How Integrating CRM with Email Marketing can Benefit Your Marketing Campaign

• Updated on: 2020-02-13
• Read original article here

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is at the heart of every marketing strategy. It helps you keep track of customer information, sales history, and product information, as well as organize customer reminders and callbacks, schedule staff hours, initiate coupon mailers, and generate reports about sales volumes, goals, and performance.

In addition, CRM systems also help you orchestrate the email campaigns and use them to the maximum potential. If you have not yet integrated your email marketing with the CRM, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity of effective communication.

CRM is a tool that facilitates better management of your relationship with the customers. It lets you know the customers better and ramp up the engagement.

A CRM tool stores every interaction that takes place between you and your customers, thereby allowing you to manage the complete buyer’s journey.

Let’s say, you are a startup with 150 clients. Just because they have converted or completed a purchase from you does not mean that you do not contact them anymore. You should plan a suitable marketing strategy and inform them that you value the association with them. CRM tool comes into picture here. You can send occasion-based emails to them, incentivize them with loyalty rewards, or other campaigns customized according to the customer’s preferences.

With the help of a CRM tool, you can capture all these details like birthday, trial period validity, previous purchases, resources downloaded etc. and store it at one place. By tracking this information, you can clearly understand the customer’s behavior and interests. Subsequently, you can send automated emails triggered according to a specific action. This, in turn, helps you to build a stronger rapport with the customers.

Having a CRM tool in place will also let you connect the campaign responses and lead generation strategies which will eventually help you to estimate the return on investment, explore future scope, ramp up the collaboration, and enhance the conversions.

Like the example above, if you have 150 clients, it is quite easy to monitor the subscription status. You can manually send reminder emails and ask them for subscription renewal. That is obviously not possible with larger lists with diverse preferences.

Although you can always have email marketing and CRM work separately, they can work more effectively when they come together. Enlisted below are some of the benefits that you can derive by integrating these two aspects.

Getting email marketing integrated with your CRM lets you send triggered emails based on the subscriber’s activity. Let’s look at an example from ecommerce sector. Whenever a customer places an order, you must send transactional emails like order confirmation emails, shipping notification and other delivery updates as and when required. Similarly, when he or she leaves a product in the cart and abandons it without completing the purchase, you can send a series of cart abandonment emails within 48 hours. All this is possible by integrating email marketing into the CRM.

Combining the power of CRM and email marketing, you can personalize the emails beyond the first name and send relevant emails that consider the customer’s behavior and past activity. Ultimately, you can cut down on the unsubscribes and send more personalized information to the subscribers.

CRM allows you to manage the data more effectively as it provides a scaffold to save the information collected through diverse communication channels, at a single place. This makes it easier to execute automation and make email marketing all the more effective.

As the CRM gives a holistic view of the customer behavior, you can address their challenges better and nurture them with engaging emails. It will also reduce the response time and enhance customer satisfaction by attending the customer queries instantly. Consequently, you can yield a better conversion rate and higher ROI.

CRM tools will let you monitor the key performance indicators (KPIs) of the email campaign and analyze the open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribes. You will get a clear picture about how your emails are performing and how you can optimize them for best results.

If the subscribers are not engaging with your emails, you can try to revive them with re-engagement emails. If they still remain inactive, you can remove them from the list. It will help you maintain a clean email list with genuinely interested subscribers only. Hence, you will be able to ensure a good deliverability rate without any bounces or unsubscribes.

Unless you integrate email marketing and CRM, you will not be able to use email marketing to the maximum potential. A CRM tool ensures that you can keep in touch with your customers and they perceive your brand as a credible one. Besides making your marketing campaigns stronger, it also gives you detailed insights into how they are performing and help build a long-lasting relationship.