The digital world has evolved a lot since the email first became available to people. Gone are the days when customers were happy to be a part of the crowd, Today, everyone wants to be a priority and want their personal interests to be considered.
Email marketing is the most effective way by which you can share messages, sell your products and services and build a relationship with your prospectus. Over 75% of email revenue is generated from triggered campaigns than one-size-for-all campaigns. In short, email marketing is a big deal and you need to adapt to this personal world of marketing to remain competitive in the industry.
With the features offered by CRM system, email marketing is simplified and you do not need a dedicated email-marketing software to accomplish this.
Why It is Important to Integrate Email Marketing with CRM
Some of the benifts of email markeitng integration with CRM:
- Fast response time
- Effective teamwork
- Eliminate data entry errors
- Lead nurturing
- Marketing automation
- Personalized Emails
- Comprehensive ROI
- Improved sales visibility
CRM Features Essential for Email Marketing Campaigns
Send Emails in bulk
When you are under the mission of running extensive marketing campaigns, sending one email at a time does not cut it. Here is when the bulk email functionality in a CRM comes to your rescue.
These days, CRMs have expanded to include many features and sending bulk emails and SMS is a major one among them. Sending the same general message to selected contacts at a scheduled time is very effective in sending promotions, newsletters, re-engaging old customer and notifying customers about any new services and so forth. Besides, email marketing, bulk emails are fairly baseline within any CRM. Most of them offer a free option for bulk emailing.
Allow custom Email templates
Different email templates are required for specific use cases. CRM offers customer email templates for different use cases like a welcome message, notification of payment receipts, remainder mails whenever service renewal date is nearing etc. and helps you to refine messages for a specific use. Good CRM let you personalize the message to add the recipient’s name and other personal information through a small bit of code. It is also possible to conduct A/B tests with custom templates to find out which types of messages are best received by customers.
CRM also provides real-time alerts to sales agents in case of any specific events like, when any customers watch videos, opens an email, click a link etc. that helps in a personalized follow-up. Knowing which customers engage with your message and in which formats, you can take specific actions that will lead to effective results.
Intelligent workflow based email notifications
Intelligent workflow automation is one of the popular features of a CRM as it eliminates the need to perform tasks manually. Workflow automation simplifies the tasks of the sales process, account management, and support automation and makes sure that nothing is overlooked. Workflow automatically creates follow up tasks for your sales team so that no important activity is missed. It also sends alerts to the sales team to keep them coordinated and push critical information. Another functionality is sending automated emails to prospects with no manual efforts. Use templates, choose the sender, send messages, and track the emails sent.
Auto email responses
Automating email responses is a feature that allows you to configure triggers to prompt automatic sending of responses to email. When comparing CRMs, look for the feature trigger, which suggests the ability to determine specific actions that promote the email like a customer abandoning the shopping cart, visiting your site several times or checking out your pricing page etc. Successful email marketing service is all about sending the right messages to relevant customers at the right time.
As you know, email marketing mainly depends on the ability to modify your approach according to what works. With a CRM, you can easily track recipient engagement like what percentage of customers opens the email, who downloads attachments or click on links etc. These individual responses will be noted over the time and the CRM provides accurate data on conversion rates, bounce rates, click-through rates, engagements etc. It can also be visualized in form of reports to analyze campaign performance.
In the conclusion
When a business grows, new challenges come into play, which did not even existed when the company size was smaller. One common issue is the lack of integration between business systems. When applications fail to communicate with each other, important data is trapped in stand-alone spreadsheets that leads to error and inefficiency. Both CRM technology and email marketing has advanced significantly with both platforms becoming more intuitive and intelligent.
After all, an in-depth understanding of your customer needs and interests is fundamental in designing appropriate and engaging email communications. Keeping both CRM and email marketing integrated, therefore, makes a lot of sense, irrespective of the scope of your business. Share your thoughts and comments on this blog post and if you wish to have a talk with our consultants to see how we could assist you in offering CRM solutions to transform your business, contact us at sales@secondcrm.com.