Matthew is a marketing expert focusing on the SEO & martech spaces. He has written over 500 marketing guides and video scripts for the WebFX YouTube channel. When he’s not striving to put out some fresh blog posts and articles, he’s usually fueling his Tolkien obsession or working on miscellaneous creative projects.
Your marketing is the fuel that keeps your business going. It draws in new customers and boosts your revenue. But for your marketing to make an impact, you need to know who you’re targeting.
Knowing your audience is crucial for obtaining the best results from your campaigns. That’s why it’s so important to gather data about your potential customers. But gathering customer data manually can be difficult and time-consuming.
That’s why there’s customer relationship management (CRM). CRM is an excellent way to learn about your audience, and CRM integrations are what make it so effective. So, what are CRM integrations, and what do they do? Keep reading to find out.
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What is customer relationship management?
Customer relationship management refers to the process of interacting with prospects interested in your business. This process includes everything from determining your marketing audience to converting repeat customers.
Much of customer relationship management is built around gathering and analyzing data. You can use customer data management to determine what product features your customers want and what people you want to reach.
Using a CRM platform can help you collect and organize customer data for analysis.
What are CRM integrations?
For CRM software to be effective, it must have access to various data sources. This software centralizes your customer data in one place so you can analyze it, but that data originates from different sources.
That’s why integrations in CRMs are so vital. These integrations help your CRM software connects to all your data sources. Anywhere that you have customer data coming in, you’ll want to connect to an integrated CRM that can pull all that data together in one place.
CRMs typically use application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect to these different platforms and automatically pull in data.
Benefits of CRM integrations
CRM integrations offer many advantages. Here are two big benefits of CRM integrations:
1. You centralize all your customer data
One of the biggest benefits of integrations in CRMs is that they allow you to centralize all your customer data in one place. It’s a pain to manually navigate from one source to another to try and get a full picture of your audience.
Fortunately, integrated CRM removes that need. You see all your data in one place so you can make more actionable decisions.
Expert insights from
NolanDataTech Solutions Team Lead
“Integrating your CRM Data into your marketing dataset provides your marketing team with more clarity on what’s driving qualified leads and, ultimately, new business for your company. You can see exactly what phone calls and lead form touchpoints are resulting in sales, allowing you to report on channel-specific ROI.
On top of the reporting benefits and clarity into what strategies are working best for your business, this data can be used to influence ad campaigns through conversion and audience APIs. You can essentially train platforms such as Google or Meta to focus ads on users who are most likely to become a customer of your business, typically resulting in an average lift of around 20%.”
2. You prevent data silos
Another major benefit is that integrations in CRMs help prevent data silos. Data silos are where large amounts of data pools up within specific teams or departments without reaching the rest of the company. For instance, the sales team might have valuable customer info that the marketing team doesn’t know.
As you can imagine, data silos are harmful, as they lead to your teams acting without having all the relevant information. But with CRM software, you can pull the data from each of those teams into one place where everyone can access it, helping everyone make more informed decisions.
What can you integrate with your CRM software?
You might wonder which platforms you can integrate with your CRM software. Different CRM platforms integrate with different sources, so there’s no hard-and-fast list of integrable options. That said, there are a few common types of platforms you can integrate.
Here are four of the main types of sources you can connect to your CRM platform!
1. Your marketing campaigns
One of the first sources you can integrate with your CRM is your marketing. Marketing campaigns are an excellent way to learn about your potential customers. You can see how people interact with your campaigns, meaning you can figure out which people have the best chance of converting.
Your website is one of the best places to gather data, as you can see what types of people visit it and which pages grab their attention. You can also look at the demographics of people who interact with your paid ads, which searches people most often find you in, and more.
As you gather this data, you can connect your CRM to your email campaigns and other various sources —paid ads, social media accounts, and website — to funnel that information into one location.
2. Your online store
If your business features an online store, that’s another fantastic place to bring in customer data. When people buy from you, you can see which demographics line up with certain products, as well as what sort of marketing path led different people to convert.
If you integrate your online store with your CRM software, you can automatically pull in all that information for analysis. It’s one thing to look at your leads, but analyzing the people who complete a purchase will give you better insight into who will buy from you.
3. Your customer service
Another area where you can find valuable customer data is, appropriately enough, in your customer service department. You might have people contacting that department frequently, whether it’s a lead asking some introductory questions or a customer getting help with a product.
When people contact customer service, whether by phone or online, they often convey useful information about themselves. By transferring that information to your CRM software, you can further flesh out your average customer profile and understand who takes an interest in you.
Additionally, you can learn from your customer service which things people most often need help with, allowing you to better optimize those your process and products moving forward.
4. A data management platform
Finally, you may want to connect your CRM software to a larger data management platform (DMP). All the other platform types listed here are data sources that feed into your CRM, but this one would flow the other way around — your CRM data would flow outward into the DMP.
Whereas CRM platforms are limited solely to customer data, other DMPs store and organize information from all across your business, relating to everything from sales to inventory to marketing return on investment (ROI). If you have one of those platforms, you’d naturally want to include customer data alongside everything else.
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WebFX can help you master your customer relationship management
Want some help mastering your customer relationship management strategy? Just partner with WebFX! We’ve earned over 1,100 glowing client testimonials that testify to our marketing expertise, and we know how to help you get the most from your customer data.
When you partner with us for our CRM services, you’ll get access to our proprietary marketing software, MarketingCloudFX (MCFX). If you already have CRM software, MCFX offers CRM integration features allowing you to transfer valuable marketing data between the two.
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Craft a tailored online marketing strategy! Utilize our free Internet marketing calculator for a custom plan based on your location, reach, timeframe, and budget.
Matthew is a marketing expert focusing on the SEO & martech spaces. He has written over 500 marketing guides and video scripts for the WebFX YouTube channel. When he’s not striving to put out some fresh blog posts and articles, he’s usually fueling his Tolkien obsession or working on miscellaneous creative projects.
