Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.
New Salesforce.com Features Meld Social Media, Marketing and CRM
By: Jordan Novet (@gigajordan)
Big news for Salesforce.com users – the company just announced it will integrate its lead-tracking system with social-listening and social-media marketing tools to enable more targeted and tailored social marketing initiatives. Through combing Salesforce’s CRM and Social.com solutions, customers will be able to enjoy the best of both worlds, showcasing a prime example of integrated systems improving end results. Buddy Media and Radian6 both play an important role in the end product, also demonstrating a solid use-case for Salesforce’s purchase of the two companies.
Six Benefits of Combining Digital Data with Traditional CRM to Enhance the Customer Experience
By: Juliet Stott (@JulietStott)
This article covers a seemingly obvious but often overlooked topic. By combining traditional digital, mobile, social and offline data, companies can avoid duplication, engage in deeper 1-2-1 conversations, increase the real-time relevance of communications, conduct agile customer service, better personalize messaging and interactions, and track consumers once they leave your properties. Yet this centralization still poses a major challenge – at a Celerity data and CRM event in London, bringing all of the relevant data points into a single view was listed as a major challenge for big companies – a problem that Scribe’s January State of SMB CRM Integration report found also plagues SMBs. However, the challenges are worth it for those companies that successfully implement and integrate CRM. As an example of success implementing CRM to unite data, Juliet presents a case study of The Caravan Club, which used CRM to improve its member retention rates and reduced marketing spend by 40 percent!
Why Mobile CRM Rules
By: Erika Morphy (@emorphy)
With mobile computing rising at an astronomic rate as desktop computing loses favor, CRM is adapting to shifting habits. Diving deeper into Gartner’s prediction that mobile CRM apps will increase by 500 percent by 2014, Erika polls experts on the “why” of this shift. The benefits of mobile-first CRM apps touted by experts include convenience to work whenever and wherever, flexibility and malleability, functional parity with desktops, the ability to more easily engender loyalty and the value-add of the entire mobile UI designed to be sparse and streamlined.
Our Eloqua vs. Marketo vs. Pardot Case Study, Take 2: The Marketo S-1/IPO, and Going Big
By: Jason M. Lemkin (@jasonlk)
With ExactTarget purchasing Pardot for $100m a few months ago, Jason Lemkin undertook a case study to compare the trajectory of three of the biggest marketing automation players: Pardot, Eloqua and Marketo. Marketing automation ties into and enhances CRM results – essentially acting as a platform built entirely for marketers, unlike CRM which sometimes caters more strongly to sales people – so understanding the landscape holds importance for any marketer. In a bold prediction, Jason states that Marketo will IPO for $2+ billion. His reasoning includes the fact that Marketo has grown far faster than Eloqua and SaaS growth in general, losses don’t seem important while gunning for an IPO, it will take billions for the investors and founders to overcome stock dilution, and the world of SaaS values experience, which the Marketo team has. We’ll know the accuracy of Jason’s prediction in a few months, but regardless of the exact number, I’m inclined to agree that Marketo will go big for the same reasons, and because of this simple fact – they make a fantastic product that attracts great customers.
Reducing Hospital Readmission: Can Microsoft Dynamics CRM Help Hospitals Meet New Patient Standards?
By: Linda Rosencrance
While very specific, this case study of using Microsoft Dynamics CRM to improve the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP) demonstrates just how widely beneficial CRM can be across many fields and use-cases. In order to meet new governmental standards, hospitals across the nation need to reduce their readmission rates, and to do this cost-effectively, those hospitals need a technology that enables them to identify, reach out to and proactively treat high-risk patients. Solution Design Consultant PowerObjects built a solution on Dynamics CRM, using Dynamics to enable the creation of “bundles” of information that can be sent to patients and family/caregivers, while also automatically updating the system with analytics on the communications’ effectiveness. Moving forward, this CRM-based technology will help hospitals reduce costs while significantly improving results for their patients, and the system’s technology could benefit other fields where similar risk-management among individuals holds.
We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.
