We share a lot of the same goals as our customers, but perhaps the most important one is that we, like you, want to work less and accomplish more. After all, isn’t that what automation is all about?

Small business owners are busy people who wear many hats, including marketer, salesperson, product/service provider, HR and customer service rep, and creative director (just to name a few). Finding a balance — let alone finding the time to get everything done — is tricky, which is why most SMB owners seek out all the help they can get with generating more sales and keeping profits on track.

Luckily, our CRM and marketing automation tools are designed for just this, helping you check more things off your list faster and without sacrificing the quality of service and care you provide to your clients. If you could use more time in your day to focus on sales (and all of that other stuff), then keep reading to learn about three of the biggest ways our email marketing and CRM platform can come together to help you out.

Organize and Track Your Contacts So You Can Learn More About Them

Our CRM helps you easily track all previous outreach and engagements with each of your contacts. Instead of digging through your inbox on a futile mission to find dated communications so you can see exactly where you left off with your leads, you get a one-stop-shop for storing contact messages and correspondences. This way, you’re always a quick update away from knowing what journey a specific contact has taken on your website, how much they know about your company, and where they currently stand in regards to making a buying decision.

Successful sales performance requires a full-picture view of a contact’s needs, challenges, and past behaviors. With our integrated platforms, you can access a wealth of essential lead information, from site activity and social media information to company size and industry — all of which offer insight that can be used to further individual leads down the funnel.

You can also access information on which emails they opened and what content they downloaded, which gives you a clearer picture of how well they understand what your company does and offers. You can tag your contacts based on certain descriptors or qualifiers, enabling you to easily segment them based on similar interests. Having this kind of intel is invaluable and can inform your strategies, so they’re more beneficial.

To get the most use out of this feature, take the insight you gather and use it to target your contacts with personalized or dynamic content. You’ll make more meaningful connections, and you might even be able to turn dead ends into profitable sales.

Manage Tasks and Follow-Ups

Integrating CRM and email is like gaining a personal inbox assistant. Automate timely follow-ups with contacts and provide the one-on-one service and attention that your leads expect. You can also set up contact-related tasks for yourself so that you never miss out on an opportunity for valuable engagement.

Keep in mind that a lot of today’s customers are doing a bulk of their research on their own. If you don’t make a point of engaging at key touchpoints, you may lose the chance to sway their decision in your favor. It’s important to give yourself as many opportunities for lead nurturing as possible (so long as you don’t overdo it with the communications, of course), and these tools can help you do just that.

Craft Customer Journeys

Any lead repository will have significant variations in terms of lead quality and where individuals are in the buyer’s journey. Use our CRM and email marketing tools to identify and separate the highly motivated potential buyers from those who are just looking with no real intention of making a purchase. Doing so will save yourself time and energy on opportunities that aren’t likely to pan out.

From there, you can take what you learn and apply it to your email outreach campaigns. Create drip campaigns that guide your prospects through the buyer’s journey with specially optimized content and promotions instead of trying a one-size-fits-all approach.

You’ll also have an intuitive tool for creating different drip campaigns for different kinds of leads, meeting your contacts where they’re at in the funnel with content that’s geared toward taking them to the next step. For more qualified leads, this will mean content driven toward making a decision. For less qualified leads, you can send content that helps educate them on what you do and what solutions you provide so they can move down the funnel faster.

Bringing You the Best Tools for Running a Small Business

We understand the unique variables involved in running a small business, and we offer solutions that are distinctly designed to help you overcome them.

While CRM and email marketing can both offer big benefits on their own, using them together means more efficiency and more connection where it really counts. The result is an increase in your outreach productivity — and, ultimately, an increase in your sales.

What’s more, we don’t offer tons of features and tools that overwhelm you (and that, quite frankly, you’ll never use). We keep our platform simple, so you can learn the ins and outs of marketing automation without spending tons of valuable time doing so.

We can’t take any hats off your head, but we can make them easier to carry. Contact us today to learn more about our email marketing platform, plus how you can integrate it with a CRM to gain even more of a competitive edge.

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by Benchmark Team