While the concept of Brand Automation software may seem futuristic to most, the humble CRM has been at the heart of tech stacks across every industry for many years. The fact is, at their essence, the two are not not only meant for each other, but very similar in their goals.
Whether your CRM is highly complex, with bespoke functionality or a straight out-of-the-box solution, once you've found one that fits, you'll wonder how you functioned at all before. The other likelihood is that you'll want the data contained within it to fuel almost any customer-facing activity you conduct.
Your CRM will likely aid in managing many of your business processes, house all of your customer data and track how customers progress through your sales pipeline. Where this information becomes really powerful is when we combine customer data with a brand automation platform like Outfit.
Suddenly you have accurate data, collected by those on the front lines with customers daily, that is seamlessly used in on-brand templates based on your document designs. The aim of this article is to show you how the relationship between Outfit and your CRM can improve your marketing production.
It Uses Data Intelligently to Personalise More Content
No marketer will be surprised to hear that we are living in a culture where personalisation and convenience is king.
In a recent Salesforce Research survey, 66% of consumers said they were likely to switch brands if they were treated more like a unique person than like a number. Interestingly, the same study found that 75% of consumers expected brands to provide a consistent experience across all touch points.
What this gives us is two key findings:
- The first is that personalisation is no longer a novelty, but a necessity for all organisations communicating with their customers
- The second is that consistency and personalisation should go hand-in-hand to create a strong brand impression on customers
Just because the concept is complex, doesn't mean that achieving this outcome needs to be difficult. The great part is that, if you integrate your CRM software with Outfit, you can use your customer data intelligently to personalise consistent and on-brand content easily.
An example is an organisation that collects and tracks data around customers' regularly searched destinations through their travel website. In minutes, we can plug into some customer personalisation, apply their home town and top preferences for travel destinations, based on their website interactions and all of a sudden, the communication feels less like spam and more like a thoughtful reminder:
It Speeds Up Your Content Creation
At Outfit, we love nothing more than to get inside your organisation and understand your different departments and stakeholders. We know that the accounts department are using templates like letters, invoices and quotes whereas the sales department want flashy flyers, brochures, eDM and social media posts.
Between some clever cordoning of content in Outfit and data in Salesforce, all your teams can increase productivity by simply choosing a template (or collection of templates) pulling relevant data in, tweaking imagery or content slightly if they wish and then get it out in front of customers faster. With these two systems working together, no user will need to think twice about being exposed to irrelevant data or creative, or having to manually search for customer information from a database, their workspace is tailored just for them to use to create whatever collateral is needed.
It’s Flexible Enough to Work with Other Integrations
If you thought that using your CRM data in your designs via automation was an impressive step towards the future, you ain't seen nothing yet. As Outfit at its very core simply sets out to digitise your designs and allow stakeholders to interact with them, it means that it does its best work in the middle of your production workflow.
Due to its flexibility, every Outfit workflow will look different. From user sign-in through Google, to data import from Salesforce to pushing emails into Mailchimp for distribution or even just plugging into Dropbox or a digital asset management system for imagery, your content management systems can all work together to increase efficiencies and possibilities.
The best part about where data and automation are taking us is that, more and more it is looking different for every organisation. These collaborations can also grow and change with the needs of your organisation and customer to ensure that your stakeholders spend less time creating materials and more time doing their core jobs better and your customers feel understood, valued and most importantly, loyal to your brand.
