Have you ever wondered if your business would benefit from customer relationship management (CRM) automation?
Fun fact: 82% of businesses use CRMs for sales reporting and process automation. Today’s customers expect frictionless journeys with brands, and one of the most cost-effective and easiest ways to improve your interactions with them is through CRM automation.
If you want to stay ahead of your competitors with CRM automation, keep reading. This blog post will go through 17 CRM automation examples and five best practices you can emulate to streamline your processes, increase your teams’ productivity, and grow your revenue.
Free your team from busy work. Nutshell’s sales automation handles lead assignments, pipeline updates, and follow-up reminders so your reps stay focused on selling.
CRM automation is the process of automating manual and repetitive tasks under marketing, sales, and customer service operations so that you can streamline your customer relationship management processes and improve these departments’ productivity.
The main types of activities you can automate with CRM include:
Entering and updating customer and lead data
Sending emails and SMS messages
Assigning leads to representatives
Moving leads through your sales pipeline
Tracking metrics for reporting and analytics
What are the benefits of CRM automation?
After learning about what CRM automation is, let’s see how it can make a difference for your business by learning some of the major benefits of CRM automation.
Here are some of the ways CRM automation can benefit your business:
Automatically performing simple, mundane, and repetitive tasks
Removing the possibility of human error
Helping you handle a significantly larger quantity of data
Segmenting and personalizing outreach and marketing campaigns
Saving time and money through increased efficiency
How can CRM automation improve sales?
CRM automation can improve your sales by streamlining repetitive tasks. This includes tasks like lead nurturing, follow-ups, and data entry. It enables sales teams to prioritize high-quality leads, track customer interactions, and automate personalized communication. This lets your sales team focus on closing deals and improving conversion rates while the CRM system handles important but repetitive tasks.
17 CRM automation examples
You can automate various tasks with your CRM—from marketing and sales to customer service. Here are 17 CRM automation examples covering these three departments:
Among marketers using automation, 91% say it’s “very important” to their overall success. Here are some CRM marketing automation examples that will inspire you to get started:
1. Lead data entry
If you collect leads from different sources like your website, paid social media campaigns, and search campaigns, it’s a chore to manually download your lead data and copy them to a spreadsheet. You can automate this task using a CRM with marketing automation like Nutshell.
With Nutshell, you can create forms that you can embed on your website. Each time a site visitor signs up as a lead, Nutshell automatically collects and stores the lead information for your sales team to easily access.
2. Marketing-to-sales lead handoff
Another example of marketing automation in CRM is the ability to automate lead scoring, which allows for the seamless handoff of hot leads to your sales team. Nutshell has simplified lead scoring with lead confidence, which indicates how likely a lead will convert.
Nutshell Pro can automatically score your leads and identify hot leads, helping them prioritize a potential sale. In addition, it can automatically assign these leads to your sales reps, so interested prospects won’t wait long to hear from you.
3. Welcome email
If someone just signed up for your newsletter, it’s a good idea to send out a welcome email, which has an average open rate of more than 86%. Do you know what a better idea is? Automating these welcome emails.
4. Personalized marketing campaigns
With 72% of customers saying they only engage with personalized messaging from brands, it pays to personalize your marketing campaigns to increase customer engagement and loyalty. CRM automation lets you quickly create workflows that segment your customer list and send relevant messages to different segments.
5. Lead attribution
Understanding where your leads come from is essential to improving your marketing. Some CRMs can automatically pull in lead sources, eliminating the need for manual data input. You can then automatically report on your top lead channels to evaluate and optimize your marketing performance.
CRM sales automation examples
Let your sales team focus on strategies and leave repetitive tasks to your CRM. Here are four sales automation examples a CRM can do for your business:
6. Lead prioritization
Did your website forms return a long list of leads? Allow your CRM’s automated lead scoring to do the heavy lifting, so your sales reps can prioritize reaching out to prospects most likely to convert. Nutshell’s lead confidence feature has simplified lead scoring, so your team can easily prioritize the leads closest to your ideal customer profile.
7. Outreach to disengaged customers
You can reduce your customer churn rate by reaching out to customers showing signs of disengagement. How? Automatically segment your customers according to how engaged they are with your business and products or services, and reach out to less engaged ones before they churn.
Do you have customers or users who appear to be using your products less frequently or perhaps not maximizing the features of their paid subscription? These customers might be facing roadblocks with product use and may not repurchase or renew their subscriptions.
Proactively reach out to them with an automated but personalized email that offers support. Let them schedule a product refresher training with your team or share a how-to blog post or training video that can help them maximize their use of your product.
8. Subscription renewal email send-out
Automate your check-ins with your customers a few weeks before their subscription expires. Ask them about how they’re enjoying your product and offer help if they need it.
Use this opportunity to remind them about their renewal, too. This way, they won’t be surprised when they receive another email from you about their subscription renewal.
9. Moving leads to your pipeline
Automation in CRM streamlines pipeline management, helping you increase your close ratio by automatically tracking and identifying which prospects are ready to purchase.
With an automated CRM like Nutshell, you can automatically advance your leads from one pipeline stage to another once they’ve met the goals you’ve set. Nutshell can also update their lead confidence so that your sales team knows when it’s time to shift their focus on leads close to purchasing.
10. Automated sales guidance and reminders
As you build your pipeline in your CRM, you can include guidance and automated reminders for each stage. This ensures sales reps always know which steps to take to move leads forward without needing to consult with sales leaders and written processes.
11. Meeting scheduling and management
Some CRMs, such as Nutshell, include online meeting schedulers that streamline managing meetings with prospects so you can close more deals. These tools automatically check availability, add the necessary details to the invitation, and send reminders so your team can focus on connecting with potential clients.
12. Quote creation and tracking
Your CRM may also have a built-in quotes tool such as Nutshell Quotes. These tools can auto-populate your quotes with data from your CRM, streamline sending your proposals, and automatically track engagement.
13. Reporting and analytics
CRMs automatically track and analyze your sales metrics and generate reports that you can use to quickly evaluate sales performance, funnel health, lead volume, and more. Having these insights readily helps you optimize your sales process much more quickly and easily.
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Keep your customers satisfied with your service through the help of customer service automation in CRMs. Here are some CRM automation examples for customer service:
14. Acknowledgment receipt send-out
Did a customer just file a service ticket? Let them know that you’re on it by sending an automated email informing them that you received their inquiry.
Sending acknowledgment receipts is an essential practice that many businesses often overlook. It is an important piece of communication that gives your customers an update about their inquiry, so they don’t keep sending you messages through different channels.
Automating this step saves your customer service team precious time in addressing concerns.
15. Appointment reminders
Make every step of your customer’s journey with you a pleasant one, including their after-sales appointments.
Did a customer book a meeting with you? Some of your customers may be juggling many responsibilities, and they might miss your appointment. Help them remember your engagement by sending a reminder a day or two beforehand.
CRMs like Nutshell can help you automate these reminders, so you spare your customers from rebooking and getting their concerns addressed immediately. Your customer service team also saves precious time because they don’t have to send an email manually!
16. Follow-up email to provide further assistance
Nurturing relationships with customers doesn’t end once they’ve purchased from you. To show genuine concern, service teams can send an automated follow-up email to customers whose tickets were recently addressed.
Service automation in CRMs can help you send this email by asking if you’ve helped them address their concern and if they need further assistance.
17. Surveying your customers and analyzing your NPS
A customer loyalty and satisfaction metric, the net promoter score (NPS) helps you understand what customers think of you by asking them, “How likely are you to recommend our product, service, or brand to others on a scale of 1 to 10?” The higher the figure, the better the job you’re doing at keeping your customers happy.
With the help of a CRM with marketing automation, you can automate the send-out of your NPS survey. Nutshell also has reporting and analytics features that can automate the NPS survey results report.
The role of AI in CRM automation
The biggest change in CRM automation in recent years is the increasing availability of artificial intelligence (AI). AI technology makes CRM automation faster and more powerful and even enables new automation capabilities.
With AI, CRMs can analyze large amounts of data, such as sales data, lead data, and past interactions with customers, and gather valuable insights from it.
For example, with Nutshell, you can summarize your timelines to get a summary of all your past interactions with a lead or customer, giving you the context you need to have more productive interactions with them. Nutshell can also generate summarizations of your Zoom calls so that your team can quickly catch up on what you accomplished in meetings.
AI can also assist with writing, and some CRMs, including Nutshell, have built-in AI writing tools to help with writing emails and other tasks.
Other uses of AI for CRM automation include audience segmentation, voice-to-text tools, and reporting.
Looking for a CRM with artificial intelligence to power growth?
Nutshell Business has what you’re looking for, with features to supercharge your team’s productivity.
CRM automation should make your teams more efficient and productive. To ensure this effort doesn’t require too much work on your team members, here are four CRM automation best practices:
1. Create clear guidelines for data entry and updates
Use consistent formatting for your data. Create a document outlining your data entry and update guidelines, including how conversation logs are typed in. This ensures productivity across the board, so other team members can easily understand all the details saved in each customer profile.
2. Prepare employees with training for new automation workflows
After you’ve created your guidelines, it’s important to get everyone who uses the CRM on board. Minimize mistakes in early automated workflow adoption by providing training and demos on the new automation processes, guidelines, and what their role is in the process.
If your team is already familiar with automated customer relationship management, getting used to a new workflow should take no more than two or three weeks of practice. Provide as much hands-on help as you can, and be open to feedback and questions during this adoption phase.
3. Perform regular data cleansing and follow a maintenance schedule
Do you simply upload your customer data and call it a day? If you do, chances are some recipients have not received your emails.
Ensure you have a maintenance schedule for your CRM’s database to check in with your customers about their updated contact details. If your past emails bounced, make sure to edit or delete them. By regularly cleaning your data, your team members don’t have to deal with outdated customer data or customers who are no longer interested in your product or service.
4. Use a mobile-friendly CRM
Boost your productivity by having a CRM that you can access through a mobile device. Nutshell is an easy-to-use CRM that has a mobile app. It also lets you save your prospect’s data by taking a photo!
5. Make simple but effective workflows
CRM automation should help boost productivity among various teams within your organization by taking up repetitive tasks. If your automation workflows are too complex, some of your team members might not adopt the automated customer relationship management tool. The result is an investment that doesn’t help your business and doesn’t provide returns.
Keep your workflows simple and effective, so your team can maximize your CRM automation tools. It also helps to have a user-friendly CRM like Nutshell so that adoption won’t be a problem.
Leverage the power of CRM automation with Nutshell
CRM automation streamlines your processes and improves the productivity of your marketing, sales, and customer service teams. If you want to help your customer-facing teams with automation in CRM, consider Nutshell.
Nutshell is a flexible and user-friendly CRM with automation that can help you with marketing tasks, sales, and customer service automation. Try it for free for 14 days!
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