CRM & Marketing Automation
What is the role of Marketing Automation in CRM? What benefits it can bring? A primer from our Business Analyst Mr. Pratik Bajaj:
What an automation tool can offer could be mapped as:1] Plan Effectively: Understand customer base and do market analysis using historical data. Get meaningful customer data and plan on the right approach to target the customers.
2] Budgeting: Appropriate budget allocations based on the Plans made earlier in terms of customer base and the marketing approach.
3] Campaign Management: Allows you to Create smarter campaigns. Allows you to track campaign’s responses, monitor results, Re-use successful campaigns and launch campaigns quickly.
4] Lead management: follow ups and converting leads into opportunities [A Robust CRM system would also offer this]
5] Analytics: Understand success of campaigns, Identify trends, concentration of business in different geographies.
What also needs to be looked into is:
1. To what extent would automation help the customer? Tracking responses of campaigns other than online ones still involves a lot of manual intervention. Hence, the automation could fail completely if the end users do not feed useful information back to the system.
2. Even a good analytics system could fail to provide meaningful information to the customer. Ex: It’s important for a ‘producer of goods’ to know where his products is sold less, rather than knowing where his products are sold more.
In my opinion, A marketing automation would be most beneficial in the following scenarios:
1] Customer retention
2] Extracting more business out of existing customers and build loyalty
3] Build stronger brand value with effective campaigns
4] Uncover hidden opportunities with the help of greater visibility of data.