Salesforce has long been the customer relationship manager (CRM) tool of choice for many businesses. The Salesforce CRM allows businesses to improve the quality of business relationships by empowering sales with information and resources. From logging sales touchpoints to cataloging all necessary account information, including account contacts and order history, a CRM helps keep all data organized and accessible. It also allows sales teams and leadership to run necessary reports. Salesforce CRM makes the entire sales process easier for businesses.
Of course, the relationship between sales and marketing is a close and important one, so it makes sense that businesses would want their primary sales tool to interface with their marketing automation tool. Marketing automation helps to drive leads to sales, who can then use Salesforce CRM resources to manage the leads.
How we can Integrate Salesforce in Marketing Automation
How can businesses best integrate their Salesforce CRM solution with marketing automation processes? Here the main ways to integrate Salesforce in marketing automation efforts.
1. Use the Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce has a marketing automation tool available as part of its Salesforce solution line up. This is one of the easiest ways to integrate Salesforce in marketing automation efforts – these two software elements were designed to work together. Here’s how using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud with the CRM tool can elevate both your marketing and sales experience.
- Journey Builder: This tool helps businesses understand customer journeys across all channels and departments.
- Email Studio: Build personalized email campaigns to nurture leads.
- Audience Studio: Use this feature to understand audience segmentation data options.
- Mobile Studio: Amp up your mobile marketing with personalized SMS interactions, push notifications, and chat messaging.
- Social Studio: Track all social media mentions and posting across all company social media channels.
- Advertising Studio: This tool taps into the Salesforce CRM to engage and retarget customers.
- Google Analytics 360: This analytics tool helps you get a comprehensive view of your sales and marketing efforts and how they’re impacting engagement and customer growth.
- Pardot: This is the Salesforce-acquired marketing automation tool that lets B2B businesses unite marketing and sales on a single platform.
2. Use a compatible marketing automation tool
Because so many companies trust Salesforce as their CRM solutions, companies had to get on board with creating a marketing tool that would be complementary to the CRM tool that so many businesses were using, otherwise far fewer businesses would be interested in these solutions. Here are the most popular non-Salesforce solutions for marketing automation that work seamlessly with the Salesforce CRM for the best business insights possible.
- Eloqua: This Oracle marketing automation tool helps businesses build powerful customer and lead databases by letting businesses customize which fields sync of between both systems while also preventing duplicate records by checking submissions against both databases before a new lead is created. Plus, if data is updated in an Eloqua form, it’s also updated in Salesforce.
- HubSpot: One of the most popular marketing automation tools works easily with Salesforce. The process is simple and takes only minutes. It allows both sales and marketing teams to personalize emails and campaigns with data directly from Salesforce. For maximum transparency, every sales interaction is also recorded in Hubspot, and vice versa.
- Marketo: This is another well-known marketing automation solution that many businesses across industries use. When integrating with Salesforce, all custom objects and fields are synced automatically and both systems are updated any time a change is made in either one.
- Salesfusion: This platform touts itself as a marketing automation tool built entirely on CRM data. When working with Salesforce, you can view all marketing activity and responses in lead and contact records as well as enable sales or marketing to nurture leads seamlessly through the entire sales process.
According to Salesforce, marketing automation can’t be an afterthought for businesses and is a necessary element in building long-lasting B2B and B2C relationships. Finding the right tool is critical, they say, noting the benefits of the right marketing automation tool as follows: “Marketing automation platforms are able to go beyond the usual function to empower marketing teams in creating personalized, cross-channel customer journeys. Through tracking and analyzing visitor behavior, the best marketing automation software provides the ability to craft 1-to-1 journeys across every channel (email, marketing, social, etc.) and a totally unified experience for the customer, whether they are dealing with marketing, sales, service, online, or offline.” Having the ability to accomplish all these tasks alongside the CRM data helps to not only streamline activities but give better data and analytics for better decision making at every level of business.
Integrating Salesforce in marketing should be a priority for businesses who use the Salesforce CRM and are utilizing the power of marketing automation. Combining these two business assets can better align your sales and marketing teams and empower your people. With better insight and processes – both enabled by quality CRM and marketing automation solutions – businesses can more easily meet their goals. Using Salesforce in marketing is a powerful way to elevate your teams and your business.
