As is known, CRM refers to a tool that allows the sales team to keep track of the relationship with its customers and potential customers. And with marketing automation, a tool that allows you to automate some of the repetitive communications on the marketing side.

Yet, the topic is not that simple and is becoming increasingly topical: integrating CRM and Marketing Automation systems deserves much more than reflection, because it involves aspects linked to technologies, internal and external processes and the company’s customer relationship strategy.

CRM and sales force management

The most widespread use of CRM therefore involves the manual entry by the salesperson of contacts, notes, appointments, opportunities, deadlines and offers, linked to the various lead, prospect and customer data sheets.

To give an example: a salesperson can enter and store information on the contact card about a potential customer met during a sector event, such as the company’s turnover, the product or solution of interest, etc…

The CRM, thus understood, is the very precious customer portfolio of the commercial team: a database or archive equipped with interactive and operational functions. If data collection is constant and updated, CRM allows us to have a clear vision of the company’s relationships with customers, suppliers, colleagues, partners or other subjects.

The user who uses it has at his disposal the history and evolution of every single company-company contact interaction.

Marketing Automation: governing growth

When we talk about Marketing Automation (we also wrote about it here), we are generally referring to all those technologies that allow us to automate repetitive marketing actions.

This definition today is reductive or in any case incomplete, even these systems allow us to activate complex processes such as the automation of repetitive business activities, the management of new leads up to the design of customer loyalty paths. The processes of managing interactions in this way are to be understood as signals of company growth.

But the actions listed above, by way of example, are certainly activities linked to the customer relationship, therefore they involve both the sales team and the marketing team, i.e. they push us towards the development of a shared strategy.

While, on a technological level, starting from the definitions provided so far we can therefore state that:

• CRM is a tool aimed at sales;
• those of Marketing Automation are aimed at marketing and communication;

But the winning project is to integrate the processes (and platforms) allowing us to work through the entire process of acquiring and managing a contact.

CRM and Marketing Automation: 7 advantages

But what are the advantages of this integration? Let’s start from a preliminary assumption: the sharing of company objectives.

All the company’s teams, in an increasingly digital world, contribute to the growth of the business. Therefore it is now necessary to acknowledge that some objectives are shared: marketing supports sales and contributes in an increasingly decisive way to generating demand which is then satisfied by the commercial team.

And now let’s move on to the 7 advantages that the integration between CRM and Marketing Automation could bring to your business:

1. Establish better relationships with customers and potential customers: a practical case is nurturing workflows, i.e. scheduled sending of useful content for your customers, valuable content that intercepts further information about them (useful for cross selling);
2. Collection of more information on contacts: a practical example is behavioral data on web browsing. Do you want it not to make a difference to engage a potential customer at the very moment he is researching what you offer?
3. Save time and costs: these systems allow you to qualify (and disqualify) a lead very precisely. If your business is aimed at companies of a certain size and turnover, a certain sector, etc… it is useless to contact everyone without distinction; today we can classify potential customers based on many factors, including behavioral ones;
4. Reduction of sales process times: send the most relevant content directly, automatically and based on the interest expressed by the contact;
5. Reactivation of dormant leads and prospects: those who have not purchased our products or services today will have had their reasons. But that’s not to say that our marketing activities fail to awaken their interest after some time has passed;
6. A unified database: some of the information held between the various customer teams may be redundant but also used in different ways and for different purposes; database unification also greatly reduces manual export and import activities between tools;
7. Integrated reports and analyses: the possibility of following the customer along an end-to-end path offers significant analytical advantages. This allows us to optimize our strategies with an approach based on the data collected, not just based on that available to a single team.

As you can imagine, the integration between CRM and Marketing Automation is an efficiency factor for the company. Data synchronization completes the flow of processes that can thus be activated; not to mention the fact that it also prevents the creation of duplicate contacts.

The time saved and the efficiency in terms of process finally allow us to concentrate our efforts on the sales strategy.

Conclusions

A CRM is the underlying technology for SMBs of any size; who can no longer do without automating routine tasks with marketing automation.

The two solutions represent two sides of the same coin, which require working on the same database.

If on the one hand the central archive in which we keep information on our customers is extremely consolidated, on the other hand the time has come to manage and govern the growth of our business, saving time and costs thanks to the technological evolution underway.

L'articolo CRM and Marketing Automation: strategic advantages of integration proviene da MA.

Evaluating the performance of your email communications is an activity no less important than the actual creation of campaigns. This type of activity can not only be easily planned, but can also provide us with key indicators to better understand our audience, enhance what works, and discover what does not bring results.

In summary? After launching the first email campaigns, we already have a series of key information available to optimize our strategy.

Mail Marketing Metrics: Planning

At the exact moment in which you are about to create an email campaign it is essential to think about a measurement, evaluation and analysis plan. These are three fundamental phases, which allow us to also work on a less executive and more strategic plan.

Three steps for a more complete picture:

• Time period: defining a period of time taken into consideration is essential, not only to commit to measurement but also for possible comparisons with previous periods. In this way it will be possible to evaluate whether the optimizations made to our messages are actually improving the results. Performance must be tracked on an ongoing basis. Consistency always pays. So before defining KPIs and email marketing metrics, we could say that it is good practice to create a performance tracking program; we can divide it by type of campaign, weekly, monthly, etc… The improvement patterns identified can also refer to a specific audience segment, then related to a specific offer or a type of message;
• Objective Definition: Performance tracking must (necessarily) be consistent with the objectives of a campaign. It therefore becomes necessary to ask yourself: for what specific objective am I sending this communication? And how can I measure it?
• Call to Action: This is where the so-called calls to action come into play. What exactly does our audience / target have to do? Yes, we have to tell them. The subsequent analysis can then shed light on various aspects: the audience’s involvement with the type of message, or the reactivity with the type of content (images, text, other links), etc…; this is behavioral information of interest towards the proposed content.

Metrics or KPIs? Definitions and Differences

First of all, let’s answer (briefly) the question: what is a KPI? And how does it differ (conceptually) from the metrics we’ve talked about so far?

In general, a KPI – an acronym for Key Performance Indicator – is a value that measures the effectiveness with which a company is achieving a specific objective. These are essential metrics, also used to measure the performance of marketing campaigns. In a broad sense, whether you are implementing a social strategy, or organic positioning of content within search engines or, again, a customer relationship strategy, understanding which metrics and KPIs to monitor are essential.

Quindi, come differiscono i due concetti? Possiamo rispondere a questa domanda sostenendo che le metriche si riferiscono a tutto ciò che in una campagna è, di fatto, misurabile. Si tratta di dati, perlopiù, quantitativi.

KPIs, as we can also deduce from the meaning of the term, are qualitative and quantitative data that allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing action or of the same strategy (starting from the proposed objectives).

Metrics & KPIs: Measurement & Optimization

Let’s get back to the heart of the matter: which email marketing metrics should you always monitor?

To understand the impact that email marketing activities have on our corporate marketing strategy, it is necessary to understand the meaning of each metric. Here are the main metrics common to all tools and to MA – Marketing Automation:

• Message Delivery: expresses the number of email messages actually delivered to the recipients / targets of a campaign;
• Open Rate (opening rate): ratio between the number of emails opened by contacts and the total number of emails delivered. There are types of campaigns, called A/B tests, that allow you to test different subjects of the emails to obtain more information on what drives a contact to open (and read) one communication compared to another;
• Click-through Rate (click rate): this is the ratio between the total number of openings of an email and the total number of clicks received within the links (such as CTAs) in the body of the email; in this case too, A/B test campaigns can be very useful as indicators of engagement of target contacts;
• Bounce Rate: measures all those messages that have been rejected by a mail server. In this case it is the ratio between the total number of emails sent to our target and the number of those rejected. It is distinguished in hard bounce and soft bounce: the first is permanent (the email address is no longer active). In the second case we can classify the classic out of office;
• Unsubscribe: the total number of contacts who have decided not to receive our communications anymore. Naturally, users unsubscribe for many reasons. The data to monitor is essential above all to improve the deliverability of our messages and, also, the quality and interest in what we offer;
• Device statistics: This is an often overlooked piece of data. But in light of the latest regulatory and contractual changes from some of the big tech players, we can no longer ignore this information. It is an aggregate of metrics relating to which devices are used by our audience to read emails. If we take into consideration a segment / campaign target to which it is now easy to match a type of device. This could make a big difference in the type of message designed for them.

Conclusions

The world of email marketing is constantly evolving, but despite the various changes taking place, the metrics and KPIs we have referred to in this article always remain unchanged.

In the first part of this content, we insisted on the importance of planning: it is an essential part of designing a successful strategy; where measurement, evaluation and analysis come before any set of metrics of email marketing or any other communication channel.

L'articolo Email Marketing Metrics Every Business Should Track proviene da MA.

In this article we will try to answer some of the main questions that revolve around the concept of Lead Scoring, with particular reference to the world of B2B.

Introduction

When designing a new marketing strategy to promote our company’s products or services, there are essentially two questions to start with: we need to ask ourselves how to generate new target contacts (i.e. potential buyers) and >how to qualify these leads for sales. And this article we will focus on the second.

We have heard it said many times: “it is not so much the number that matters but the quality of contacts”. When we talk about Lead Scoring we are referring precisely to this: qualification criteria for a new contact who, naturally, has expressed an interest in one of the communication channels of our digital ecosystem.

What is Lead Scoring?

First of all, let’s start from a scientific definition of Lead Scoring:

This is a methodology used to classify potential customers, based on a scale that represents the perceived value that each lead represents for the company.

Wikipedia

We could talk about a real marketing tool; i.e. an evaluation methodology that assigns a score to a contact based on various criteria.

Its purpose is therefore to classify potential customers, so as to automatically identify the most promising ones and discard (i.e. disqualify) non-target contacts.

Criteria for evaluating a Lead

The qualification criteria for a Lead may vary based on the company’s business. However, there are macro-areas that all organizations could take as a reference for their internal processes.

There are two main macro criteria, both of which concern the data collected during the acquisition of the new contact:

• Explicit data: this is information generally deriving from filling out a contact form, in which you are asked to leave your data regarding Name, Surname, Email and telephone number, role, name, sector and size of the company you belong to;

• Implicit data: these are behavioral data. We collect information on the opening / clicking of email communications sent to the contact, if he has downloaded content, if he has visited web pages or, more simply, if he has responded to our phone calls after completing the form;

In both cases, this is extremely valuable information that contributes to the qualification of a Lead.

So, before we start assigning a specific score to leads, we need to establish our criteria; criteria which must be based on indicators which can indicate a greater or lesser propensity to purchase our products or services.

Lead Scoring Examples

Once we have defined that Lead Scoring serves, in a very practical way, to assign/remove points from contacts stored in the database, let’s look at some practical application examples together.

Example:

Carlo Rossi is a Marketing Manager of a B2B company, looking for marketing automation software capable of integrating with the CRM and the website of his organization that operates in the sector of solutions and services for marketing. ‘HR. He was asked to make a software selection and to propose a short list of solutions, including ours.

Di Carlo, we therefore have the following information, to which we can assign a score ranging from 1 to 10:

• Role: 8;
• Company: 7;
• Number of employees: 9;
• Turnover: 7;
• Sector: 7;

TOTAL explicit data: 38.

Furthermore, after requesting information, Carlo carries out the following actions in chronological order:

• Opens an email: 5;
• Click the email: 5
• Schedule a demo of the solution: 5;
• Ask for a quote: 10;

TOTAL implicit data: 25.

Based on our Lead Scoring criteria, we may or may not qualify Carlo as a potential customer ready to sell the proposed solution.

Lead Scoring and CRM strategy

Scoring leads is essential for those companies in which Marketing and Sales work in synergy. In this post, we have already addressed the topic of integrating CRM and Marketing Automation< /strong>, but let’s take a look at some essential advantages here.

Certainly, this system allows us to save time: the qualification of a contact is automatic. Furthermore, we are able to collect so much information which is very useful in terms of segmenting our contacts (targets for various types of campaigns).

Conclusions

Now that we have understood how important Lead Scoring is, all that remains is to “get our hands dirty”. Implementing processes of this type in the company requires time and a certain sensitivity on the topic. But the effects are absolutely beneficial.

If you want to delve deeper into these topics, or if you are looking for a Marketing Automation solution… do not hesitate to contact us here.

L'articolo Lead Scoring: what is it and how does it work? proviene da MA.

Welcome to the world of Marketing Automation, an innovative field where advanced software takes over repetitive marketing activities, allowing you to personalize communication and improve campaign effectiveness without constant manual intervention.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation in B2B

Nel contesto B2B, caratterizzato da cicli di vendita complessi e prolungati, la Marketing Automation si rivela un alleato prezioso.

In the B2B context of complex and prolonged sales cycles, Marketing Automation proves to be a valuable ally. This technology enables tracking of every lead interaction, delivering tailored content to guide them toward conversion, thus ensuring that no opportunity is overlooked.

Key Features of Marketing Automation Platforms for B2B.

The best Marketing Automation solutions for B2B are distinguished by intuitiveness of use, a wide range of tools (from landing page editor to email and survey management) and advanced data management capabilities that are essential for personalizing marketing strategies.

Practical Application Examples for B2B

Marketing Automation in B2B results in strategies and tools that facilitate and optimize marketing activities:

• Personalized Email Marketing: Automating the sending of emails based on users’ online actions or their position in the sales funnel.
• Lead Scoring: Automatic evaluation of leads based on their behavior and demographic profile to identify their readiness to convert.
• Audience Segmentation: Creating specific audience segments to target campaigns based on behaviors, preferences, and demographic characteristics.
• Automated Nurturing Pathways: Configuring automated pathways to deliver personalized content and communications to leads at the most appropriate time.
• Automated Social Media Management: Automatic social media planning and posting to maximize engagement.
• Analysis and Reporting: Real-time campaign performance monitoring with detailed reports for continuous optimization.
• Integration with CRM: Linking with CRM systems for a comprehensive view of leads and facilitating collaboration between marketing and sales teams.

The B2B Market and the Importance of Communication

In B2B, establishing effective communications is critical. It is necessary to build strong relationships, thoroughly understand customers’ needs and propose suitable solutions. Marketing Automation enables these communications to be personalized at scale, optimizing resources and time.

MA – Marketing Automation, part of the Zucchetti Group, stands out as an ideal solution for B2B companies. It offers an integrated and advanced platform that can be adapted to specific industry needs, ensuring excellence in automating marketing processes and promoting effective collaboration among teams.

Conclusions

Adopting Marketing Automation in the B2B sector is not only a strategic choice, but a necessity to remain competitive.

The adoption of Marketing Automation in the B2B sector is not only a strategic choice, but a necessity to remain competitive. With MA – Marketing Automation, you will have the tools to turn leads into loyal customers, simplifying processes and maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives. Now is the time to take the next step toward your business success.

Request a demo.

L'articolo How Marketing Automation Revolutionizes B2B. proviene da MA.