Efficient sales and marketing workflows help you avoid repetitive tasks. For instance, if you switch to automation tools, they will help you create reports, send messages, gather information, and more. That means you and your team can focus on more important sales and marketing tasks, relying on a computer to take over mundane and time-consuming activities.
By now, you might be wondering if you can use the same tools for sales and marketing automation. The answer is — it depends. Some platforms offer alternatives for both marketing and sales, but only a few exist on the market.
Although each software category has its own distinctive features and uses, they work together perfectly. In fact, sales and marketing automation work so great with one another that they have become an irreplaceable part of a successful business.
So, what is the difference between sales and marketing automation? How can you use them together to get the most benefits? To help you give your business a boost, we’ve prepared ten strategies to improve your revenue using marketing and sales automation tools.
What Is the Difference Between Sales Automation and Marketing Automation?
In 2020, 66% of businesses used automation in their processes. However, only a year later, that number rose to 76%. That is because different automation tools allow firms to work with limited workforce and resources by transferring menial tasks to software, streamlining operations, and improving productivity, lead generation, and revenue. But what kind of automation tool makes the most sense for your small business?
Marketing automation is a great solution for managing, qualifying, and nurturing many of the leads you have in your database. Still, it is not intended to be used by salespeople as a tool to drive certain deals to closure. On the other hand, sales automation can help you increase ROI, customer satisfaction, and overall growth. So, to understand how to combine sales and marketing automation tools the right way, you must first know how they work on their own.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Email, social media, and other marketing efforts can be carried out using marketing automation. Your goal is to track and examine marketing efforts to qualify leads, before sending them to the sales team. Some features that automation platforms offer include business development, marketing intelligence, and advanced workflow.
Business development refers to social media and content marketing, SEO, as well as email marketing automation. On the other hand, marketing intelligence is about analyzing your customers’ online behaviors and tracking codes. Finally, advanced workflow covers the automation flow from start to finish, including all the functions and marketing processes.
What Is Sales Automation?
Sales automation builds on marketing automation. It covers all processes in the sales pipeline, such as lead scoring, lead nurturing, and closing deals. Sales automation boosts your sales by preventing quality leads and opportunities from slipping through the gaps.
For quite some time now, CRM platforms have been at the center of sales automation. CRM’s function is to gather customer and prospect data in one location. Just like in marketing automation, this feature is the key to having organized and correct data. CRM software also includes activity recording, automatic data entry, profile creation, and search.
So, What’s the Difference Between the Two?
Despite having comparable characteristics, the two automation systems operate in distinctive ways. Knowing what makes them unique will help you get the most out of them both.
Communication
Marketing automation platforms help you reach countless customers using a number of different channels. You have complete control of the content created and shared via websites, social media, and email. However, unlike a sales automation platform, they do not provide one-to-one conversations. On the other hand, sales automation gives you a better chance to approach lead nurture by allowing one-on-one interactions.
Processes
Sales automation streamlines all internal procedures to increase productivity and improve your sales pipeline, whereas marketing automation is designed to manage and optimize all marketing touchpoints.
Basically, marketing automation will make sure that a prospect keeps getting more news about your product or service if they submit their personal information for it. But with sales automation, when a potential customer asks for further details on a product or service, the sales team reaches out to them to engage and assess their needs.
Data
How does lead management work with sales and marketing? Sales automation offers a deeper look at a potential client’s interactions inside the sales pipeline, while marketing automation provides a bird’s eye perspective of marketing analytics. The latter will also give you data and campaign performance indicators. At the same time, the former will present you with reports on lead activity.
That way, you can know how far along the pipeline your customer is and what actions they have taken by that point. As a result, your sales team can create a better strategy to convert leads.
Actions
From the beginning of a prospect’s purchasing process, marketing automation has to conduct some crucial activities. The computer performs these activities by itself, which involves nurturing leads and expanding the client base.
At the same time, sales automation monitors the lead scores and completes the transaction. The information the software provides helps sales reps understand the prospects’ place in the purchasing cycle.
Responsibility
How can automation convert more leads? The marketing department’s main responsibilities are to assist in keeping leads within the company. The prospects must then be nurtured via marketing automation so that they ultimately convert. Therefore, among the other essential responsibilities, automation software’s primary duty is to optimize the marketing flow in the lead-generating cycle.
When it comes to sales automation, however, the platforms are primarily in charge of calling leads and prospects to confirm already planned meetings (ARM system). The point of such activities is, of course, to close the deal.
Implementation
Small businesses’ biggest problem in this regard is determining when to employ marketing and sales automation. For example, you can greatly benefit from automating every step of a prospect’s journey through marketing platforms. That can start with creating demand and go all the way to consumer loyalty maintenance.
Contrastingly, a company that is still new can skip sales automation altogether. Another option is to use it along with marketing automation. However, this type of automation is not necessary when the quantity of leads and customers is still small.
What are the Benefits of Combining Sales and Marketing Automations on One Platform?
Now that you know the difference between the two automation processes, you are probably asking yourself why you should use them simultaneously. Why should you focus on sales and marketing automation as a whole?
As you can see, you can use sales and marketing automation software to achieve your own particular objectives. For instance, you can continuously use marketing automation tools to improve marketing efforts and mature leads. Or you can utilize sales automation tools to deliver data to your sales reps so they can interact with clients more effectively.
However, integrating these two solutions into one platform can give you actionable results, such as flexible business intelligence you can apply to the entire company strategy.
For example, a good CRM system can provide crucial datasets to sales staff, while marketing teams can analyze the info and recreate marketing campaigns based on what sells the most. Additionally, marketing automation can supply your CRM with the data it needs to give every organizational unit useful insight into the present and future consumers.
Combining marketing and sales automation tools enables you to:
- Establish a connection with prospects before forwarding them to sales;
- Use closed-loop reporting to get a complete view of what is and isn’t working;
- Determine lead score;
- Give leads a smooth transition from a visitor to a client;
- Aid sales representatives in understanding the complete lead lifecycle within your business.
- Consistently communicate with leads to nurture and support them.
Why You Need a CRM for Both Sales and Marketing Automations
CRM software, sometimes known as CRM, is a tool that manages contacts and sales, agent productivity, and client connections across the whole sales funnel, from marketing to interactions with customers. This software also stores everything about clients — every purchase they’ve made, every interaction, and phone call notes since the beginning of your relationship. For this reason, it is irreplaceable for improving customer experience, simplifying procedures, and boosting sales.
“CRM software, sometimes known as CRM, is a tool that manages contacts and sales, agent productivity, and client connections across the whole sales funnel, from marketing to interactions with customers.”
In case you were wondering, the best CRM for sales and marketing automations is DYL. That is because utilizing a DYL CRM system for both sales and marketing automation has a number of advantages that will eventually save your company time and money. Take a look at some of them.
Organization
After you provide basic details like a name, phone number, and email address, our CRM will automatically monitor and arrange your contacts. That is one of the main advantages of such software. The CRM acts as a single store of data that every employee in your company can consult to enhance customer service and increase lead generation.
Task Tracking
By automating time-consuming operations, the DYL CRM also streamlines your business’ standard workflow and saves time on routine chores. Thanks to the simpler, more consistent, and customized messaging, it can increase client engagement too.
Better Chances for Sales
Our CRM software keeps track of your current clients’ purchasing habits and offers insight into trends and themes you may use to create lead generation and marketing strategies. That way, you are more likely to close deals and bring in fresh leads and clients.
One Platform to Monitor Sales and Marketing Progress
By tracking client journeys, you may easily identify areas you can improve, gaps to fill, and leads that should be allocated to other team members.
Communication Made More Personal
As a rule, CRM software allows you to personalize your communication with customers, which has been shown to enhance lead conversion. In fact, the Epsilon study claims that 80% of customers are more willing to buy from brands that offer personalized experiences. You may customize emails using clients’ names, focus campaigns based on their purchasing patterns, or send emails founded on the customer journey stage.
10 Strategies to Improve Revenue Through Sales and Marketing Automation
1. Use Transactional Emails to Start B2C Relationship on the Right Foot
How can automations impact email marketing? Well, imagine the following situation. You have a guest that is visiting your house for the first time. Since you’ve invited them to drop by, the logical thing is to welcome them, make them feel at home, and help them settle in. It’s the same with your website visitors.
When you have a new customer who created an account or registered on your website, sending them an email is the next logical step. This welcoming message is sometimes referred to as transactional email. Its purpose is to put clients at ease and make them feel valued.
2. Personalize as Much as Possible
Everybody desires to feel important and respected, wherever they are. That means your consumers also enjoy the sense of being wanted. Luckily, CRM platforms are excellent for personalized messaging.
The more you manage to customize your content, the more you will engage potential prospects. Doing so appeals to your clients more effectively, increasing the likelihood that they will click through and buy your stuff. As we mentioned, the majority of consumers would rather purchase from someone who addresses them by name than someone who does so at random.
3. Create Interesting Content
There’s no successful marketing automation without quality content. You won’t attract any customers if you have little or no content to offer.
However, quality content must be dynamic and send a clear message about your product or service. In other words, you risk alienating a potential consumer if you communicate a wrong message or have low-quality materials. But having engaging content encourages more frequent interactions from your audience.
A dynamic piece of content is focused on the interests of a certain consumer pool. It is intended to be appropriate for a specific reader or spectator at the time. That said, you must be careful to target the correct consumer with the proper message based on their interests and prior behaviors to increase the likelihood that your email marketing plan will succeed. You have a higher chance of providing your audience with quality material if you obtain adequate information about them.
4. Send Reminder Messages
No matter how good your memory is, we all need reminders from time to time. So, if you don’t want your clients to forget about you after a while, you need to remind them about your brand through various channels. But how can automation improve customer experience?
Perhaps a recipient has read your email but did not click through. In that case, you could use an automation platform to send them a reminder and possibly throw in a gift or a discount. Or, if someone hasn’t returned to buy more products from you, you could encourage them to visit your page with a limited-time offer.
5. Lure Your Clients Back
In reality, a number of consumers create an account on a whim, only never to use it again. In other cases, they use their accounts for a time, then lose interest.
However, it’s your responsibility to try and engage those clients that have been inactive for some time. Of course, you can use a CRM platform to give them a call or send an email. That could help you win them over once again.
So, send a message or call a customer who hasn’t signed in lately, informing them of special deals and promotions. Some of them may have even forgotten a product or two in a cart. That is a perfect opportunity to remind them of the items they once found interesting, especially if you can now offer special deals and discounts on those products. Or perhaps you can entice them with items similar to their chosen options.
Furthermore, rewarding your loyal customers—those who have remained loyal to you throughout, is something you shouldn’t forget to do. The same effort you put into winning people back should also go into maintaining the relationships you already have.
6. Keep Track and Pay Attention to Your Clients
You must pay close attention to your clients to keep them satisfied and increase your business. You can do that by closely tracking their interaction with your brand and filtering out more valuable leads.
That way, you can treat regular customers differently than people who aren’t constantly present. Your regulars are the ones with a high customer lifetime value, so you should shower them with discounts, promotions, and offers. That can make them your brand’s ambassadors and encourage them to tell people how great you are.
With the help of the right automation tools, it’s easier to locate and categorize such clients. Then it’s only a matter of sending emails with information about new goods, offers, and promotions.
7. Make Discounts and Promotions Work for You
People adore sales, promotions, and discounts. So why let that piece of information go to waste when you can use it to draw in new clients and retain existing ones? Although an outside spectator would not take that for granted, more discounts and promotions mean more sales and bigger revenue for you.
That is because your profits increase as your consumer base grows. If you provide enticing deals and discounts, people might become addicted. As a result, even when special and seasonal discounts are over, they will probably keep coming back for more.
That said, it might be difficult to reduce these costs manually. Not only does it take a lot of time, but some mistakes might also sneak in. However, with a proper automation tool, like the DYL CRM platform, you can complete this task without a lot of stress. For instance, email automation can help you notify your customers about your new prices quickly, saving you a lot of time.
8. Allow Your Employees to Advance
Your sales representatives didn’t join your team because they enjoy doing menial tasks like data entry. They want to put their skills to use and meet potential customers so they can seal transactions. With a good automating tool, you can eliminate mistakes, improve coverage planning, and have other useful features that will free up your staff to concentrate on selling, which is what they do best.
9. Follow Your Leads Across All Channels
Potential clients are everywhere, whether they are using social media, exploring the web, attending events, or doing something else. No matter the channel, it’s critical to keep track of every interaction the prospect has with your business. Considering the kind of content your clients like to engage with, you can tailor messages and offers to them. Also, since relevant content is the best approach to keep a prospect engaged with your business, this will boost sales as well.
Aside from marketing automation, your landing page is your greatest marketing tool. So, how can automations impact landing pages? Basically, when a visitor fills out your landing page form, your CRM, email automation software, or both are instantly notified of their information.
10. Track Your ROI and Results
As Einstein wisely said, doing the same thing over and over and hoping for different results is not wise. And the same can be said for sales and marketing. To determine whether there are noticeable results, your team must monitor the ROI of each campaign they conduct. If you keep track of this kind of data, you’ll be able to tell which activities give the best results and which ones you should discontinue.
How Can You Use This Information Moving Forward
So, how can automation score and nurture more leads in your marketing and sales pipeline? Automation platforms make things quicker and easier for you and your team. No matter what kind of business you run, you need a data-driven marketing automation platform that will help you optimize your profits.
Therefore, combining the DYL CRM platform and the ten strategies will undoubtedly result in high efficiency, minimal mistakes, and better lead-to-customer conversion rates. Start using them today and observe the quick change in your business’s revenue.
