How to Use CRM to Your Benefit: Marketing
4 min read - May 11, 2021
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or part 2 of our “How to Use CRM to Your Benefit” series, we’re going to be covering how Marketers use CRM. When you think of Marketing, you may think of the big-name automation platforms – Hubspot, Marketo, Act-On, Mailchimp, etc. But when you’re a distribution company, marketing efforts can look completely different than the “norm”. That’s where CRM comes into play. Whether you’re not quite in need of the HubSpot’s of the world yet or you’ve being using one for years, CRM can take your Marketing to the next level. Not to mention save your Marketing team some headaches (we’re forever thankful).
Personalization
Personalize messages and forms with name, account/company, location, and even sales data. Basically, any data in the CRM can be added to an email or form and it will automatically place the corresponding data into the selected place using merge fields. This can be used with account-based marketing (ABM) strategies to personalize messages to manufacturers, contractors, and MRO suppliers.
Contact Targeting
Whether you’re sending messaging out to purchasing managers, MRO staff, first time buyers, or are targeting specific territories/branches, contact targeting is a vital feature. Contact Targeting allows you to build segmented lists of complex business data, save time, and help your sales team manage customer expectations. It looks like this:
Contact > (click all the drop downs you want to filter the list by) > Search > Save Search
…then it automatically pops up in the contact list options on the messaging that you’re creating. By using this functionality, you can send lists automatically into your choice of Marketing Automation platform.
Analytics
Continuously improve your marketing efforts with KPI tracking on every marketing campaign. CRM allows your team to see who opened, when they opened, who clicked, what they clicked, who opted out and what emails bounced (helps you to weed out invalid emails). This feature also tracks form submissions and webpage visits. Marketing teams commonly use this to generate and qualify MQL’s and SQL’s. The follow up to this generates action steps for your sales team. Go get that W!
Connect the Dots Between Marketing & Sales
No, we’re not talking about the children’s game. As eluded to above, CRM utilizes workflows to automatically generate “next step” actions for the sales team based off the contact’s marketing engagement. This is turn helps quantify the conversion and justify marketing spend. Basically, through workflows, sales tasks/activities are automatically created when a pre-determined marketing engagement is completed by a contact.
Contact integrity
Stale contact information is a huge reason that our customers started looking for a CRM solution in the first place. Quite frankly, they were losing out on sales because they were missing key contact information that was sitting in someone else’s inbox or phone. Manually editing and updating data using excel sheets is painstakingly time consuming for everyone involved. By using CRM, you eliminate the process of exporting lists, sending it to sales for input, checking for duplicates and then importing that data, just to do it all over again every month or quarter. With CRM you have a master list, accessible by everyone and the ability to update, run bulk updates and automatically check for duplicate data.
Lead/Contact Scoring
The same way the CRM will automatically send info to your Marketing Automation platform, the platform can automatically send data back into your CRM, for your centralized viewing pleasure.
This looks like: Email has been sent out and the Marketing Automation platform runs lead scoring (pre-determined by you). The CRM automatically updates contact info based on how they interacted with the email. The CRM also creates automated actions based on predetermined scoring in the Marketing Automation platform. An example of scoring may be: a contact’s score hits 50, CRM creates task for outside sales rep to make a call or visit. On the other end: score hits 10 and the CRM creates a task of an outbound call by an inside sales rep.
A CRM solution can also assist drip campaigns done in your Marketing Automation platform by using those lead scores to send out follow-up, confirmation, or meeting invite emails.
If you’d like more information on how WebPresented can meet your needs, don’t hesitate to reach out to us today at [email protected] (there’s no question too small or too big). We have a team that knows the Wholesale Distribution industry and Integration Specialists who can answer all your Marketing Integration questions! If you’re a current user looking for more ways to utilize WPCRM please contact [email protected].