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.