Websites are not just company showcases on the Internet anymore, as more and more people shop and order services online. Percentage of online deals varies across industries, yet in some cases up to 100% of company margins come from online orders (various service providers, etc.) In order to streamline ecommerce activities a lot of companies adopt CRM solutions that allow for profound automation. According to the Gartner research, nearly 80% of the total CRM revenue comes from North America and Western Europe, and around 47% of the total CRM software revenue worldwide is generated by CRM SaaS solutions. This is the market where only customer-oriented companies succeed. Will yours be amongst them?

What is CRM Integration?

What is CRM integration? And how can you integrate your CRM to your CMS?

CRM stands for Customer Relations Management. It is a software product type allowing for automated collection and processing of various data that your customers submit on your website. However, CRM is not only about collecting basic customer data, as standard web analytics tools do this well enough. CRM software helps to do the following:

Managing your existing customer base and adding new prospects from leads

Connecting your marketing and sales operations into a streamlined process

Building a centralized marketing, sales, and customer support strategy

Increasing your ROI (nearly $6 increase per $1 invested).

CRM integration implies merging your CRM software with your website’s CMS (content management system, like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla). After the integration process is completed, you will receive a robust and powerful tool that will help you manage your customer base better in order to meet their needs. Its main benefit is that you will have an explicit picture of your sales process and you’ll be able to leverage the incoming data by shaping your sales activities and yielding better results.

Benefits of CRM Integration

Your website is your company’s focal point bringing various data from interactions with visitors. How do they view contents, download materials, leave their comments, participate in polls or read your company’s tutorials and showcases? You may also display your social media feeds, blogs, and reports on company events so that visitors get a full grasp of the company image. And each case of interaction can be tracked and analyzed.

Combining CRM software with analytics tools you can maximize the impact and increase the overall sales efficacy. The last but not least, CRM allows you to sort submitted contacts based on submission page and website surfing history, so you can assign appropriate specialists for the follow-up process. For instance, you may send helpdesk support invitations to people who browsed your Help section and let your sales managers communicate with leads that looked through your whitepapers and watched your demos. You can also integrate automatic web forms submission to gather primary customer data, deploy auto-response rules that send certain emails whenever customers take some action (welcome emails, announcements, suggested tutorials or product usage examples, etc.) All of this can have a significant impact on turning one-time visitors into long-term customers.

So integrating CRM into your website can give you the following:

Convenient reports on your prospects and leads

Combining pre-sales warm-up with after sales follow-up to ensure customer satisfaction

General reduction of manual sales processing and reducing the influence of personal contacts (so that sick leave of a sales representative will not stall their ongoing sales)

Connecting various disparate processes into a smooth workflow to optimize your sales.

How to Integrate Your Website and CRM

There are multiple ways you can integrate the CRM of your choice with your website:

You can choose a solution like Salesforce, which integrates with a bunch of CMS automatically, but costs quite a sum annually. Your employees will most likely be able to install and configure the software themselves and you will have provider’s support if need be.

You can order CRM integration as a service from a specialized company as many other (open-source, i.e.) CRM solutions may be lacking some modules (automated integration into CMS in particular), so these modules should be added and configured by specialists to reduce the configuration and data synchronization time.

Alternatively, you can order a custom CRM solution if you have specific needs. It will take longer than buying an out-of-the-box product, yet it will be personally tailored for your requirements.

The path you take depends on your preferences and company goals.

Types of CRMs

There is a quite large roster of CRM solutions on the market today, so you can choose the one that works best for you. Two most common types are standalone CRM solutions, installed on your server, and SaaS CRM service.

Standalone CRM. The data resides on your hosting servers, and you have the full control over it. There’re multiple downsides of this option. Not only standalone software can cost a lot, but also the product may receive poor support from the vendor. And most likely you’ll need to hire specialists to tweak your system and maintain it stable.

SaaS. The other option is adopting a SaaS solution to do the job. All software maintenance is delivered by a provider. This kind of service can also seem pricey if you have numerous corporate users operating with it but SaaS solutions generally get more support and upgrades from suppliers.

Both options allow nearly 90% of small and medium businesses to cover their needs due to a deep pool of out-of-the-box features available.

Custom CRM. Opting for custom made solutions is only necessary for unique corporate workflows and highly specifics sets of tasks. For instance, we at DDI Development have experience with building complex CRM systems that integrate not only with a website CMS, but also have HR and recruiting modules. Basically, these solutions automate almost all aspects of internal and external corporate activities.

Want to ask any questions regarding CRM integration with your website? Drop us a line, we are always glad to answer them!