CEOs, marketing directors, managers, or anyone else whose job involves dealing with customers always seek to determine the best ways to manage contacts, leads, customers, and opportunities.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is key to all this.
A business can integrate its website with a CRM to enhance collecting and organizing all its customer data in one place.
A CRM benefits website integration in multiple ways.
Both CRM integration with online store and website is essential to help a business communicate to its customer base more effectively.
To understand the value of CRM integration, we outline six benefits of integrating a CRM system with a website.
But, before talking about benefits, let’s quickly understand what CRM and website integration are.
What is CRM?
Your marketing team is dealing with prospects and customers every day. A CRM aims to track, organize, and manage every bit of your customer information, activities, and dialogues.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management; it refers to a combination of business tools, strategies, technologies, or software that helps businesses build long-term relationships with their customers.
A CRM system is a central place where companies can store prospect data, track consumer interactions, and share this data across all departments. It allows a business to grow by sustaining relationships with prospects.
Integrating it with your website helps you better understand your prospects and ensures that you are communicating the right message at the right time.
In a nutshell, CRM is an application developed to help you and your website organize all of your data on your prospects or customers.
What is CRM Integration?
CRM integration means merging a CRM software with a website’s Content Management System or CMS– like WordPress.
Simply put, CRM integration with a website means building your website and CRM for functioning together seamlessly.
By connecting CRM software with your website, you can expand the functionality of your software, cutting the need to toggle between systems.
In addition, this CRM integration with the website lets you figure out when the lead last visited your website, what part of the content they looked at, and what information they provided about themselves.
Such customer data provided by a CRM combined with website analytics help you plan for future marketing campaigns.
What is Website Integration?
A website works on its own when it is alone, but when it is integrated with other systems, it is part of a network.
Website integration is a connecting thread that integrates disparate computer systems by interlinking a website with third-party systems.
These third-party systems are CRM’s, business platforms, accounts solutions, gateways, merchandising systems, and networks.
Website integration can be as easy as importing an excel spreadsheet of inventory or as complex as CRM solutions- like Sage or Salesforce.
Moreover, website integration allows for self-regulating compilation and processing of different data that your customers submit on your website.
You can effortlessly receive and share data between your website and other systems with website integration to save time.
What are the Benefits of CRM Website Integration?
A CRM brings a lot of added value to your time management and marketing outreach and helps you manage your website traffic effectively.
Listed below are the six benefits of CRM integration with a website:
- Makes the customer experience better
Understanding that you are in a customer experience business is essential; that’s what leading companies do. They know that how a business delivers value to customers is as valuable as what it offers.
Marketers focus on the customers as the center of the business and aim to improve their experience. Customer experience is the single most thrilling opportunity for a company to achieve the best results at the end of every marketing campaign.
CRM integration with your website gives you the benefit of improving the customer experience. Since your CRM maintains real-time information about your customers, it gives you more confidence to talk to customers about their needs.
Providing an optimal customer experience is relatively easy for a startup business. Still, as the customer interest grows and a company deals with more inquiries, it becomes difficult to hold up the demand.
For a large number of businesses, integrated websites are essential to providing the requisite customer experience levels.
- Reduces administrative overhead
If your website is not linked to your CRM, then perhaps you are spending an excessive amount of time doing tasks inordinately.
For instance, if you are either exporting data from your website and importing it into the CRM, or manually copying and pasting any data from your website to the CRM, or even worse, not collecting the data from your CRM at all.
By choosing an automated website integration with a CRM, you can reduce administrative overhead, resulting in money and time savings as it eliminates all manual task performance. Hire web app development company and secure web applications that are built to last.
This also leads to enhanced productivity as it gives your team ample time to work on other tasks.
- Single data source
Another benefit of CRM integration with your website (or other contact point systems) is that you get one single valid data source on each customer contact.
Having one master record of each potential lead or customer saves your team enough time. They don’t have to toggle back and forth between multiple systems to get a complete customer data view.
In addition, there are no manual human check and balance elements in adding the data; thus, there are fewer chances of errors made or redundant records created.
Even more, it is likely that more data is collected, and consolidating the entire data into one place can help you achieve a broader profile or picture of your customers, deriving a higher conversion rate.
- Better profiling
A significant benefit a CRM can give you is its ability to profile leads or customers to infer what they might shop, how valuable a consumer they are, and more.
With more and more data on a customer, it becomes easier to develop a better profile, and by feeding more accurate data in the CRM, the customer profile becomes more accurate.
By integrating your website and CRM, your team will get additional information about customer’s interactions with your business- right from preliminary inquiry to sales to communications and the final feedback.
A CRM thus gives you access to more accurate and consistent information. Consequently, you are backed up with comprehensive data about your customers to better visibility your consumer’s behavior and purchase habits.
Decent customer profiles let you more effectively oversee and target marketing campaigns. At the same time, your website integration facilitates you to track the efficacy of these campaigns through customer response and conversion rate.
- Keeps customer churn to a minimum
Having improved customer experience, website integration helps your business respond to customer queries quickly and make them happy by ensuring that their question gets a timely response from the right person.
Some other small touches like automatically sending a thank you email or an acknowledgment of receipt can once again make your customers feel happy that their query is being responded to.
You must ensure that you are demonstrating your value and understanding their needs and wants. Integration with a CRM can help your team track customer satisfaction and support your team’s efforts in nurturing leads.
With CRM integration, get them across the loyalty ladder from a visitor to a customer who loves your brand and spreads your business via word of mouth.
- Better decision making
Imagine one of your team members having access to all of the relevant information of a customer while answering the phone; at that time, they will not need to contact other departments to answer customer queries.
So, gone are the days when specific information was only accessible to certain personnel within that department.
CRM integrations give you a holistic view of customers across various kinds of departmental information. Thus, they provide all required information to make better mindful decisions.
When every single customer interaction is accessible to you while the customer is talking to you on the phone or while you are developing a marketing strategy, you have the power to make better decisions having all facts and figures at hand.
While your CRM puts all information at a single location, it also reduces the need to shift the data from one system to another, making your teamwork much easier.
Conclusion:
Regardless of what CRM software you use for your website, a CRM offers numerous benefits. It improves customer experience and satisfaction and reduces data redundancies by compiling accurate data in a single place.
All of the benefits, as mentioned earlier, directly impact your customer satisfaction with your brand and finally affect your website’s ranking in the search engine.
Lots of CRMs are available in the market. You will need to pick one that fits your needs. Next, make sure that every form and chat message on your website is integrated with your CRM.
