Integrating Email with Other Apps

• Updated on: 2017-07-15
• Read original article here

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Imagine you’re launching a brand new product and you want to email your customers about it. You create the email, add in beautiful imagery, and everything is ready to go.
But just as you’re about to send it, you realize your list is way out-of-date. If you were to send the campaign now, hundreds of your customers may not receive it and you’d miss valuable click-throughs and potential revenue or sales.
It’s a problem many marketers face, but there is a solution: integrating your email marketing tool with your other business apps.
In this guide, we’ll show you why you need to integrate your email marketing tool with the other applications you use to run your business, and share some of the advanced email campaigns you can send once you’ve got your systems integrated.
Chapter 1
Why integrate?
Email marketing is the most effective marketing channels around today. In fact, according to a recent study by VentureBeat , email has the highest ROI of any marketing channel, beating out social media, paid search, TV, and radio among others.
But your organization’s success with email marketing largely depends on the quality and data in your email lists.
In fact, research shows that marketers who have in-depth information on their subscribers and are using it to segment their lists and send targeted campaigns receive a 760% increase in email revenue over those that aren’t.
But how can you make sure your lists are always up-to-date? And how can you ensure you have in-depth data about each of your subscribers ready to use in your campaigns?
The answer to both of these questions is integration, as it’s likely you actually have the information you need, it just lives in other systems or apps you are already using. Now you just have to get them all working together.
For sales organizations that data might live in your CRM tool, or for online retailers that data will likely exist in your chosen eCommerce platform.
By integrating these tools with your email marketing solution, data can be automatically available to help you segment your lists, add dynamic content to emails or even trigger automated email campaigns to customers.
All of this makes for more relevant and appealing email campaigns that ultimately drive more revenue for your business.
Chapter 2
Salesforce CRM
If your business has salespeople driving new customer acquisition, then chances are there is a wealth of information in your CRM system that could be used to fuel smart, powerful email marketing campaigns that help close more deals and increase revenue for your business.
Salesforce, the world’s most popular CRM, is known for its enterprise sales, marketing, and service platform, but turns to its partner ecosystem for email marketing apps.
By integrating CRM tools like Salesforce with Campaign Monitor , it’s simple to automatically sync contact information between the two systems, including a contact’s name, email address, sales cycle stage, contact owner, and all of your other custom fields. You can even utilize your custom fields, like propensity to buy or product interest, to target and personalize the campaigns you send.
With these rich customer insights from Salesforce now flowing continuously to your email marketing tool, you can then use Campaign Monitor features to build a modern, on-brand email campaign – without a line of code or ever leaving Salesforce.
All email activity is then tracked right inside the Salesforce contact record, so salespeople have visibility into the email campaigns that marketing is sending and can see how prospects are engaging with those email campaigns.
To help get you started, here are a few ideas for email marketing campaigns you can send to help close new deals and/or drive more business from your existing customers.
Convert Prospects to Customers
According to research, over 50% of leads generated are qualified but not yet ready to buy . As a marketer, it’s likely your responsibility to guide these leads down the funnel to purchase. An email marketing campaign is an extremely effective way to do this.
By integrating your CRM and email marketing tool, you can set up a series of automated lead nurturing emails that go out to prospects containing guides, videos, and customer case studies to help them learn about how your product can benefit them, moving them further down the buying cycle until they are ready to be closed by your sales reps.
Here at Campaign Monitor, we use our own email marketing tool to do this. When a potential customer becomes a lead by downloading one of our free content pieces, we synchronize their email address into our Campaign Monitor account and guide them toward trying our email marketing solution.
The initial email of the series aims to drive adoption with a clear call to action to create a campaign inside Campaign Monitor. And for those who need assistance getting started, we introduce our team of email marketing specialists and a few ways to contact them.
The subsequent emails in this series contain an assortment of helpful resources – videos, case studies, and more – to ensure those interested in Campaign Monitor feel 100% comfortable using it and understand the value it brings to their business.
Upsell and Cross-sell Promotions
The potential for revenue doesn’t end once you’ve successfully converted a lead to a customer.
Once you’ve closed a customer, your CRM contains all the information around which products your customers have purchased, enabling you to target certain customers with promotions for other products and services they haven’t purchased. By integrating your CRM with your email marketing tool, you can send highly relevant campaign offers about these other products.
If you don’t have multiple products to sell, you could also target customers with additional services, such as a paid support option or an additional consulting offering.
Event invitations
Events are an excellent way to educate your prospects about both the value your products offer and to upsell other products to existing customers. Email is the single most effective way to send an invitation to your leads and contacts.
If you’re running a live event or exhibiting at a trade show, you can build a targeted campaign by geography. For example, if you’re hosting a dinner in Austin, you can easily create an email list containing all your contacts in the neighboring zip codes. This way you target only the individuals who can realistically attend the event.
If it’s an on-demand event – such as an online webcast – you can target your contacts based on product interest or where cross-sell/upsell opportunities exist. By integrating your email marketing solution with your CRM, you can create a list with prospects who share the same product interest and invite them to an online event about that topic.
Campaign Monitor customer Soho House is a great example of how to invite contacts to a live event:
With multiple locations around the globe, Soho House has to be hyper-targeted in how they invite their guests. It wouldn’t make sense to invite all their CRM contacts to an event in Chicago. Rather, they can segment their list to invite only those contacts within driving distance of the event by creating an email list by area code.
Chapter 3
eCommerce platform
If you run an online store, then chances are you’re collecting order details like items purchased, amount spent, purchase frequency, and more.
These insights into your customer’s spending patterns can be useful for segmenting your lists and sending highly relevant campaigns – such as special offers, promotions, or purchase recommendations – so making it available in your email marketing tool is a great step towards driving more revenue from your email marketing.
Through various connectors, an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor can integrate with all the popular eCommerce platforms , including Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce and more.
Here’s some ideas for email marketing campaigns you can send when you integrate your eCommerce platform and your email marketing software :
Targeted Promotions and Special Offers
When you have new products arriving, or a promotion approaching, rather than sending your offer to your entire subscriber base, you should be segmenting your list and targeting the campaign to those who you know are going to be interested.
Take this email from Campaign Monitor customer Rip Curl for example:
Although Rip Curl has a vast line of apparel for men, they have enough information in their email marketing platform to identify who their female subscribers are, so they only send them information about the latest bikinis.
This ensures the content of their campaign is relevant to recipients, and increases the number of opens, clicks and sales they get from the campaign.
Once you’ve connected your email tool and eCommerce platform, this kind of targeting is simple. You can create segments and send different campaigns to each segment of your list, or send the same campaign, but use Dynamic Content to show relevant offers and promotions to subscribers based on what you know about them (like their gender for instance).
Birthday emails with special offers
A birthday is an exciting time for anyone, and also a time in which people are willing to treat themselves.
By integrating your eCommerce platform, you can automatically pass your customer’s date of birth into your email marketing software and then set up automatic birthday emails that go out to your customers with a special offer or discount for their birthday.
Take this email from Campaign Monitor customer Chandon for example.
Not only does the email show they care about their customers by wishing their subscribers a happy birthday, it also provides the customers with a highly-relevant offer that encourages them to make a purchase. And who doesn’t want a bottle of champagne on their birthday?
Request for Feedback
Collecting customer feedback is the best way to constantly improve the user experience with your online store.
By integrating your eCommerce platform with your email service provider, you can automatically generate a post-purchase survey to understand what their experience was like and how you can improve it. Online survey tool GetFeedback enables you to create an engaging and mobile-ready survey in just minutes so you can see your customers’ feedback in real-time.
Campaign Monitor customer Fiji Airways understands the value of listening to their passengers and sends a post-trip survey email to better understand how they can improve:
Since they’re trying to reach passengers who are traveling, it’s critical their emails are mobile optimized. The above email is concise in that it clearly directs their audience to take the 5 minute survey. The entire experience is mobile optimized so their passenger can complete the entire survey from their taxi cab or hotel room.
Chapter 4
Website & landing pages
Like most marketers, you probably have a website designed to help you drive revenue for your business.
By integrating Campaign Monitor with a website management system like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Kentico, or Unbounce, you can create sign up boxes to a page to capture additional subscribers.
Whether you achieve that by capturing leads through contact forms or by selling products directly on your website, it’s important that you use the information people enter into your site to fuel smart, powerful email marketing campaigns that grow your business.
Here are a few ideas for targeted campaigns you can send when you integrate your website with your email marketing tool:
Newsletter Subscription
Oftentimes someone will visit your website in search of more information about your products and services, but aren’t yet ready to purchase. For these visitors, it’s critical to make signing up for an informative newsletter really easy so they get the information they need.
Campaign Monitor customer NAU’s newsletter subscription form is the first thing their website visitors see when they visit www.nau.com:
Nau asks for a single piece of contact information: an email address. And when your email service provider is integrated with your website, each new signup will be automatically added to your newsletter list. Read on to learn how you can make the most of having your website visitor’s email address.
Automated welcome series
Once you’ve collected your website visitor’s email address, you can then drop them into a welcome email series to keep your brand at top of mind. Nau’s newsletter, “Off the Grid,” serves to keep their contacts informed about new products, special offers, interesting interviews, and discussions about relevant topics to their subscribers.
Their initial newsletter is transparent about exactly what type of content the newsletter will contain, its cadence, and provides an opportunity to opt-out of future communications. The newsletter is less about selling product and more about sharing content that interests their readers.
New Content Updates
If you use content marketing to attract and convert new customers, then email is one of the most critical methods for building your audience.
By integrating your blog with your email marketing tool, you can automatically send out email campaigns to subscribers when new blog posts are published.
Campaign Monitor customer Freshbooks does a great job of this.
Each time Freshbooks publishes a new post on their blog, an email like the one above is automatically generated and sent to subscribers. These campaigns encourage people to read their blog content and share it over social networks, which in turn drives new visitors and signups for Freshbooks.
Once you’ve connected your email tool and website, this kind of automated email is easy to set up. You can use Automation to monitor your blog’s RSS feed and automatically create and send a campaign when it detects new content. You can even configure it to go out at specific time intervals, so you can send an email once per week and automatically have all your newest blog content included in the email.
Chapter 5
Accounting & billing tools
For a lot of businesses, you collect several unique data points when you invoice or bill your customers, including when they became a customer and where they’re located. These two data points alone are extremely valuable to have in your email marketing tool because you can send geographically targeted campaigns and subscription renewal emails.
Campaign Monitor can integrate with Xero, Quickbooks, MYOB, Freshbooks, Harvest, Stripe and more so sharing this information between the two systems is seamless.
Let’s drill down into the value of knowing your contacts’ geographical location and when they became a customer.
Geographically Targeted Campaigns
Demographic information, by way of your customer’s billing address, is a common data point kept in accounting tools.
By integrating your accounting software with your email marketing tool, you can use this information to create geographical segments and send more targeted campaigns and promotions to your customer base.
Campaign Monitor customer Converse targets their customer base by region. As you can see below, they’ve customized the language in the email for their Spanish speaking audience. They even have the option to utilize our dynamic content feature to modify the language in the email based on their subscriber’s location.
Delivering targeted content is a smart marketing move because personalized email are proven to have higher click-through rates – to the tune of 14%. By integrating your accounting tool with your email marketing software, you’ll have the information you need to create these kind of engaging campaigns that generate results.
Subscription Renewal emails
If you have a sales team, then chances are they’re recording every closed deal in your CRM along with the date they closed it.
When integrated with your email marketing tool, this information becomes incredibly valuable at renewal time. You can send customers an automated email series in the leadup to their renewal date reminding them of the impending renewal and encouraging them to take action.
Campaign Monitor customer Birchbox does an excellent job of this.
They send a beautiful, branded email reminding their customers that their subscription will expire soon is soon to expire. They provide a clear call-to-action for customers to renew their subscription and even add a sneak peek at a few products that the subscriber has to look forward to if she decides to renew.
This kind of automated email is simple to set up when your tools are integrated, and helps you generate more revenue from your existing customers by encouraging them to continue paying you for longer.
Chapter 5
In conclusion
By integrating your business apps with your email marketing tool, you can start sending your leads & customers a variety of compelling campaigns that can help you close more deals and drive more revenue from your existing customer base. So go ahead and use the ideas and tools mentioned here to set up an integration today.