There is an opinion that marketing automation software makes businesses’ communication with prospects and customers impersonal because of unified approaches and poor segmentation which leads to lower outcome. But forward-thinking companies know that this assumption is a complete nonsense. Recent study conducted by Razor Social shows that more than 25 percent of companies that have a marketing automation in place observe the revenue growth up to impressive 49 percent. At the same time, another 20 percent of brands using marketing automation software reported 29 percent revenue increase.
Unfortunately, not all marketing automation implementations help companies boost their ROI and run successful marketing campaigns. Errors in product selection can lead to overall dissatisfaction across departments, which in turn has a negative impact on the entire business performance. Marketing software deployment is a fundamental step for your company and choosing the right vendor is not a task that should be resolved on a whim. First of all, this software has to help your teams optimize time spent on marketing efforts, enhance the level of communication and easily track the return on investment.
The right marketing CRM should also feature a sufficient level of flexibility and be versatile enough to provide company with necessary tools for creating a user-friendly environment that can be altered any time. This environment should also be self-sufficient enough so businesses are able to supplement marketing CRM with sales and service features from the same vendor for better alignment across departments. At the same time this tool should be capable of integrating with other technologies or automation tools that your company is currently using if there are any. Additionally, it needs to be scalable enough in order to accompany your teams growth.
This list of top 5 tips is designed to help you make a marketing CRM software choice that reflects your company’s goals and will aid your teams in achieving outstanding results:
1. Capabilities and features your company needs
The first key step any business has to take before buying a CRM software should be the assessment of its needs and requirements. Don’t spend too much time on talking to sales reps before you don’t know what your employees need and want to see in the marketing CRM software. First talk with the executives so you understand whether the marketing automation software has to fill the gaps in reporting or it has to help email marketing teams with deep customer database segmentation and killer email templates. Take into consideration that some vendors provide solutions with extra capabilities. For instance, intelligent reporting and advanced analytics which is a backbone of effective marketing campaigns. While basic analytics is a default feature for many platforms, best CRM systems like bpm’online allow marketers to transform big amount of complex data into actionable insight providing businesses with a valuable picture of all omnichannel communications and campaigns in a user-friendly interface with a social look and feel. Such systems provide granular reports with an option to sort data and customize the way it is displayed for better usability.
2. Choose a full-fledged tool that can serve multiple departments
Companies that intend to foster a right technology to help them boost customer loyalty must consider purchasing a software that is capable of not only automating company’s marketing efforts but also providing necessary building blocks for sales and service departments so all teams are on the same page. This alignment across key departments creates a common language which ensures each team member knows their performance. This unified platforms for sales, sales, and marketing give a unique opportunity for employees to collaborate and share data on the go since they are built on the cloud engine which makes information accessible from any device.
3. Pricing policy can be tricky
This might sound kind of irrational for most businesses, but the price shouldn’t be the most critical aspect when evaluating the marketing CRM software. Best solutions that were selected correctly pay off very fast. However, note that a lot of CRM market leaders provide the same list of features as other lower-priced vendors. Therefore, it’s important that CRM implementation doesn’t have a significant impact on company’s financial health.
Make sure that selected plan from the vendor does not include any hidden fees so you know what every dollar was spent on. The easiest way to check on this is to reach out to sales rep and clarify the pricing policy as not all pricing pages are showing all the details.
4. Don’t overcomplicate it
New marketing automation software implementation sure is an exciting processes for employees as it gives them tools to build trusted and personalized relationships thus maintaining the high level of loyalty. But at the same time this process can be overwhelming and tiresome. Best practice implementations show that companies that train their employees on simpler features first tend to have higher adoption rates. This is mainly because they are being trained feature by feature to give them an opportunity to grasp all of their benefits and explore ways on how these features can help streamline their routing work.
Keep it simple and boil your businesses needs down to the essentials before presenting workers a platform with all possible features.
Marketing CRM can take your marketing efforts to a completely new level and help generate more high-quality leads, but before buying one, companies need to do their homework and evaluate which CRM is the best for their business model and industry.
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