Connecting the Dots: the Importance of Marketing Systems Integration
Many of the small businesses and nonprofit organizations we work with use a variety of very good marketing technologies to help with their strategy and messaging. But often when they come to us, these platforms are working completely independent of one another, with no clear tie from one system to the next. When we begin to work together, it quickly becomes evident that this lack of coordination is hindering growth and progress.
From a strategic perspective, most leaders recognize that a coordinated marketing effort is not only cost-efficient, it’s also highly successful in delivering a message that is both impactful and results-oriented. When we build campaign strategies, the first thing we do is look for connections between platforms, audiences and themes to help provide a clear and directed program.
Just as your strategy needs to work collaboratively, so does your technology. Successful marketing is integrated marketing, and that holds true for your technical implementation as well as your creative planning. If you’re new to this idea, or trying to understand why things should work together and how, this article is your place to start.
Your CRM
Let’s start by saying that if you do not already have a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, or your CRM is not up-to-date, you need to start there. Your CRM software should be the heart of your marketing information systems, as well as a key contributor to your sales and marketing processes. If you think of your software platforms as a wheel, the CRM is the hub that all spokes connect to.
Once you have a CRM, which systems it integrates with depends on who you will store in that system. For example, some organizations use their CRM only for qualified leads and customers, whereas others will use it for all leads (qualified and not) as well as vendors and partners. Who you choose to add to your CRM is an internal business decision, but once you have a clear understanding of who should be included, you can then decide which systems to connect.
Some examples of system integrations you should consider are those used for marketing purposes, like your website and email marketing, but also data-rich systems like your billing software, inventory systems and HR/hiring software. Integrating other sales software, like quoting systems and meeting schedulers can also be extremely useful for your sales team, and can help inform your marketing metrics by calculating attribution data as well as ROI for various programs.
Your Website
Your website is the most important part of your digital marketing program. It is one of the only places in your entire program where you fully control the user experience. When someone visits your site, they hear your brand voice, your way. It’s the public platform where you can collect and leverage first-party data that will help advance your marketing goals.
Understanding this, it’s vital that your site fully integrates with all those marketing systems that are critical to your success. Whether your site is built in WordPress, Drupal, Shopify or any other major platform, make sure it’s capable of talking to your CRM directly or with an outside integration. Another critical component to program success is analytics, so be sure that your site is connected to Google Analytics or whatever measurement system you use to study visitor behavior.
As mentioned above, your website should definitely be connected to your CRM. From there, look at your marketing automation and e-commerce systems as the next vital pieces of technology to merge data with. You can also consider connecting to event management and webinar systems as well as your billing or accounting systems to help bring a 360-degree perspective to your website visitor data experience.
Your Email Marketing Platform
Most email automation systems are designed to be integrated with other marketing platforms, so if you’re using Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Constant Contact or most other major providers, pushing data from your email system to the rest of your tech stack should be straightforward. By adding this data to your CRM, you’ll provide invaluable user experience data to your sales and customer service teams, which can help with both attribution modeling and improved customer experience.
But integrating your email into your marketing systems is a two-way street. You want data from your other systems to feed into your email platform as well.
If your website is your home base for marketing, then your email system is your voice. Unlike other areas, it is where you control the message and the follow up experience for your subscriber. As you think about how you communicate with your subscriber, think about all the ways your email marketing system can help. Some of these include event registration platforms and webinar management systems, but you can also look at commerce platforms as another important place to bring in data.
Remember that in terms of ROI, email marketing has the highest ROI of all digital marketing tactics. It’s able to achieve this because you are able to present your brand in the best light to convert if you can leverage your first-party data from all channels to provide the subscriber with a high quality, customized user experience. The best way to do that is to leverage the data from your CRM and other systems to build emails that will knock their socks off.
Hopefully this has helped you to better understand why and how connecting your software platforms together can make a difference in your overall results for your marketing programs. If you have questions or want to know how to build a more integrated digital marketing program, contact us for more information.
Hey there…
After decades of crafting successful campaigns for my clients, I’ve seen and learned a lot. Tap into some of those lessons in my book, Precision Email: 7 Lessons in Engagement Strategy, available on Amazon.
