Guide to CRM integration with your website

Most businesses need a way to communicate with potential clients and guide leads through their sales funnel. CRM software basically started a revolution on this front. Now it’s become so commonplace that companies couldn’t imagine functioning without specialized software. However, simply having Customer Relation Management systems in your company isn’t enough. In this article, we will provide a guide to CRM integration with your website to make the most of what this technology has to offer.

 

The importance of CRM

How does your business find customers? While you could argue that your customers approach you, this rarely happens without an initial effort on your part. Perhaps you invested in marketing or optimized your website to get more hits on search results. Whatever the case, every business needs some method of lead generation, whether it’s SEO and CRO integration or something else. After you have generated leads and found out who might be interested in purchasing your product, you need to do something with that information before turning leads into customers. This is where CRM steps in. It can prop up your entire company with software that can streamline the process of handling leads and customers.

Who makes the decisions about CRM?

Regardless if you have a large company with multiple specialized departments or a small business with a few employees, you still need to have a way to delegate tasks. It’s important to know who gets to make the call when it comes to CRM. Usually, decisions that include CRM are the responsibility of the marketing and sales departments. For the most part, this makes sense since CRM revolves around dealing with customers.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen companies purchase state-of-the-art software only to fail at enforcing company-wide adoption far too often. You need to help everyone get accustomed to the new software and the new work policies it requires. If you are planning CRM integration with your website, we highly recommend including your tech department in any decisions you make. The techies are the ones who will actually help with website integration, not the marketing department.

How does your website fit in?

Business owners who offer sales through their website tend to make the same mistake time and again. They view their website only as a shop window. Instead of aiming for CRM integration, they fail to see the potential a unified system can have.

Your website design needs to be multi-functional. Make it something more than a simple storefront by integrating CRM. If you have a unified base instead of two different data sets, you can let visitors input their information into your system. This allows leads to be directly sent to the business and marketing teams.

A seamless customer experience

CRM integration with your website doesn’t only benefit your internal teams; it’s also there to help your customers. Whatever business decisions you make, you should always keep in mind how they will affect your clients. Care for your customers and give them a great experience, and they will keep coming back to do business with you. If you integrate CRM with your website, it will allow your customers to:

• Track orders
• Compare prices
• File complaints
• Communicate with your employees

With proper integration, all of these features can be available to your customers in one place. It will also reduce the amount of stress on your employees if your teams have an easy time coordinating and sharing information.

Use the data you gain

Okay, so you’ve talked to your teams, decided on integration, and implemented it. Now what? The goal of this guide to CRM integration with your website is to get you to understand the benefits and possibilities that open up once you have the proper systems in place. What use is all that data you now have access to if you don’t use it?

Use the data you have obtained to profile users. Make an effort to understand your customers in order to offer them a uniquely tailored experience. Based on their shopping preferences and habits on your website, you can recommend specific products to them. It’s also worth noting that you can also have insight into their interactions with your company. Know which users to target by setting up alerts when they respond to your emails and visit your website.

Reduce the data entry time

Integration offers huge benefits to your team, not only by letting them share relevant data faster, but also by reducing the amount of admin work necessary. You will basically be unloading a part of that work onto your website. Automated integration means you won’t have to export from your website and then import to the CRM. Just think of all the work hours you can save by having an integrated system. Not to mention that no employee likes entering enormous amounts of data. It’s a numbingly repetitive task, which should best be left to automated services like the ones integration can provide.

Structure your data

Admittedly, all of this sounds wonderful, but where do you begin? Unless you have a web developer among your employees, you will need to hire outside help. However, there is still a lot you will need to do yourself. No one knows your company and how it does business better than you do. In order to integrate, you will need to structure your data. Remember that you are creating a unified system for your employees to use.

You will need to decide which info you gather and what is relevant. Without proper structure, you will have large amounts of data flowing into your system, causing chaos. Poor data structure will make complex analytics almost impossible, defeating the purpose of having access to the information in the first place.

In conclusion

As you have seen in our guide to CRM integration with your website, there are many benefits that stem from having a unified system. The reduced workload on your employees will make them available to handle more important tasks than data entry. Your customers will have a better experience on your website, and customer satisfaction leads to increased sales.