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Boost B2B Marketing with an eCommerce CRM Integration

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Putting logic behind what you present to customers

B2B Companies can reap enormous benefits from converging their marketing efforts with customer relationship management software because full ERP integrations not only generate sales opportunities and leads but also optimize marketing automation, email campaigns, paid and generic searches, website effectiveness and many other B2B marketing applications.

The effort needed to integrate a CRM system fully separates B2B companies that value and exploit their customer service efforts from those that just go through pro forma efforts that seldom generate marketing benefits. The incredible benefit of integration is that many marketing initiatives can be scheduled automatically without involving staff effort and expense.

Improving Performance with a Stronger Leads-to-Sales Conversion Strategy

Designing a CRM system to work with sales and marketing is similar to trying to make an apple and orange pie -- the ingredients, cooking processes, and flavor profiles are too dissimilar to provide appealing results without a sound strategy and separate processes. CRM software uses transaction-processing techniques to record sales while marketing uses an analytical approach. That makes it difficult to automate marketing efforts with legacy CRM systems because they're just not structured to mine data from existing sales and customer buying behavior that’s available from other business resources.

Fully integrated CRM systems can draw data from other business applications, third-party resources, back-office software, and proprietary apps to make essential connections, refine customer profiles, apply that information to current buying habits, and tailor marketing campaigns with high percentages of precision. integration fosters automation, extrapolation, and predictive analytics that reduce lead-to-conversion times, increase sales, encourage cross-selling, and nurture customers with greater engagement and better overall website experiences.

Marketing Automation Strengthens Inbound Marketing Results

The phrase "preaching to the choir" is often used to describe efforts to sell people, companies, or groups a product or idea to which they're already favorably disposed. There's a reason that the phrase became a cliché -- existing customers are the most profitable, least expensive, and easiest prospects to convert. Inbound marketing automation is the least expensive and easiest way to target existing customers. One-fourth of Fortune 500 companies use marketing automation, and 76 percent of the top SaaS companies use automation as standard business practice.[1] Fully integrated CRM systems can offer these automation benefits to B2B companies:

Keeping customers informed about incentives, sales, special bulk prices, and new product lines
Developing interactive relationships with customers before they even talk to staff members or salespeople
Educating buyers on the benefits of products, services, or the B2B platform's intuitive ordering features
Gathering information from all business processes and connections to qualify leads, segment customers, curate content and target marketing messages
Prioritizing leads based on buying history, browsing behavior, company resources, credit ratings, and other criteria
Updating information in real-time so that salespeople and staff always have the latest data available instantly on their phones or mobile devices
Scheduling newsletters, emails, follow-up queries, thank-you letters, and mobile marketing efforts based on analytics data that show when each method gets the best results
Segmenting customers who only buy certain brands, buy when products are discounted, or order at certain times of the year

An eCommerce CRM integration delivers deeper insights than almost any marketing initiative, and many B2B companies waste this valuable information when they don't use their websites to capture, extrapolate, and analyze CRM data from a marketing perspective. Econsultancy studies show that B2B companies average a 44 percent increase in sales by moving their customers online where these insights can be found, stored, and used to generate higher sales.[2]

Making contact at the right time through automation combines insights into buying behavior, customer service issues, buyer profiles, product preferences, seasonal purchasing habits, and website behavior in an integrated, proactive, and effective marketing approach.

Integrating Paid Searches Into Campaign-Management Dashboards

The big advantages of a fully integrated CRM system include optimizing paid advertising campaigns and refining generic search optimization. Using CRM marketing and analytics data, it's easy to customize a paid-advertising dashboard to manage pay-per-click advertising and jump-start producing higher-quality leads. By integrating first-click data with Web tracking, it's easy to refine paid advertising content to get higher conversion rates and better-qualified leads. At the same time, decision-makers can abandon unprofitable keywords, products, and targeting strategies that don't deliver solid cost-value benefits, which extends paid advertising budgets by concentrating on those initiatives that produce the greatest results.

Maximizing Customer Engagement

A little-known fact about the Declaration of Independence is that there was enough opposition to declaring independence that securing a unanimous agreement seemed impossible. However, John Hancock ruled that the agreement must be unanimous for the fledgling United States to have any chance of breaking away from England. The debate over the Declaration's language and terms deeply involved and engaged the delegates to such a degree that negotiations were able to secure a unanimous agreement with just a few abstentions. Getting customers engaged is the first and most important step to converting them and encouraging referrals, and an integrated CRM system offers these benefits for engaging customers:

Nurturing leads in a timely way
Responding to complaints and questions quickly
Soliciting opinions and customer suggestions
Providing outside resources for understanding and reviewing products
Revealing supply chain details
Offering perks and rewards for increasing order sizes or referring other buyers to the company
Crafting effective and profitable pricing tiers
Tracking ever-changing customer demographic profiles
Connecting with customers on other marketing, social, and industry-related digital channels
Segmenting customers into more accurate buying groups
Tailoring content and marketing campaigns to each customer or decision-maker
Predicting future buying behavior, seasonal changes, and alternative products of interest
Heightening the user experience of each customer and website visitor

Look For a Developer Who Understands B2B Integrations

CRM integrations can generate leads, proactively address customer service issues before they become problems, and create many marketing opportunities for eCommerce B2B companies. The secret to success is fully integrating your CRM software to automate leads, marketing responses, segmentation capabilities, and targeting efforts. It can be challenging to build custom solutions, but if you choose a development partner who collaborates fully with your team, your IT and sales staff learn how to use the integrated CRM system to supercharge your marketing efforts. You'll receive solid cost-value returns on your development investment while reaping the benefits of expert training, collaborative development, and skilled insights into how to use CRM to receive the greatest marketing and sales advantages.