to online stores, create awareness on social media and improve sales with Google Ads.
HubSpot: HubSpot, the email marketing software, helps manage customer data like; emails, recording calls and meetings. Also, the software works the sales pipeline and aids sales personnel to keep monitoring customer contacts and deals. The software helps to monitor performance since it gives insight into sales activities.
The differences between marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management
The remarkable critical differences between marketing automation and CRM include;
The similarity between marketing automation and CRM;
The significant similarity between marketing automation and CRM is that they help prevent leaks in the sales funnel.
Conclusion
Both CRM and marketing automation go together, and in some cases, they perform similar functions. In most cases, businesses use them together, but CRM helps sales representatives to leads and sales while marketing automation manages digital campaigns and prioritizes leads.
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