3 Reasons why companies should go for website-CRM integration

From Amazon to Spotify and Facebook, website personalization feels just natural for B2C websites. Pause for a second, though, and think how it could work for B2B websites too, with their inevitably longer sales cycles and importance of personal, empathic communication that exposes a vendor’s problem-solving skills.

Since you can’t attend personally to each and every lead, you want to rely on a specialized technology to get more insights into your audience’s behavioral patterns and tailor your messages accordingly via your website – the cornerstone of your online image. For this, you should first understand who your clients are and then channel your expertise through dynamic content that will hit the targets.

We are not speaking general visitors here but the ones who already got into your sales pipeline: leads, opportunities, customers. Guess what system was specifically designed to manage relationships with them? That’s right, the mighty B2B CRM is here again to build the bridge between your customer base and sales force, this time through no other medium than your website. Below is our take on some exciting opportunities arising from website CRM integration, from better lead management to higher engagement of your B2B clientele.   

1. Uninterrupted, faster management of leads

A website request is normally registered in a CRM system only once the lead is qualified. But ask yourself a few questions: how much time lapses before they get into your CRM system' how many critical data gets lost on its way' and how many more leads could be qualified if you registered their web requests immediately?

A CRM integrated with the website will instantly register a visitor who has sent a request via an online form as a lead. From this moment on, every interaction will be recorded, without missing neither communication nor personal details crucial for conversion. By automating the registration of every new website request into your CRM, you will improve the time required to respond and follow up on requests with no information lost in the swirl of emails. To back up this process with immediate feedback to registered leads, you may want to introduce email marketing tools to send out automatic but personalized emails using the CRM data.

2. Better awareness of their browsing behavior

Gathering such data is crucial for a better understanding of your clients. Sometimes it can truly open your eyes and help you tailor your offering and communication according to your website visitors’ immediate interests (see point 3).

To track the behavioral patterns of your audience, website CRM integration works to connect your every lead’s identifiers both from your website and CRM. There are two ways to do this, so let’s take a look at them in action.

• Website first

The goal for this method is to assign a unique CRM ID to every website lead. Once they fill in an online request form, be it for a quote or to download a whitepaper, they will be automatically registered in the CRM with all the details they provided (name, company, position, address, phone, etc.).

• CRM first

That’s a bit tricky but not impossible. To identify your leads, opportunities or customers as your website visitors, it’s necessary first to make them click a designated link with a unique customer identifier in the URL query (something like mycompany.com/?id=3746453). Using a neat marketing excuse, you can just send such a link in a personal email. Once clicked, your Content Management System (CMS) will relate the website visitor ID with the one from the CRM so that you can follow their browsing behavior right from the next time they stop by your website.

3. Higher engagement through personalized content

As cited by Hubspot, targeted content brings 20% more in sales opportunities. The same source confirms that 42% of personalized calls-to-action convert better than non-personalized ones. So why not use website CRM integration to this benefit?

This approach may seem to be the most technologically complex and effort-consuming, but in the end of the day it does help to reap visible improvements in conversion rates. This is where you can rely on your website as complementary to your sales/customer service team to the extent where their participation is minimized.

Once your identification mechanisms are tuned (see point 2), you can go on and enable data-driven personalization based on the data already contained in the CRM system. There are multiple focuses to it, but you can opt for the so called ascribed website personalization that triggers content recommendations for further read (“you may also be interested in…”). Possible content options include:

• geo-targeted materials (“Offices in your city/country/region…”)
• industry-focused collateral (case studies by industries, analytic white papers, e-books, etc.)
• request-based offerings (complementary services, available upgrades, etc.)
• personalized special offers and discounts

In this regard, your CRM will serve as a persona builder for those who registered as a lead and beyond (qualified lead, opportunity, customer). As content personalization can spread across channels, including your email marketing, it can become part of your nurturing strategy for returning visitors who have been already registered as leads, opportunities or customers.

Afterword

In our CRM consulting practice, we advocate pushing the limits of both the technology and its perception by end users. Going for a seamless integration of their website and CRM system, B2B companies can discover new ways of engaging their audience, nurture it through personalized content and effectively manage relationships with them across communication channels.