What is CRM Integration? 6 Fundamental Integrations For Your Business

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an essential component for any business. It’s the System that contains all your prospects’ and customers’ info, their current stage in your sales funnel, every interaction between your brand and them and other crucial data. It’s a part of your hardware and software tools.

CRM can be integrated with your email marketing campaigns, networking strategies, and it also offers automation for many processes. To get the highest benefit from this tool your business needs to organize and integrate data, assess the information and make strategic decisions accordingly.

In this article, you will learn what are the most fundamental CRM integrations for your business and how to take advantage of them. Let’s dive right into it.

What is a CRM?

Whether you’re a CEO, sales manager, marketing director, or customer service representative, you’ll interact with customers, leads, and contacts every day. This task might seem overwhelming, but CRM makes everything very easy. CRM systems help businesses manage, track, and organize their interactions with customers and other activities. It stores data and conversations, which helps you to understand your customers better.

When you understand your target population, you can address their specific needs more efficiently. Your customer service will therefore improve because you already know people’s preferences, opinions, and habits. With CRM, you can ensure that all data is organized and you’re delivering the right message to every single customer at the right time and stage.

What is a CRM Integration?

CRM can streamline the communication within your company, and integrating it with various software and applications can help improve your customer service. Instead of manually recording your customer information, integrating your website or marketing automation software makes the entire process seamless.

For example, a prospect signed up for your newsletter; the marketing automation software that’s integrated into your CRM will automatically create a new record of that prospect. This system helps your sales representatives monitor your website activity, analyze page visitors, and track your ecommerce performance. Hence, a great way to interact with prospects, convert leads into new customers and generate sales.

Why CRM Integration is Important For Your Business

In an ecommerce world full of competition and expanding businesses, it’s important to retain your customers and give them the best possible service. CRM integrations can help you identify new leads easily, add them to your record automatically, and categorize them accurately. Thanks to this, your sales agents can focus on the right leads and prioritize the ones that will get more likely closed.

On the other hand, your marketing team can identify customers that need more nurturing and work on them to become customers. Integrated CRM determines your business’ future success. It offers better customer support and helps you improve your products and services.

6 Fundamental CRM Integrations For Your Business

CRM integrations may vary depending on your business’ needs and scope. But one thing is for sure you need a system that will improve your customer relations, boost your marketing efforts, and generate revenue. Let’s find out what are the 6 fundamental integrations for your business.

1. Email integration

Long before social media became the top marketing tool for businesses, emails had already been there. And some people still prefer to receive announcements and make transactions via email. Email marketing is the best tool for lead nurturing, and integrating it into your CRM can help you reach a more targeted audience.

Email integration allows businesses to send personalized messages to their customers. It analyzes feedback automatically, enables you to monitor responses, and refine your customer approach. Some of the best email management systems are Zoho CRM, ActiveCampaigns, and HubSpot.

2. Social media integration

Social media is now one of the go-to sources for lead generation. You may have a website or ecommerce platform, but your online presence will not be strong enough without Social Media. Through social media integration, you can extract data for social sales and social customer service. Just make sure your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter accounts are connected to your integrated CRM.

What else can you do with social media integration? Social CRM allows you to schedule your posts within the software, track real-time notifications, and respond to all messages in a single dashboard. This integration is ideal for small businesses and for brands that are investing solely in social media for their marketing.

3. Calendar integration

As mentioned above, CRM systems can help you organize and keep track of all your interactions. And this is possible through calendar integration. Digital calendars allow businesses to schedule appointments and meetings. You may also create a calendar of your product deliveries and marketing activities.

When it comes to calendar integration, Google Calendars is the primary tool that businesses use. It gives alerts and allows your contacts to book time slots or integrate with communication apps. Aside from Google Calendar, you may also use Apple Calendar or Outlook.

4. Telecoms integration

Being able to call your customers and have a CRM data integration for all your conversations is a seamless way to create new customer records. With the telecoms integration, you can get your customer’s profile automatically while conversing over the phone. The system also allows businesses to route calls and streamline the resolution process.

Call integration is vital, and it helps sales representatives provide a more personalized experience to customers. It also has the big potential of turning service calls into sales. If you’re confused about the best telecoms that integrate with CRMs, you may search for the top business phone systems.

5. Marketing automation integration

Email and social media integrations are great, but if you want a complete marketing solution, marketing automation is the best CRM integration. It takes care of your lead generation, campaigns, optimization tools, automation, and lead scoring. The best part? Marketing automation tools increase team productivity, as every member can see all activities on a single dashboard.

Some of the highly regarded, affordable solutions are Marketo, MailChimp, and SendinBlue. If you want a system with a combination of sales and marketing, you may try HubSpot or Infusionsoft.

6. Team communication integration

Of course, your customer relations and online marketing won’t be successful if your team doesn’t have a good collaboration. The team communication integration is most helpful for remote members. It allows people within the organization to chat, create project-specific channels, send files, and conduct virtual meetings.

When you integrate the collaboration tools with CRM, you can get real-time notifications, automate busywork, and increase your team members’ productivity. The most popular team communication tools are Slack, Microsoft Teams, and ProofHub.

Challenges with CRM Integration

As we have discussed, the biggest benefits of CRM integration are:

• Easy customer tracking
• Automation features
• Team collaboration

However, CRM still faces some obstacles. One of the main challenges is compiling data from disparate sources. For example, a customer’s contact information may be recorded in Salesforce but their social media data might be on your Facebook account and other socials.

Another obstacle is the type of software you’re using. If your budget allows, you can choose the leading business solutions. However, a tight budget might force you to settle for software of lower quality. It’s a bonus if you find a system that’s affordable and dynamic at the same time.

Conclusion & Takeaways

Keeping track of all your customer interactions can be a daunting task. Thanks to CRM, this process has become easier and more accessible. Various integrations enable your team to have a smooth workflow and effective customer relationship management.

Whatever CRM you’re using, just remember that they should fit your goals and needs to improve communication, enhance prospect tracking, and increase your company’s ROI.