Social CRM meets Marketing Automation

Much of our conversation around marketing automation tends to focus on the new revenue side of the business. Understanding digital body language allows us to understand which prospects are ready to buy, and which need to be further nurtured. However, the same concepts apply to the understanding of existing customers.

Understanding which customers are engaged with your knowledge portal and online community in order to learn more, which are struggling, and which are advocates allows you to use similar principles in order to better guide all of your customers towards success and ultimately renewal. I wrote recently about the ideas behind renewal marketing and social CRM, and the opportunity that it provides us to focus on maximizing customer satisfaction.

Since that time, I’ve had a number of conversations with the folks at Helpstream (who power our Customer Central online community), and we have a strong collaboration in the works. Recently, the Helpstream team announced the ability to integrate marketing and social CRM by adding Eloqua tracking to any pages (or all pages) within a Helpstream-power portal that you would like.

By doing this, activities within the social CRM community can be used as part of your lead nurturing strategies to guide your communication based on what level of engagement an individual has, or as part of lead scoring algorithms for looking at renewal or upsell.

If you have both Eloqua and Helpstream, it is worth ensuring that you are receiving the insights into your customers’ engagement with your social CRM system by integrating Eloqua scripts into the portal.