Consumers are now using multiple media platforms to gather data and stay up-to-date, making life difficult for marketers. One might be inclined to think that marketing automation and CRM are two different strategies and serve different purposes. However, enterprises can get a lot of mileage by integrating these two technologies.
(Read our blog: Marketing Automation in CRM)
The general notion is that while marketing automation focuses on digital marketing to a wide-scale audience, CRM revolves around client services. However, SugarCRM is not just any CRM but one which is built for the purpose of creating excellent customer relationships through a combination of innovations in Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. Integrating SugarCRM and Marketing Automation is an effective way to boost Sales, develop excellent marketing programs and most importantly, give your clients an unforgettable experience. But there are dozens of marketing automation tools out there in the market so which one should you integrate with Sugar?
Over the years we have integrated several marketing automation platforms with Sugar for clients from several different industry verticals and all of our clients have reported a marked increase in their marketing ROI after the integrations. To make your life easier, we have compiled a list of the top 3 marketing automation tools which, based on our extensive experience, we know will give you complete control over your marketing strategy and empower you to stay one step ahead of the competition when integrated with Sugar.
1. Act-On
The seamless integration between Sugar and Act-On will accelerate the sales cycle by enabling the marketing team to deliver highly qualified leads to the sales team and, in return, get valuable feedback from them. By pumping unrivaled lead intelligence into your CRM, marketers can get a 360-degree view of the customers.
Main features of Act-On & Sugar integration:
Lead Scoring
Identify and prioritize sales-ready leads based on demographic data and behavioral touch points including email, website, event attendance, and form submissions. Your sales team will know who the prospects are, what they care about, and what to pitch during the sales call.
Website Visitor Tracking
See actual names of people and companies visiting your website, and what they’re looking for. Go beyond page views and bulk visitor statistics provided by traditional website analysis tools to get real marketing and sales intelligence that can boost your sales.
Forms & Landing Pages
Easily feed form submissions into Sugar in real time without the risk of duplicates. Use A/B testing to identify and automatically select the best performing forms and landing pages.
Social Media
Align your social media strategies and tactics with other channels, so your message is amplified and your branding is consistently reinforced in all the places a prospect may find you. Schedule posts to multiple social channels in one click.
Pricing:
2. Marketo
The Sugar Connector for Marketo provides seamless bi-directional data integration between the Marketo and Sugar platforms. It syncs and processes marketing and sales data to promote a complete and unified experience for the customer. The connector enables sales teams to focus on high priority leads based on marketing generated lead scores. Similarly, information related to the sales opportunities is passed back to the marketing platform via the connector to enable measurement of marketing ROI.
Main features of Marketo & Sugar integration:
Batch Integration
The connector provides the functionality to enable batch uploads of existing Sugar Leads and Contacts into Marketo for upsell/co-sell scenarios with a scheduler for handling large data-sets.
Real-Time Integration
New leads created in Marketo are automatically propagated in real-time to create leads in Sugar. In addition, bi-directional real-time synchronization is executed across Marketo and Sugar contacts, accounts and user records.
Agile Integration
The connector has complete control over synchronization attributes with capabilities to unsubscribe from campaigns within Marketo to prevent Sugar users from further sales targeting.
Full Visibility
The connector portrays an end-to-end picture of the lead to purchase pipeline with a rich activity log that provides reporting for tracking and history.
Pricing:
3. Mautic
Mautic is as good as any other leading marketing automation solution and is packed with a bunch of features to reach out to, build relationships with, and nurture prospective clients.By integrating Sugar with Mautic, you will gain complete control over every stage of the customer journey.
Main features of Mautic & Sugar integration:
Synchronization of personal records
Leads, Contacts and Prospects in Sugar become fully synchronized with Contacts in Mautic. The synchronization is bilateral. Contacts in Mautic also get automatically pushed to Sugar and saved as Leads every time the action “Push Contact to integration” is performed.
Merging history of operations on records
The whole history of operations, saved in both systems, is merged and unified.
Duplicate prevention
Real time synchronization prevents the creation of duplicates in both systems. This function also helps to avoid repetitions in tasks of Sales and Marketing.
Scoring control
Sugar users can easily control the scoring granted to their customers through the analysis of marketing actions that Mautic enables.
Target lists’ synchronization
The availability of lists created in SugarCRM helps to run dedicated marketing campaigns in Mautic.
Switching between systems
You can preview any SugarCRM equivalent record in Mautic through contextual links in SugarCRM with just one click.
Flexible, self-configured
Mapping of specific fields in Mautic and SugarCRM allows for a simple and self-reliant configuration.
Reports
Highly customizable reports can be generated through Mautic’s Reporting tool which can then be easily viewed from within Sugar.
Integration of E-mails
This functionality is available for customers using the Enterprise edition of SugarCRM. All the emails sent with Mautic are also archived in Sugar under individual personal records.
Pricing:
Bottom Line:
Choosing the right CRM solution is crucial to make the most of marketing automation. Linking Sugar to a marketing automation solution can bring tremendous benefits in terms of increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the sales and marketing teams by saving time on administrative tasks, delivering messages with the right content to the right audience, closing deals faster through increased automation and increasing revenue and profits. It is an excellent way to standardize communication between the sales and marketing departments. You can also leverage the Sales Management dashboard to see exponential growth in your business. Not just businesses but Education Institutes are also using Education CRM and marketing automation to streamline their promotional campaigns and engage the students. Moreover, by bringing marketing insights into the hands of your customer-facing teams, it ensures every interaction you have with customers and prospects is extraordinary.
Rolustech is a SugarCRM and Salesforce Certified Developer & Partner Firm. We have helped more than 500 firms with various CRM integrations and customizations. Contact us today for your FREE consultation session. We will be happy to assist you.
