Utilizing a customer relationship management (CRM) system to track and organize business contacts is key for organizations across industries, but figuring out how best to implement and organize your CRM system can be tricky. Manually inputting data is time-consuming and can lead to errors and omissions, and it can be challenging to get your team to take full advantage of your CRM if it’s populated with outdated or incomplete information. Luckily, the solution to this problem is straightforward: seamless integration with your CRM system and your website can streamline the entire process.
Why Integrating Your Website with Your CRM System is Important for Marketing Success
From improving information accuracy to reducing workload, bringing your website and your CRM system together can reap major benefits for your business in several keys ways.
Creates a Single, Centralized Data Source
One of the most common reasons why a CRM system is not as effective as it could be stems from errors in customer and lead records. Whether information is duplicated or simply incorrectly entered, mistakes in your CRM’s database can waste time and resources. Integrating your CRM with your website can help resolve this issue. By creating a single source of data to populate your CRM–that is, the information received directly from website forms and other types of CRM tracking–your business can effectively eliminate common entry errors.
Reduces the Time it Takes to Manually Update and Maintain Your CRM
If your business’ CRM and website are separate, chances are that someone on your team is spending a significant amount of time manually entering customer and order data into your CRM. Streamlining this process by directly connecting your CRM and website and removing the middleman can dramatically boost productivity.
Ensures That All Data is Up-to-Date
Almost as bad as errors in the information contained in your CRM system is information that was accurate–at one point in time. Any lag in updating the data in your CRM can cause confusion, leading employees to wonder if your CRM has been brought up to date with recent orders or new potential leads. Since integrating your CRM and website leads to instant updates, this concern can be alleviated.
Helps Create Better Customer Profiles
A well-organized CRM system with correct and full data lets your business craft customer and lead profiles that reveal key purchasing trends. This allows your employees to create a more accurate picture of each individual customer. A truly complete customer or lead profile clearly tracks all interactions between your company and the customer or lead, from initial contact, ongoing communication, and (hopefully) sales and feedback. What’s more, better customer profiles can aid in crafting marketing campaigns. By integrating your CRM and website, you can not only increase the strength of your customer profiles by improving the accuracy and completeness of your data; you can also more effectively track how different customer profiles respond to your marketing efforts.
Boosts Sales
Ultimately, the reason your business utilizes a CRM system is to increase sales. At every step of the process, automating the interactions between your website and CRM support this goal: better and more accurate data leads to more robust customer profiles, while generate more promising leads, which support stronger conversion rates. Looked at this way, there’s no reason not to move towards integration.
How to Integrate Your Specific CRM System with Your Website
Now that you understand why integrating your CRM and website is so important, let’s take a look at the how. Every CRM system works differently, but all have a feature that allows users to seamlessly track leads and client data directly from their website:
Salesforce
Through Pardot–Salesforce’s marketing automation system–your business can track website visits, embed forms to gather lead information and even automatically engage leads. Integrating Pardot into your website is simple: just grab the corresponding code from your Pardot account and insert it into your website code. Be sure to integrate your existing forms to send data to Pardot’s form handlers – or replace the forms entirely with custom Pardot Forms so you can have lead data go directly into Pardot and Salesforce.
HubSpot
Even for websites not hosted on HubSpot itself, using HubSpot’s tracking code to capture key customer traffic analytics and lead information is straightforward. Under Settings in your HubSpot account, navigate to Analytics Tools under the Reports menu. Click on Prospects, then Actions, then View Tracking Code; once selected, simply copy the code and install it on each page of your site. Hubspot has an API that you can post form data to in order to capture user data. For a simpler approach, you can create forms within Hubspot and then embed them on your website.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Integrating your Dynamics 365 systems into your website will allow you to track the behavior of known leads and new visitors alike–and all you have to do is add an automatically-generated JavaScript code to each page of your website. To get the JavaScript code, just set up your website under the Website tab of the Internet Marketing menu, then copy the JavaScript code that is generated. You should also connect or create new forms to embed on your website to capture lead data.
With your CRM integrated into your website, your organization will be well-positioned to utilize your CRM system more easily and effectively. If you need help integrating your CRM system, Zero Gravity Marketing is here to help! Contact us today to get started.
