Need bigger CRM guns? Add marketing automation to your CRM arsenal

(Jan 12 2010) CRM , ERP Blog

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Technologies: Cloud Computing, CRM, CRM Blog, ERP, ERP Blog, Green IT, on-demand, SaaS, web-based

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  1. Todd R. Weiss       CRM Blogger


    Your big, complex, beautiful customer relationship management (CRM) application is a great tool for your business.

    It can help you better meet your customers' needs while improving your communications, response and sales.

    But there are times when every CRM component that you will need wasn't built into the application you bought and installed.

    That's where add-ins can save your hide.

    One such piece is marketing automation, which is also called campaign management, which can help you fine-tune your marketing campaigns even more to meet your goals.

    Vendors such as Marketo and Eloqua offer this component.

    "The CRM vendors don’t always do a very good job at doing everything that business-to-business (B2B) marketers need to do," so sometimes add-in applications are required to fill in the gaps, said Laura Ramos, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.  

    The key is that targeted marketing automation tools are often much more specialized that generalized tools found in all-in-one CRM applications from many vendors, Ramos said. "They're better by an order of magnitude," she said of the add-in offerings.

    The problem is that CRM and marketing requirements are so different for so many companies and industries that no one CRM product can include everything that fits everywhere, she said. That's where the add-ons fit in into the marketplace.

    "Marketing automation has more to do with managing demand, doing an e-mail communication blast, doing an advertisement run, putting out press releases, advertising that you're giving a webinar," Ramos said. "All of these things generate leads and tell you what the difference is between a good lead and a bad lead, where someone is just kicking the tires. It's helping B2B marketers do a better job."

    This kind of ultra-detailed information, gathered through your Web site visitor data and other sources, is critical.

    "You can use the information to profile customers and see how often they visited your Web site. You can find out, did they participate in your webinar? How long did they stay? You can find out that kind of information. It gives data that can be used to qualify sales leads and then segment them and find potential good customers."

    Marketing automation helps companies "craft better marketing and messages to find their target audiences and what works for them."

    Paul Greenberg, a CRM consultant and president of The 56 Group LLC in Manassas, Va., said that marketing automation uses technology to dig much more deeply into marketing products, services and businesses.

    Traditional face-to-face marketing has always been the first round of communications with a customer, Greenberg said.

    That's been changing as technology tools like CRM have been becoming more widely used and adding deep layers of new detail about customers, their beliefs, their wants and their behavior, he said. "Traditional marketing automation provides you with tools that allow you to craft things like campaigns that have some specific focus because of demographic knowledge you have about a customer. It also allows you to automate the campaign and to measure the results of the message."

    A key to remember, Greenberg said, is that "CRM is not technology – it’s a strategy that's focused around operational excellence and customer management traditionally."

    To do that, you need a good CRM system with just the right components that let your customers communicate with you and your company, he said.

    "So you provide for the customers the tools, the products and the services they need to do to their business with you" through your CRM systems, Greenberg said. "You're essentially letting them be the painter and giving them the tools to create their masterpieces. You do that and you can have a customer for life."

     A huge chunk of customer relationship management, then, involves not data and IT, he said. Instead, it's about being sure that your customers are satisfied emotionally with their business dealings with you. "We're getting into the customer's psyche," Greenberg said. "Human beings are creatures of habit who don’t consist merely of skeletons and neurons. If someone likes you, they’ll stay with you. If they don’t, they won't. The reality is very, very simple. It's how people interact with companies, too. They don’t trust companies. They trust people at companies. The reality is that customers can buy those same things [you sell] in 55,000 other places. So you do those things well enough that customers want to stay with you."


    Todd R. Weiss is an award-winning technology journalist and freelance writer who worked as a staff reporter for Computerworld.com from 2000 to 2008. He spends his spare time working on a book about an unheralded member of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves and watching classic Humphrey Bogart movies. Follow him on Twitter @TechManTalking.

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