By Nermeen Nabil 
Looking to invest in a CRM platform that fits your eCommerce needs and your customers’ needs? Whether you’re evaluating HubSpot vs. Salesforce or are intrigued to learn more about how CRM automation can benefit a business’s sales and marketing teams, you’re in the right place!
CRM Automation: What Is It?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) automation helps businesses better manage outreach efforts with prospects, leads and customers by automating various parts of the sales process.
Rather than having to repeat important tasks like entering data, updating contact records, etc., CRM automation performs these tasks automatically − saving sales teams a lot of time. In addition to saving time, the features and functionality enable sales and marketing teams to leverage analytical data to make decisions.
CRM Automation: Features & Functionality
CRMs allow businesses to see customer data within a single database, and automation helps salespeople, customer service teams and marketing teams work together to achieve business goals. Here are some valuable features and functionality of CRM automation for eCommerce businesses:
Manage contact records
Manage leads
Create email sequences & workflows
Keep track of customer interactions automatically
Automate customer service efforts
Manage Contact Records
One of the most basic features a great CRM automation software offers is contact management, which gives businesses important data on prospects, leads and customers. HubSpot reports that salespeople spend 17% of their day entering data, and leveraging automation can really help to utilize contact information in your sales outreach and marketing efforts.
For example, sales and marketing teams can see a contact’s first name, last name, the company they work for, company details, lifecycle stage and so much more depending on the CRM used. Marketing teams can then use this information to segment customers and promote specific campaigns to each segment in an effort to increase leads and conversions.
Manage Leads
To attract more leads and convert them into customers, it’s important for sales teams to pay attention to their behavior. Are your leads downloading content? Are they visiting your website? Are they filling out forms to learn more about a certain subject matter? Are they continuously viewing a product but have not yet added it to their cart? You understand the point.
CRM automation makes it much easier for businesses to identify leads, use lead scoring and manage leads in the pipeline and sequences/workflows. This feature makes it possible to stay up-to-date on a lead’s engagement with your brand.
Create Email Sequences & Workflows
One of the best eCommerce marketing strategies for engaging prospects, leads and customers is to create email sequences and/or workflows to follow-up with customers after they’ve met a certain criteria. The criteria is up to the business and can be a number of things − from when a contact abandons their shopping cart to when a contact fills out a form to watch a webinar or downloads a piece of content.
In addition to saving your sales and marketing teams time by manually creating various emails unique to each contact, sequences and workflows also provide the means to personalize and engage with contacts that you know are interested in your brand in some way or form.
Keep Track of Customer Interactions Automatically
CRM automation software keeps track of how engaged your contacts are with your brand and automatically updates a contact’s record each time they interact with your brand. Seeing this information helps salespeople gauge how interested a contact may be before speaking with them over the phone.
Let’s say that one of Groove Commerce’s contacts downloaded our Inbound Marketing for eCommerce Guide, for example. Our sales team would then have a clearer understanding that this potential client might be interested in our marketing services − like email marketing, SEO, paid media or sales enablement − rather than our website design and development services.
Automate Customer Service Efforts
Salespeople can enable notifications so that the CRM sends automatic messages when a contact meets a specific criteria, such as a lead moving through the pipeline or a reminder of an upcoming phone call. With a CRM, businesses can even avoid manually assigning contacts to salespeople by setting up rules so that the CRM automatically assigns them (based on a variety of criteria).
Conclusion
We hope these 5 features help you to better understand how CRM automation helps eCommerce businesses attract more leads and drive more revenue. If you have any questions or would like to learn more about Groove Commerce’s custom HubSpot CRM development, contact us through the form below. A member of our team will be in touch with you soon, and we look forward to helping you grow your eCommerce store!
Nermeen Nabil Khear