How marketing and CRM drive engaging customer experiences

Highlights

You’ll learn about why CRM is critical in marketing:

• Personalizes campaigns that resonate with customers
• Improves engagement and conversion rates
• Builds stronger loyalty through streamlined processes
• Aligns sales and marketing teams with unified customer data

How Contentstack helps:

• Centralizes content management for consistent messaging
• Enhances experiences via CRM integration
• Supports omnichannel marketing with seamless connectivity
• Enables smarter decisions with efficient data management

Is marketing only about selling your products or services? Probably not. Today, marketing is more about creating personalized interactions and customized services. 

Modern customers have high standards. They expect businesses to recognize them across channels, deliver relevant marketing content and personalize the buying experience. Businesses that fail to live up to expectations lose their loyal and potential customers to competitors. 

That’s where customer relationship management (CRM) comes in.

With marketing and customer relationship management, you launch campaigns and personalized messages. As a result, your content resonates and increases conversions and engagement. 

With CRM software increasing conversions by as much as 300%, it's a must for driving leads and sales among your existing and potential customers. 

Let’s understand how marketing and customer relationship management go hand-in-hand and why CRM is important in marketing. We’ll also explore how a headless content management system (CMS) facilitates CRM integration for optimized marketing outcomes. 

What is customer relationship management?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business process that increases loyalty and satisfaction. The CRM process:

• Manages a company’s interactions with current and future customers
• Enhances retention
• Increases profitability
• Streamlines processes
• Drives sales growth

CRM combines many business functions to deliver a personalized and seamless customer experience. Companies implement CRM to know their customers and provide never-before-seen experiences. You can achieve this by collecting relevant data like goals, values, challenges and motivations behind purchasing. 

The end goal of CRM is to build strong and emotional connections with your brand. Your customers work as brand advocates and provide free word-of-mouth promotion, ensuring higher ongoing business and generating leads. 

Types of CRM systems

Four types of CRM systems are:

Operational CRM

The primary purpose of operational CRM is to help marketing, sales and service teams streamline interactions. It organizes customer information and simplifies workflows. The CRM uses various forms of automation to provide best-in-class experiences. Features like contact management, lead tracking and campaign management increase efficiency and build better connections.

Analytical CRM

Analytical CRM analyzes customers' buying habits, preferences and market trends. You get a clearer picture of what they want. Using these insights, you develop smarter strategies and make better predictions. Eventually, it leads to happier customers and stronger loyalty.

Collaborative CRM

Collaborative CRM is all about bringing teams together. It helps your sales, marketing and customer service departments to work together and use the same information. With everyone on the same page, creating a smooth, consistent experience is easier. These CRMs use channel management features and interactions to provide teams with a 360-degree view of customers. 

Strategic CRM

Strategic CRM ensures lasting relationships. It helps you understand your customers' needs and expectations to build loyalty and generate long-term value. These insights align your goals with what matters to your customers.

Key components of CRM system

Contact management

Contact management keeps customer information organized and easily accessible. You stay on top of interactions, keep details accurate and build stronger relationships. It helps you make your CRM work smarter. This feature:

• Centralizes your customer database
• Keeps detailed logs of past communications
• Segments your audience based on location, purchase history, demographics or engagement level
• Ensures real-time updates

For example, if a customer inquires about a wrong order, the service agent can refer to their contact information, shopping history and past interactions in a CRM. The agent solves the problem and the customer is happy.

Sales automation

Sales has many moving parts, from lead generation to complete deals. That’s where the sales automation feature of CRM comes in. This feature:

• Automates repetitive tasks
• Optimizes lead management
• Helps your sales reps close more deals
• Streamlines sales processes
• Tracks sales progress
• Provides reminder follow-ups 
• Generates and manages proposals

For example, a sales automation feature sends email reminders to a sales manager when a high-value lead needs follow-up. This way, they don’t miss any opportunity. 

Customer support

A CRM with a customer support feature improves customer satisfaction by ensuring quick and effective resolution of issues. By centralizing past interactions and using data, CRM decreases resolution times while enhancing the productivity of a customer service agent. 

This feature:

• Converts support requests into tickets
• Combines email, live chat, phone and social media
• Uses the built-in knowledge base to resolve issues
• Analyzes team performance with metrics like response time and resolution rates
• Tracks and ensures compliance with service-level agreements 

For example, a customer reports an ongoing issue through live chat. The customer service agent uses the CRM to review their ticket history and previous interactions on email and social media. This ensures a seamless experience that builds trust and loyalty.

Marketing automation

The marketing automation component enhances your marketing efforts by personalizing campaigns, streamlining processes and tracking performance metrics. It strengthens connections with leads and customers by identifying their position in the customer lifecycle.

This feature:

• Targets different customer groups with personalized promotions or messages
• Delivers automated yet personalized content
• Sets up workflows for sending welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders or follow-up messages
• Schedules posts, monitors engagement and analyzes audience responses
• Tracks the performance of campaigns
• Identifies which channels or strategies to deliver the highest return on investment

For example, a business uses marketing automation to send personalized discounts to those who shopped during the last year and follow up with exclusive discounts.

Analytics and reporting

The analytics and reporting component provides a clearer, data-driven way to make smarter decisions. When you track how sales, marketing efforts and customer service are performing, you know what’s working and which areas require improvements. 

This feature:

• Visualize critical metrics like acquisition cost, average deal size or churn rate
• Provides updated data, giving teams a live pulse on operations
• Uses historical data to forecast trends
• Determine behaviors that lead to success or failure
• Tracks how well leads from marketing campaigns convert into closed deals

For example, analytics can show that leads from email spend 20% more than those from other methods. This finding may lead you to increase your email marketing budget. 

Benefits of CRM in marketing

The benefits of CRM in marketing are:

Supports marketing campaign

CRM tracks leads, organizes your audience and runs marketing campaigns. The system places all your data in one place to give you valuable insights into what your customers want, how they behave and what they’ve purchased. Your campaigns feel more personal and relevant to specific groups. CRMs make teamwork easier. Everyone from sales to support stays on the same page with up-to-date information. The result? Happier customers and a better overall experience.

Offers personalized customer experiences

Even if you hire the best salesperson, understanding what your leads want is challenging. They might be reluctant to share their requirements with you most of the time. That’s where a CRM helps you. As most CRMs come with sales and lead tracking features, you know which pages your customers view and how much time they spend. When you know which products or services they like, you provide a personalized customer experience. 

Creates loyal customers

With CRMs, you connect with your customers by understanding their needs, preferences and behaviors. You can address concerns, build trust and offer genuine interactions more easily. With time, these stronger relationships lead to happier, more loyal customers. 

Drives business growth

CRMs make it easier to stay organized and gain valuable insights about their customers and market trends. As the CRM tracks interactions and analyzes data, you know about new learning opportunities, like reaching an untapped audience or responding to emerging market needs. 

With a smarter, more focused approach to managing relationships and marketing, you improve customer satisfaction, retention and growth.

Ensures better web page positioning

You can use the CRM data for keyword research to know what matters to your customers. With these insights, your content speaks directly to their needs and interests. This:

• Builds stronger connections
• Increases engagement
• Improves search rankings
• Drives more traffic
• Enhances website performance

It’s a smarter, more personal way to write content that works.

Connects your sales and marketing teams

CRMs unite your marketing and sales teams, ensuring everyone uses the same data to achieve business goals. In a CRM, all your information is stored in one place, helping you track interactions, spot opportunities and improve communication. When all your departments work in a team, you witness increased conversion rates and a smoother, more personalized experience. 

Provides a single view of your customers

Another benefit of using CRM is its ability to collect and present data to give everyone a unified view of your customers' information, interests and purchasing history. Besides collecting data, CRMs sort, clean, analyze and consolidate data as a shared view of your customers. You can use your data in exciting ways tacross your business. 

CRM strategies in marketing

Build effective customer retention strategies with CRM

Apart from finding new customers, a CRM keeps your existing ones. Using data like purchase history and behavior, you understand what keeps customers loyal and build campaigns that feel personal. By sending reminders and special discounts, you show customers they’re appreciated. Customer retention is important because bringing new ones costs five to seven times more than retaining them. 

Design omnichannel CRM marketing strategies and campaigns

You run connected marketing campaigns across multiple channels, like email, social media or in-store. It keeps your messaging consistent and personalized at every touchpoint. The result? Stronger brand recognition and a better experience. You can reach people with the right message at the right time on their chosen platform, driving more engagement and conversions.

Engage customers through dynamic, data-driven approaches

CRMs make life easier for marketers by providing real-time analytics and detailed customer profiles. With these tools, you group your audience into segments, creating personalized outreach that works. Sharing personalized promotions, customized product recommendations, and content that feels like it was made just for them encourages customers to make purchases. Such data-driven marketing leads to better targeting and stronger connections.

Link CRM systems to social media and other marketing tools

Connect your CRM with social media and other marketing tools for customer engagement. You can monitor social interactions, gather valuable insights and respond to feedback by linking your CRM to platforms like Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn. Pairing your CRM with email marketing or e-commerce systems provides efficient workflow. This integration makes managing campaigns and tracking results easier.

How does Contentstack facilitate CRM integration for optimized marketing outcomes?

A headless CMS like Contentstack seamlessly integrates with CRM software to improve marketing efficiency and outcomes. 

Integrates with marketing automation tools

Contentstack integrates with marketing automation tools like Salesforce Einstein. You can then connect your CRM to email marketing platforms and analytics tools. As a result, your marketing team can run the desired campaigns.

Centralizes content management

With Contentstack’s headless CMS, you organize and manage content in one place, so everything customers see is consistent and on point. Connecting your content with CRM data creates personalized messages that resonate with their needs.

Enhances customer experience

Contentstack allows marketers to create personalized experiences through seamless integration. When you leverage CRM data, you offer targeted campaigns, manage customer relationships and improve satisfaction at every stage of the customer's journey.

Provides omnichannel marketing support

Contentstack connects your messaging across email, social media and web platforms. Such omnichannel support creates a seamless marketing strategy that connects with your audience wherever they are.

Ensures efficient data management

When you sync your CRM data with Contentstack, you can manage and analyze customer information. Your teams can make smarter decisions and create impactful campaigns.

Case study: How did Contentstack’s headless CMS help Mitsubishi Electric Europe increase digital agility?

Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. migrated from a legacy system to Contentstack’s headless CMS. With the change, the company could publish content faster, ensure better localization and allow sales teams to develop local content. SAP CRM and SAP Commerce Cloud integration provided additional improvements. The company enhanced its agility and digital presence by bringing updates in-house and reducing reliance on external suppliers. Using Contentstack, Mitsubishi plans to unify its brand website and shop, creating a seamless digital experience for customers and partners.

After using Contentstack, Andrea Intveen, Website Manager, Factory Automation EMEA, said:

“We began our journey looking at what headless content management could offer us in terms of better internal processes and removing our dependency on external suppliers. We have come full circle and are looking to see how we can use the same technology to improve our role as a supplier, offering a superior digital experience to customers and partners alike.”

Read the complete case study here.

FAQs

What is customer relationship management in marketing?

CRM in marketing handles your customer details, records interactions and improves their satisfaction. 

What is marketing and customer relationship management?

Marketing and CRM align your marketing efforts with CRM tools to engage customers, improve retention and drive growth.

What is CRM in marketing examples?

Some examples of CRM applications in marketing include using the system to design email campaigns, monitor interaction on social media and generate follow-ups to customer activity using rules. 

What is the meaning of CRM?

CRM is a strategy to manage interactions and relationships with potential and existing customers.

Learn more

A CRM platform helps you understand your customers and create customized marketing strategies. CRMs are the backbone of successful marketing teams because they:

• Streamline operations
• Increase ROI
• Enhance customer expectations

Whether scaling your business or refining your marketing approach, now is the time to leverage CRMs for real results. Learn how Contentstack works and integrates with CRM systems to create a unified and efficient marketing workflow. Talk to us to know more.