Services tighten links between CRM, marketing tools

Is CRM the center of your small company's productivity applications universe?

If the answer is "yes," you'll be interested in two new integration platforms designed to help small and midsize businesses (SMBs) better connect their customer information with the tools they use to manage social media outreach and marketing campaigns.

Here are two of the latest developments that I've heard about:

Batchbook plus HootSuite: It looks like social CRM developer Batchbook took the initiative here, to create close ties with the HootSuite social media dashboard. The integration means that Batchbook information and customer records can be accessed from within HootSuite. Conversely, you can add new contacts into the Batchbook database directly from with the marketing dashboard. 

"Important conversations can happen anywhere, and our new app gives small businesses and professionals the power to capture those exchanges and record them in Batchbook for future reference," said Pamela O'Hara, CEO and co-founder of Batchbook. "HootSuite's users send more than 3 million messages through the dashboard each day. Those social posts and conversations, as well as emails, phone calls, notes and meetings are all critical data to save in your small-business CRM."

VerticalResponse and SyncApps by Cazoomi:  More recently, marketing services and applications company VerticalResponse has moved to support the email API integration technology developed by Cazoomi, called SyncApps. That will synchronize the VerticalResponse email marketing tools with CRM platforms including Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite CRM, Highrise CRM, SugarCRM and ZohoCRM. That would enable marketers to select certain customers within their CRM system and import them directly into a VerticalResponse dashboard to plan, deploy and manage a campaign. 

The primary benefit touted is time savings."By eliminating the need to toggle between multiple systems for marketing and for managing customer contact data, [SMBs] can focus more of their efforts on growing their business," said Janine Popick, founder and CEO of VerticalResponse.  

The integration does come at a cost. The basic plan for the integrated solution starts at $9.99 per month.