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Shedding Light on CRM and its Integration into Email Marketing

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Every business is competing to draw maximum attention from its target audience. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that your prospects and customers find your messages relevant. Communicating with the right message at the right time goes a long way in winning over the customer. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools can help you out with this and streamline your marketing operations. 

By integrating CRM into email marketing, you will be able to impart a personalized customer experience to your subscribers. Here’s how you can use CRM to deploy more effective email campaigns that can bring results. 

1. Better segmentation and personalization

With the help of a powerful CRM tool like Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, businesses can segment their subscribers in a better way and personalize the emails accordingly. According to a report by SuperOffice, hyper-segmentation can facilitate customer acquisition and retention, a higher deliverability rate, and an increase in the number of sales leads. Email Uplers recently carried out a study in which it was revealed that personalization is one of the most pressing issues for CRM managers. Most of the experts worked with an in-house team to execute all these marketing operations. 

2. Integration with third-party tools

It is possible to integrate your CRM tools with a number of third-party software programs. By doing so, you can have a centralized platform to maintain all your marketing tasks, whether it is lead generation, tracking the movement of leads in the sales funnel, and reaching out to them at the right time. 

3. Effective lead nurturing

Tools like Marketo and SFMC come with a lead scoring model that allows you to nurture the leads based on their interaction with your website. You can set a drip email workflow to send out relevant offers and product updates that might prompt the subscribers to convert. You can also employ the principles of Artificial Intelligence and behavioral tracking to send out triggered lead nurturing emails.

4. Customized email templates

CRM tools let you create tailormade email templates with dynamic content blocks as well as enticing visuals to woo customers. Most of these tools have an in-built drag-and-drop editor that facilitates the creation of attractive emails that can yield a higher open rate and conversion rate.   

5. In-depth analysis of metrics

Integrating CRM and email marketing gives you a detailed insight into the key performance indicators like open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate. It will even help you to understand how your readers are interacting with the emails. You can get a clear picture of the click-to-conversion rate and overall conversion rate. This will give you a clear picture of how your email campaigns are performing. Accordingly, you can keep optimizing your emails for optimum results.    

6. Integration with Social Media

CRM tools come with a feature that lets you integrate your email marketing with social media. By using it, you can determine the social media visitors through email. You can also build your social media visibility and establish a stronger foothold in the digital marketplace.   

7. Powerful email automation

Integrating CRM with emails allows you to set relevant automation workflows based on the customer’s journey with your brand. For example: You will send out a welcome email to someone who has just joined your email list or made the first purchase from you. You can even send out automated marketing emails to your subscribers through this tool. Re-engagement email workflow comes into the picture when you want to win back the dormant customers and encourage them to take action again. Ecommerce brands can even set a cart abandonment email workflow to remind them about the product they left in the cart. Subsequently, they will be tempted to complete the checkout process and make the purchase.    

Things to keep in mind:

  1. CRM managers must make sure not to overwhelm the subscribers by sending out too many emails. 
  2. Project management is of paramount importance when it comes to CRM and email marketing integration. You must see to it that all the teams are aligned with their tasks and well in sync. 
  3. Maintain a record of everything and always have a backup in case you end up losing the data because of some inadvertent circumstances.  
  4. Keep a close eye on the quality of leads that you are getting. Having 1000 qualified leads is always better than having 25000 leads but not being sure whether they are qualified or not. 
  5. Streamline your email approval process so that there are minimum rounds of revisions and changes. 
  6. Even if you cannot create an exclusive email for every prospect or customer, make sure it is relevant to them. This will improve all your communications and bring unmatched results for your business. 
  7. Data governance is everything. 

Summing it up

CRM has not only enables data-driven marketing across the various channels but has also raised the bar for customer experience. 

If you are yet to invest in a CRM tool, now is the right time. 

To learn more about CRM email marketing and its challenges, solutions, and pro-tips from the experts, head to the insightful resource created by Email Uplers –Exploring the Realms of CRM:  A Roundup 

About the author

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Kevin George

Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest-growing email designand coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free responsive HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.