Do you know the two major pain points for small-scale agencies? These are data retrieval and client reporting processes. So, congratulations that you have decided to automate your data retrieval and client reporting processes using a white-label platform and software.

To seamlessly execute your daily tasks and manage the workflow, you need to work on different platforms, access data from other sources, and access the login credentials of numerous third-party apps and software.

The smart step is to focus on your agency's growth, so you should invest your precious time in marketing and other essential activities that will help you grow and expand your market.

If you are busy taking screenshots and retrieving data all day long from multiple channels to prepare reports, you're wasting your productive hours. It's not smart work; instead, it is imprudent!

This article will help you share your client reports in no time using the power of automation.

About DashClicks' White-Label Platform

DashClicks' white-label platform helps you scale your agency by not just automating the workflow but also through the fulfillment services. The fulfillment services include all digital marketing services such as SEO, PPC, social media advertising, email marketing, content marketing, website development, etc.

Still, DashClicks' platform is available free of cost for limited use. However, if you want to serve multiple clients and campaigns, you can opt for a premium account.

So, you can be an agency owner, even without hiring expensive full-time professionals. DashClicks will assist you throughout your journey.

Watch this video to learn what DashClicks is and what services it offers.

How to Use the Free Trial?

Before moving on, kindly watch this video to learn how to build a successful digital marketing agency from scratch.

DashClicks' free trial doesn't refrain you from using any of its major premium features. However, it's for limited use. You can always upgrade it if you are using it to manage your campaigns. This way, you can drastically save your time and money spent on time-consuming & repetitive tasks that are a part of the daily grind in an agency.

Here's how DashClicks' free trial offer works.

Go to the DashClicks website and sign up for its white-label platform.

Signing up for an account is free, and DashClicks will never charge you for a base account. You will only be charged if you upgrade to the Pro plan or above.

Once the signup process is complete, you'll be directed to the dashboard.

DashClicks Starter Kit

If you are new to DashClicks, this video will give you a sneak peek at the platform and how it works.

From the top right corner of the dashboard screen, go to settings.

YouTube Video: New User Dashboard Crash Course: 4:10

On the settings page, you will find many options to add your custom domain, fill up your business profile, upload your branding, logo, etc., and change your business settings.

Apart from that, you can manage various third-party account integrations here, so you can import data directly into the DashClicks dashboard to generate automatic reports, etc.

On the settings screen, you can set up a payment and access all the useful apps such as:

• Contacts App
• Deals App
• InstaSites App
• InstaReports App
• Sites App
• Templates App
• Projects App
• Analytics App
• Forms App
• Inbound App

You can also visit White-Labeled Fulfillment Store here and order quality white-label SEO and digital marketing services. It helps you remain lean and thin while staying profitable.

Through the fulfillment store, you can order all digital marketing services such as SEO, PPC, social media advertising, email marketing, content marketing, website development, etc. We have a comprehensive team of full-time digital marketing professionals, so you get the best value from our services.

With DashClicks' forever free account, you get free unlimited features such as:

For more details about pricing and features, please visit our pricing page.

How to Use the Dashboard Application?

You can treat the Dashboard application as the home page for your entire platform experience. It gives you a bird's eye view of your campaigns and performance.

You can fully personalize your dashboard page to adjust the page view as per your needs. It means you will quickly get the most important updates as you open your account.

Accessing the Dashboard App

The Dashboard acts as your default homepage for the platform. So, even if you change the settings, you can navigate back to the dashboard using the app drawer in the top right corner. Here is what the app drawer looks like.

The dashboard provides you with the summaries of your campaign, so it's the easiest to navigate. Each widget is separated by easily visible boxes.

When you click the Deals app widget button, you get the option to customize the data displayed on the widget according to the specified period.

You can edit your Dashboard by clicking the Edit button in the top right corner. This way, you can customize your dashboard view.

You can also drag and drop any widget above, below, left, or right of other widgets to customize your view per your preference. After that, click on Save in the top-right corner.

You can create custom client dashboards and reports on the DashClicks platform. The data updates in real-time. Creating a dashboard is the prerequisite for using a white-label platform as it's the central location where you can manage the entire platform.

Here is the complete DashClicks software tour for your reference -

Final Words

DashClicks is a one-stop solution for every need of a digital marketing agency. You can use the DashClicks dashboard for everything from performance evaluation of your campaign to sending reports and fulfillment of digital marketing solutions such as SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, reputation management, local directory listings, and content marketing. So, sign up for a free account today and benefit from this incredible white-label platform.

Gone are the days when automation sounded like a luxury for businesses. Automation has transitioned from a luxury for larger enterprises to a necessity, so even small companies are rapidly implementing it to stay agile and competitive.

In this article, we will discuss how you can increase your digital agency's sales by using three popular DashClicks automation tools, i.e., Deals, Contact & Inbound apps.

But, first, let's discuss what process automation means and the benefits of adopting it.

What Is Automation?

The dictionary meaning of automation is a technique, operating system, or method of managing a process using automatic tools to mitigate human intervention.

In simpler words, automation is using software applications to automate business processes so that we can minimize the need for the human workforce.

Through business automation, we can replace labor-intensive business processes saving time and effort.

What Is Automation Software?

Automation software is applications developed to handle menial and repetitive tasks usually handled by humans. So, it minimizes human input, providing us with more time to do jobs requiring logic, critical thinking, and creativity. Automation software is used in multiple industries.

Sales Automation Software

When you automate your sales process, you split sales into a few simple steps and automate these tasks using a software program. You can automate tasks such as lead capturing, email marketing, deal or sales pipeline, and contact management.

Here are some of the best sales automation software to help increase your agency's sales -

1. Using the Deals App

Sales pipeline management can be a big hassle for startups and agencies. You need to keep a tab on actions taken on leads, their position in the funnel, and the strategy you need to convert them. You may quickly lose leads if you don't manage them properly. The Deals application is a powerful tool that the DashClicks' white-label platform offers.

This app helps you create a variety of sales pipelines so that you can visualize your sales funnel and path to closing deals. It will also allow you to track deals.

You can break this journey into many steps using the Deals App. It comes in handy while managing tasks and tracking performance at different stages. It will also help you identify the salesperson accountable for a lost lead.

You can watch this video to learn how to use this app.

How to Access the Deals App?

You can easily access the Deals App from the DashClicks dashboard. Login to your DashClicks accounts, go to the app drawer in the top right corner and find the Deals icon.

Go to the Deals app >>Click on the My Deals tab to navigate the app.

On this page, you'll be able to see your latest sales pipeline and your active deals.

Can you see some solid color lines here in the first row? It suggests the stage of the pipeline your deal is in.

Here is the list view of your different deal stages -

When you click on a specific stage, you will see an expanded view of the individual deals available. Using the search field, you can also search for a particular deal by name.

You can easily export this deal using the Export button into a CSV file.

Click on the "+ New Deal" button next in the menu to create a new deal.

Using its user-friendly menu, you can easily add, edit, or reorder a sales pipeline.

Deal Automation

Deal automation is the most incredible feature of this application. For each new deal, you can automate the most repetitive and tiring tasks the salespeople are assigned while working on a pipeline. These tasks include sending follow-up emails, text messages, and reminders. Manual execution of these monotonous and tedious tasks may lead to human errors.

You and your team can save time by utilizing the Deal Automations feature. Here are four related automation offered by DashClicks. Click on each link to know more about them.

• Email Automation
• SMS Automation
• InstaSite Automation
• InstaReport Automation

You can automate reporting through the reporting tab. To keep the record, you can utilize automation logs.

2. Using the Contacts App

Adding profiles of individual and business contacts helps you integrate valuable information that you can use in your campaigns, notifications, and templates.

Similar to the Deals app, you can access the Contacts app from the app drawer icon of the dashboard.

Here is how you can navigate the Contacts app. Enter the details of people, businesses, and filters, in this app for better contact management.

You can use "+ New Person" to add new people and "+ New Business" to list new businesses in the app. The contact preview looks like the following screenshot.

The app has several features, but the four most prominent features are:

• Add a Business Contact
• Add a People Contact
• Use Your People Contact Records
• Use Your Business Contact Records

The Contacts app automates contact management and saves you a lot of time and hassle.

3. Using the Inbound App

The Inbound application is a blessing for digital agencies as it helps them become the sales rockstar. With a focus on lead generation, this app will help you set up and integrate campaigns.

If you use various third-party platforms, the Inbound app will help you create new campaigns in the app. The app allows you to assign sales representatives to new leads, further streamlining the sales process. The app will send automated notifications to your teams with the updates on those leads, so the teams can better track their performance and take the most appropriate course of action.

It also makes adding fresh leads to your sales pipeline a cakewalk. The reporting feature of the inbound app helps you track and record the details of the phone calls. The app will notify you about fresh leads if a form submission happens.

You can watch this video to learn how to use the Inbound app.

Accessing the Inbound App

You can easily access the unbound app through the app drawer available in the menu.

You can easily track your leads from the My Lead page. The dashboard looks something like this:

If you choose "Phone Call preview," you can listen to calls or messages. If you select "form submission," it will provide you with all the form responses the user provides. You can easily customize your Inbound app by clicking on the "Customizing the Inbound App" tab.

You can also see a campaign overview in the Inbound app and get the details such as the date it was created, the number of leads generated so far, integration type, and notifications.

Create a new campaign by clicking on the "+ New Campaign" button.

Here are some campaign types you can create in the Inbound app.

• ClickFunnels
• Facebook Ads
• Instapage
• CallRail
• Forms

You can use the reporting feature to get breakdowns of campaign performance. You can use the following filters:

• Phone calls
• Form submissions
• Total leads
• Leads by date
• The lead count per sales representative

The app allows you to filter by leads, integrations, or sales reps. So, it brings all your leads-related information to your fingertips, and your team can significantly benefit from it.

Final Words

DashClicks' white-label platform provides you with an unmatched marketing and sales ecosystem through which you can run campaigns, track the performance of your sales team, optimize your campaigns, and ultimately boost your sales. It also helps you in customer retention and increasing brand value. DashClicks' Deals, Contact & Inbound apps can be a game changer for your agency's sales performance.

Reporting is an essential but perhaps sometimes tedious task, as it consumes your productive hours. Tackling complex data might take a few hours to several days, depending on the number of clients you have.

If your agency client needs a smaller reporting frequency, i.e., weekly, it might become quite taxing for your team. What makes it even more challenging is that you need to be meticulous while preparing those reports as marketers use them for critical decision-making.

What Is a Reporting Tool?

A reporting tool for an agency, or marketing reporting software, is a system that fetches information from various channels and re-arranges it in graphics charts, tables, and visual presentations. It makes the complex information easy to understand, interpret and consume for better decision making.

If you want to turn your agency into a reporting powerhouse, here are a few tips:-

1. Customize Your Dashboard

Different clients have different priorities, so you need custom metrics for each. However, one thing is common among them - most want to evaluate their performance across various channels. You can combine data from different integrations into a single exclusive metric to communicate the campaign performance as per the client's requirement.

Custom metrics give you the needed flexibility because generalized metrics only give you an approximate idea of what is happening.

DashClicks uses multiple metrics and integrations to present data into one organized dashboard. So, you can see your campaign performance according to other channels. All you need to do is drag and drop the items to communicate your campaign's success.

2. Manage Everything From a Single Dashboard

Too much data can lead to analysis paralysis, which is why most clients prefer to keep it minimal. They find it convenient to control everything from one dashboard. It allows you to pull necessary data and use the relevant metrics for crucial decision-making through numerous integrations.

Using a visual dashboard, you don't need to look further. It can paint a good picture of how your campaign is faring.

It allows you to use the specific metrics you should track. Marketing today has become highly complex with too many channels, increasing competition, and exploding volumes of data. You might need to switch between platforms, consuming a lot of time extracting the information you're looking for.

Using a platform like DashClicks, you can easily connect numerous digital marketing channels in a few clicks. DashClicks offers 30+ integrations with channels such as Facebook ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google My Business Insights, etc.

You can combine these channels with digital marketing tools such as a keyword rank tracker. Besides a white-labeled dashboard and fulfillment services, DashClicks offers a whole marketing ecosystem for agencies. Its software apps such as Contacts, Deals, Analytics, Inbound, and InstaReports come equipped with built-in tools.

It will make your life easier!

3. Use Storytelling

You can make your reports even more engaging by storytelling. It is the desired value addition you can provide to your client. You can set goals and keep clients updated on the campaign's progress by highlighting the achievements.

If you fail to communicate your successes, your clients will never realize the value you're offering. Furthermore, you can use data and visual elements to tell the brand's success story, saving time and increasing engagement. It's also suitable for your agency's branding.

4. Make Your Client Feel Special Through Personalization

Adding personalized insights and commentary to the report is an excellent way to make your clients feel special.

You can easily do it on your custom dashboard by adding specific comments for each section in the report and providing an overall campaign summary at the end. Based on it, you can also make recommendations that will make decision-making easier for your clients. If there are any unusual data patterns, you can highlight them, and your clients will appreciate that.

Source: Video (Time - 2:10)

To ensure more accuracy while automating your reports, you can set up mechanisms such as getting prior approval for each report. A brief review will make sure that the report doesn't miss anything.

Pro Tip: It's a good idea to double-check each report's content before they are automatically sent to the client so that you can find the opportunities to upsell and identify the faults in the campaign. A brief review of your report can significantly enhance your report's face value by opening the doors for upselling and improvement in the campaign.

5. Use Visual Elements

Sometimes your clients cannot interpret the complex reports because they are unaware of the specific metrics used. It often happens because they don't have the time to study marketing and the related jargon.

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Data visualization will go a long way in helping such clients. Your visuals should be arranged in a story format with different scenes that weave an exciting story together.

Visual elements can make the report lucid, clear, and precise, so even a naive person can interpret it.

Search online for marketing report samples and see how you can creatively use visual elements to present stats and facts in your digital marketing reports.

6. Organize and Streamline Your Workflow

Streamlining your workflow inside your agency is a crucial step you need to take to scale and grow your agency, and it begins with effective delegation. Therefore, you should learn to delegate smartly.

Using a white label platform helps you seamlessly delegate tasks. You can create staff accounts on your white label platform and assign them different campaigns.

The platform provides them access to the tools they might need during the campaign. DashClicks allows multiple employees in your agency to access their platform using different login credentials. So, they can use it according to their needs, improving the workflow.

The platform will also allow you to track your agency's overall performance on different campaigns. You can improve the overall performance of your ad agency and its success rate through intervention.

7. Make It Easy for Your Clients to Access Their Data

One significant advantage of using a white-label platform is that it builds trust by offering tremendous transparency.

With the rising trend of on-demand services, most customers want to access their data per their needs.

DashClicks provides you and your team members with access to its dashboard. So, your clients can log in and see their campaign performance in crisp detail.

It simplifies client management and makes it convenient for your clients to review the campaign performance across different channels in one place.

It also allows you to navigate different accounts and find the information you want in a few clicks.

8. Share Reports in Different Formats

You can export digital marketing reports in various formats such as XLS, CSV, and PDF. You can also send it through email.

You can use these formats for ease of use and convenience for different clients.

You can directly share them from the dashboard using marketing reporting software like InstaReports, which can generate the entire campaign report within a few seconds.

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InstaReports is a highly convenient reporting tool for agencies that saves them time and effort. You can utilize this time in other productive ventures such as marketing and project management. The reports created by InstaReports are easy to understand and full of graphics and illustrations.

9. Use Pre-made Templates With DashClicks' Template App

DashClicks' Template App offers many dashboard templates, such as email and SMS templates. You can choose them according to your convenience and priorities in the marketing ecosystem.

These templates allow you to personalize your messaging by injecting data from apps, team users, contact records, and other data sources.

Final Words

DashClicks' automated reporting system is a game changer. Make life easier for you and your clients and save countless hours doing repetitive and monotonous tasks such as generating reports.

With numerous integrations and an intuitive dashboard to find the data you are looking for, you can easily track your campaign's performance through DashClicks' white label reports. These reports can be the greatest weapons in your arsenal for decision-making.

SEO software can be the most deadly weapon in your arsenal if you run a digital marketing business. So before you sign up for a subscription, make sure that the software has everything you need to run your business processes and that it's compatible with your pre-existing technologies.

So what are the benefits of using an SEO software?

Digital agencies always struggle while offering quality SEO services. It begins with finding clients for your agency. It would help if you had qualified SEO leads that you could nurture, engage and convert to maintain a steady revenue stream.

Businesses need traffic, leads, and sales from the web. SEO can help you with that, but it's not a cakewalk, so you need a robust SEO software program to help you.

Later, you will need to monitor your clients' campaigns and ensure they also get qualified leads for their businesses.

So, the best SEO software will address your pain-points and help you manage your workflow.

How to Find the Right SEO Software for Your SEO Business?

An SEO tool is not just a piece of software but the extension of your team through which you can perform repetitive tasks and handle numerous activities in the agency environment.

It makes your teams more productive and efficient. If you are successful in selecting the right tool, your growth is almost assured. So, without further ado, go through this SEO Software Guide and learn how to find the right SEO software for your agency.

1. Identify Your Pain Points

Identifying your pain points before selecting an SEO software is essential. Sometimes, all an agency wants is to automate a process, but most agencies need tools to manage and organize the information received from different channels. Some of the pain points agencies face are as follows:

• Organizing contact information
• Measuring campaigns
• Nurturing leads
• Conversion
• Tracking keywords
• Automate processes

2. Enumerate Your Agency's Workflow

Mapping out your agency's workflow is essential before buying an SEO software tool. Having a fair idea of your business processes and pain-points always helps find the right solutions.

Write down your agency's daily routine, including its activities.

For SEO agencies, these activities can include managing communication, lead generation, following up on leads, tracking campaigns, generating reports, on-page, and off-page SEO, and more.

Once you successfully map your agency's workflow, identify where you need help to minimize the time and effort involved.

Pro Tip: Using DashClicks' white-label platform and fulfillment services, you can do all these things efficiently and even set reminders for your team to do a certain task.

3. Does It Allow You to Conduct Competitor Analysis?

It's essential to dissect your competitors' SEO strategies and using that information, formulate a robust keyword and content strategy to achieve top rankings. It becomes even more crucial given the rise in shady marketing and SEO practices today.

Understanding Your Competitors' Backlink Profile

The right SEO software will also tell you about your competitors' backlink profiles and how their content is faring on different platforms. Your site authority largely depends on your backlinks. So, you can make a long-term plan to reach out to those websites with links pointing to your competitors' websites. It will save you both time and money in building quality backlinks.

4. How Good Is It for Website Auditing?

Website issues are akin to cracks in a new building. The sooner you fix them, the better it is for the website's health. Such in-depth SEO audits give you a host of facts and critical issues in your website. But, if you try to perform these audits manually, it will take ages to complete. Some SEO tools allow you to do audits of multiple websites simultaneously.

Some website issues that an audit can track are:

• Pages where users and search engines can’t reach, i.e., orphaned pages
• Missing page titles & meta descriptions
• Broken links
• Page depth, i.e., the number of clicks it takes to reach a page from the home page
• Page server errors

Pro Tip: DashClicks' white label website audit tool, InstaReports, automates this process and generates a user-friendly report based on these issues. These reports provide a complete blueprint of what needs to be done to remove these errors from your website and make it more feasible for search engines to crawl.

5. Does It Allow You to Find High-Converting Keywords for Content Marketing?

The failure and success of a website depends on your ability to find the right keywords. So, in short, it's not easy. Most SEO managers list specific industry terms based on search volume and competition on search engines. The criteria for choosing the keywords is that they should have a high search volume and low competition.

But, it's simply not enough. There are other factors too that should be taken into consideration. You should also differentiate those keywords based on "search intent."

The keywords seeking "free information" aren't the same as the ones used to "buy a product."

So, ensure that your SEO tool provides you with a wide variety of high-converting keywords for content marketing.

Finding New Keyword Opportunities

You may soon hit a wall with your existing keywords and wonder what to do next. A white label SEO software program allows you to discover the existing and new keywords your competitors are ranking for. The SEO tool will also provide related keywords to expand to new markets. Some tools can generate hundreds of keyword ideas instantly.

With numerous relevant keywords, you'll never fall short of keywords for your content, especially blog posts.

6. The Features Your SEO Software Should Have

Here are a few features that your SEO software should have:

A. Lead Generation Tool

Lead generation is tedious, and your white-label SEO software should simplify it. DashClicks' Inbound lead management software streamlines all the lead data and helps you manage all your inbound leads across multiple third-party platforms and distribute them among your sales team for instant follow-ups. The added advantage is that it comes with the deals app that streamlines all your sales activity, making it easy for your team members to collaborate better.

B. SEO Audit Tool

You need to perform an SEO audit to understand your client's problems and get insights into their website's SEO. It's an integral part of SEO services. Doing it manually can be extremely tedious and time-consuming, so it should come with the SEO software you subscribe to. DashClicks, a white label SEO agency, offers a complete SEO audit as part of its white label fulfillment services.

C. Lead Nurturing and Closing Features

As explained above, both the Inbound and Deals apps help you view your leads in the funnel along with all the necessary information and actions pertaining to those. It helps you nurture and close these leads.

D. Customer Relationship Management Feature (CRM)

Without a CRM, you might be losing numerous sales opportunities. When you sign up for DashClicks' white label services, you get access to our Deals app, a sales pipeline management CRM software that considerably simplifies lead and deals management for your sales team.

E. Data Analytics Feature

Without analytics, all that you're doing is just shooting in the dark. That's why your SEO software should have an advanced analytics feature. When you sign up for DashClick's white label platform, you can access our advanced analytics software that tracks and reports on all your marketing campaigns in one place.

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F. Report Builder for Clients

Lastly, reporting is an immense pain for agency owners and their teams. It eats up a lot of productive time and is incredibly repetitive in nature. So, your SEO software should have an automated report builder. DashClicks' InstaReports comes as a relief. It automates report generation by generating professional-grade SEO reports with a single click.

Final Words

Selecting the right SEO software is a crucial decision for an agency. The above tips will help you evaluate your options and choose the most suitable tool for your business. Your SEO software should be compatible with your workflow and meet your business needs. It should also save time and effort and help you deliver the best results to your clients.

While CRM and marketing automation may sound similar, there is a vast difference in how they work and the benefits you can drive through each.

The prime difference between the two is that they serve two entirely different purposes. While CRM is an essential tool that assists you in sales, marketing automation is mostly used for various marketing tasks and outreach.

Integrating them in your operations can have magical effects on your business. It will improve your customer experience as well as business capabilities.

So, let’s dive deeper into their usages and differences, and how you can use both in combination for the best results.

What Is A CRM?

CRM, or customer relationship management, is a tool many industries use to manage customer contact and relationship data. It’s focused on sales and the existing relationship a business enjoys with its customers.

For example, if a customer has a savings account, a personal loan, a credit card, and health insurance from a single bank, it would be their existing relationship with the bank.

So, a CRM is a tool that tracks and manages customer relationships throughout the entire sales funnel.

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What Are the Benefits of CRM Software?

The most significant advantage of using a CRM is that it increases your chances of converting prospects to loyal customers.

Here are some significant benefits a CRM offers:

1. Streamlines customer data, i.e., name, address, and phone number (NAP.) for easy tracking and organization. It enables everyone in your organization to access and use customer information for better customer support and lead generation.

2. CRM also saves your time by reducing the routine tasks that consume more time.

3. It also improves customer engagement by ensuring consistent, personalized, and targeted messaging.

4. You can use CRM to identify increased sales opportunities by tracking your customers’ buying patterns. You can use this information to get insights into themes and trends that can help you identify new sales opportunities.

5. CRM also enables centralized sales to progress tracking across your entire organization, which is vital to pushing the prospect down the funnel. It will also help you identify areas of improvement, bridge gaps, and assign leads to salespersons.

6. Have you ever seen highly personalized communications from brands you buy from? CRM helps you do that.

For example, a customer browses sports shoes on Amazon or any other eCommerce site and soon receives personalized emails or messages about offers and discounts on selected sports shoes. It’s possible because of a robust CRM that tracks everything. Today, even AI is being used along with CRM and other marketing tools to closely predict what a customer has on their mind.

How to Personalize Your Communications?

Many CRM platforms provide tools for personalizing your messaging to customers. It boosts lead conversion. An Infosys study reveals that 86% of consumers reported that personalization influences their buying decisions in a big way. There are many ways you can personalize your communications, such as:

• Adding customers’ names in your emails
• Target campaigns based on their buying behavior
• Sending emails based on where they are in their customer journey

Things You Can Achieve With a CRM Software

You can achieve the following with the help of a CRM software:

• Increased engagement
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Increased sales

You can easily drive sales through CRM by tracking the customers’ stages in their buying journeys.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing doesn’t work in a straight line. There are various steps and aspects, and automation allows you to automate and streamline critical marketing tasks and workflows.

Automation covers everything from lead generation to segmentation and lead-nurturing. Marketing automation also facilitates account-based marketing and customer retention.

The primary purpose of marketing automation is to speed up processes and eliminate repetitive, manual, and time-consuming tasks.

Marketing automation is also used to create targeted marketing campaigns for individuals using targeted content. The result is a better customer experience.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

With marketing automation, you can save time by automating vital marketing tasks. When you free up your resources and eliminate wasteful activities, you can utilize your time and money to implement other targeting strategies.

What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

With marketing automation, you can achieve a high conversion rate, improve workflow, boost productivity, create custom content, and enable personalized buying journeys. The most significant advantage of marketing automation is that it helps you generate high-quality leads, faster.

How Do CRM and Marketing Automation Work Together?

We have discussed the benefits of both CRM and marketing automation. What if, we combine both? The combined strengths of the two can do wonders to your marketing campaigns. Marketing automation supplies detailed info to your CRM, so your entire team can get actionable insights about your prospects and existing customers.

It’s crucial to understand the difference between the two, so you can figure out why it’s best to integrate them.

Marketing automation facilitates lead generation and nurturing, while CRM is a sales tool and doesn’t serve your core funnel marketing needs. But, when you integrate the two, you can do the following:

• Build a relationship and engage your prospects. It also helps you push them down the funnel using targeted content before sending them as a hot lead to sales. This, in turn, minimizes the uncertainty and pressure on the sales team.
• Use detailed and closed-loop reporting aided by micro-analysis to see what’s working and what isn’t.
• Improve lead quality.
• Help sales reps understand the entire customer history and their behavior from when they come to your website as a visitor, until they become interested in your product.
• Send targeted messages to support and nurture leads.

Key takeaway: When we combine marketing automation with CRM, it becomes our biggest marketing & sales weapon. It ensures a consistent flow of leads and sales.

DashClicks’ white-label platform offers CRM and marketing automation through its apps, such as:

1. Deals App: It helps you manage leads and deals within your sales pipelines CRM software.
2. Projects: Our white-label project management app provides the easiest and most powerful way to manage your projects, teams, customers, etc.
3. Inbound: Helps you manage all your inbound leads across multiple third-party platforms. You can also share these leads with your sales team so they can follow up and convert them.
4. Contacts: DashClicks’ unique contact management CRM software helps you manage your contacts easily.

What’s more, you can access all these apps through a single dashboard! So, no need to open multiple tabs and repeat logins.

Why Do CRM and Marketing Automation Need Each Other?

CRM and marketing automation are the two most essential tools businesses use to grow in the digital ecosystem. Marketing automation can’t replace CRM, but it sure can help increase the efficiency of your sales department. It reduces the tedious and repetitive manual tasks such as emailing and calling the prospects.

Content marketing automation helps you craft engaging content for different stages in the buyer’s journey. And it’s proven that care automation improves customer support. Together, they can help generate qualified sales leads for your fledgling business.

Case Study:

How SmartBear Software increased inbound leads by 200% using marketing automation and CRM together?

SmartBear Software is a B2B cloud software development company. The business owners decided to take advantage of technology and deploy marketing automation and CRM as an integrated process to boost their sales.

The plan was simple but effective. According to Keith Lincoln, VP Marketing, SmartBear, the management chose three objectives:

• Easily implemented
• Scalable
• Can integrate with the new CRM system

After finalizing the vendor, they called in a third-party engineer to implement the software. The consulting engineer introduced specific training programs for the in-house employees to speed up the learning curve. The modus operandi led to the automation solution functioning within a work week.

The initial days were challenging and full of implementation hassles and struggles. So, the engineer suggested that the teams go slow and keep their activities limited to running a few email campaigns. However, soon the systematically designed training sessions started yielding results, and the teams quickly learned how to implement lead-nurturing and handle a high volume of leads in different segments.

Soon, they also integrated automation with their webinar platform, adding to their outreach armor. The results proved the efficacy of combining CRM and marketing automation, and their efforts paid off. Lead volume skyrocketed to 200%. In the meantime, 80% of total leads generated came from an automated software trial download campaign. The leads generated through this trial download campaign generated 85% of SmartBear’s total revenue.

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Final Words

The absence of CRM and marketing automation software integration may lead to many missed opportunities for your business. A marketing automation system is used mainly to automate marketing tasks, such as sending personalized messages to prospects based on their various stages in the buyer's journey. It can be a total game-changer and open the doors to a plethora of new opportunities for you!

The nature of integration will depend on the business needs. So, you should have a system where you can combine the best features of both types of tools. Or else, you can outsource digital marketing services from an agency that integrates both the systems into their services. DashClicks offers a white-label platform for agencies of all kinds and sizes where you can use our CRM and various automation apps together.

Further Reading: Does Your Organization Really Need a Marketing Automation Platform?

Studies indicate that you have about five minutes to make contact with a lead if you want conversion.

Yet, you probably take hours if not days to catch up on your recent list of submissions. That means the individual likely forgot about you, found another brand, and already made a connection.

If your lead management system's results sound like this, you need better solutions.

Here are six tips for better inbound marketing lead management you can start implementing right now within your company.

1. Segment All of Your Inbound Leads

When you run a digital ad campaign, you're likely to get clicks and submissions from a variety of users.

From there, your sales representatives look at the contact data, then try to verify email, prepare their pitch, and attempt to touch base. They repeat this process until they've exhausted their list.

This approach is a mistake.

Though interest in your products or services is a common denominator, not all of your audiences will share the same characteristics.

According to a survey, 62% of marketers purport to utilize segmentation to better communicate with leads. The reason for this is that highly-personalized advertisements show a much better response rate than general-purpose ads.

You can segment your inbound leads in the following ways:

• Marketing channels used
• Age
• Gender
• Income levels
• Occupation
• Interests/hobbies

When you filter your leads into one or more of these pools, your team can build a better picture of that persona.

For example, a local landscaping company likely does business with all local properties including homes, businesses, and even municipal buildings. However, they would want to tailor specific ads to target homeowners and business property owners respectively for best results.

Fortunately, most advertising platforms like Facebook Ads or Google Ads will automatically gather data when available.

Of course, you can further qualify any leads by asking the right questions on your landing page's submission form. If your offer applies to customers of a certain income threshold, you may wish to ask for an approximation in addition to their contact details.

You'll need to test and balance this to avoid overburdening potential leads with too many questions that ultimately drive them away.

Finally, you can better optimize inbound lead management from all platforms by utilizing superior inbound management tools. One such type of software is the Inbound app offered through the DashClicks platform.

Inbound allows users to integrate their campaigns from a variety of third-party tools including:

• Facebook Ads
• CallRail
• ClickFunnels
• Instapage
• Kartra
• ManyChat
• PhoneSites
• Unbounce

Instead of checking in to each of these accounts, all of your leads will automatically show up in one unified dashboard.

From there, you can set the campaign to automatically delegate lead responsibilities to specific sales reps or via round-robin assignments. This serves to help speed up response times and avoid overburdening your sales teams with more leads than they can handle.

2. Remarket to Specific Buyer Personas

After you've done the work of segmenting your audience, it's time to get to work on creating better-optimized campaigns.

We highly recommend creating individualized PPC campaigns designed to attract segmented users.

While this may seem difficult at first blush, it's easier for content creators due to a better understanding of the target. Instead of trying to make ad copy that works for everyone, they can freely write messages to one specific type of buyer.

Customers can and will identify when your copy is speaking to them personally. Once you have their attention, you seal the deal simply by listing the benefits they can gain by shopping with your brand.

If you're working with a limited ad budget, you may need to score leads to determine which types of campaigns you wish to pursue first.

You can score leads and audiences by the weight of actions taken when interacting with the campaign. Clicking on an ad is meaningful, but filling out a form or responding to an email is more significant.

Finally, remember that segmenting your campaigns will improve your ROI overall. That means a smaller cost-per-lead and more budget available to use toward more unique campaigns.

3. Create Highly-Targeted Landing Pages

This is more a continuation of the last tip but bears noting nonetheless.

Your ads should not only target specific audience segments but should direct them to highly personalized landing pages.

The landing page equates to an in-person or over-the-phone sales pitch. Any representative with experience will tailor their approach to what they know about that individual or group.

Using this same practice when designing a page, uploading images, and writing your copy will result in:

• More clicks
• Longer session duration
• More form signups
• Better email marketing metrics

Furthermore, any sales representatives assigned to this specific campaign will already know about the leads they're dealing with ahead of time. This grants the opportunity to continuously analyze and refine your sales tactics for that audience segment.

4. Implement Chatbots for Superior Response Times

While we already acknowledged the importance of a quick response, there are limits to every sales team.

Thanks to modern tech and a bit of know-how, you never need to worry about leaving potential leads in limbo.

There are countless chatbot platforms available for marketers and business owners to implement in no time at all. Sites like Chatbot and ManyChat provide you with all you need to set up your bot script and get the leads the information they require.

This is superior to leaving users with a message like We'll be in touch soon on your landing pages as nothing beats instant satisfaction. Furthermore, you leave users feeling empowered by keeping them in the know and directing them to resources that can help with their purchasing decision.

Chatbots not only help users feel heard but can help you to continuously qualify leads that have already demonstrated a high level of purchasing intent.

Tools like ManyChat are among the list of previously referenced integrations that you can incorporate into your DashClicks account for better lead management overall.

5. Offer Trials or Demos

What's better than getting a lightning-fast response?

Taking away something useful for absolutely zero cost.

Successful marketers know this, and that's why so many ad campaigns and landing pages come complete with some form of lead magnet.

A lead magnet is any free item or service that offers immediate value and benefit to the lead simply for providing their contact information. The less information they need to provide, the more likely the lead magnet is to swing the conversion in your favor.

Lead magnets do not need to be particularly elaborate or expensive to put together. A common tactic is to put together short eBooks that help educate the customer about aspects of your brand. For example, real estate agents often push eBooks that teach buyers what to look for when shopping for new homes.

However, the best type of lead magnet is one that allows the lead to sample the product or service.

Offering something that doesn't hurt your brand's bottom line can make for excellent conversion tactics. These might include:

• Free classes
• 7-day free trials
• Trial-sized products
• Free professional consultations
• Free software demos

There's no better way to sell a product or service than to let it speak for itself. Think of ways that you could create a free, cost-effective experience for leads to make more sales.

6. Nurture Real Relationships

Finally, the best tip of all is to treat each new lead like the individual they are.

This can prove to be difficult for unprepared teams, but there are technologies available to help with audience nurturing.

By real relationships, we mean going above and beyond the standard marketing messaging.

When customers show interest by filling out the forms on your landing pages, send out a message addressing them by name thanking them for their time.

If customers take the time for a call and hear your pitch, let them know that their time is valued and appreciated. Showing your customers that they're worth more than their wallet goes a long way in not only landing a sale but building customers for life.

Improving your ROI is not just about capturing leads for less ad spend, but building a relationship that increases customer lifetime value.

Other tactics like sending exclusive sales and discounts to loyal customers are another great way to help them feel appreciated while providing an incentive to make additional purchases. Customers love to know that their business is more valued than someone new to the scene.

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Better Lead Management is Readily Available

With so many platforms and automation tools available, poor lead management should never be something that holds your business back.

Not only do PPC platforms like Facebook and Google automatically provide segmented data, but platforms like DashClicks can also help unify all of those metrics into one place.

With all of this personalized data on your side, your paid ads and content teams should have an easier time curating ad content and landing pages for specific groups. The better focused your content is, the more likely you are to drive conversions.

Finally, valuing the customer's time is essential. Make sure to be quick with your response times by having reps ready to call or a chatbot ready to point users in the right direction. Strong lead magnets will also help leads remain engaged and empower them to make informed purchasing decisions.

You can refine all of these tips in a way that works best within your existing lead management system. The better you are at establishing and nurturing relationships, the more likely you are to improve your ROI over time.