What are your thoughts on having a CRM specializing in email marketing? Sure, you can have a separate email marketing tool independent of your CRM, but it will make little sense not to take full advantage of everything that a CRM can do for your email marketing campaigns.

What Is CRM Software Designed To Do?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and gives you access to a centralized database of customer data, including their contact details, past interactions, and several insights into customer behavior. However, CRM tools offer much more than centralized data storage, a good CRM is a powerful tool for streamlining your entire sales and marketing process.

CRM email marketing refers to any effort that relies on a CRM to execute email marketing campaigns. The data from CRM is effectively used to craft better-personalized email content, reach out to the right audience, and get better ROI. But there is more to it. In this article, we will explore email marketing CRM in-depth and help you get started.

Advantages of Combining Email Marketing and CRM

Here are some of the significant benefits of combining CRM email marketing to let you rethink the way you strategize email marketing.

1. CRM lets you gain a holistic view of customer data and create emails with better positive outreach. As you have access to your audience’s data, you can use it to craft personalized email messages that ought to be more appealing.
2. Combining CRM and email marketing lets you devise and execute personalized communication journeys for each of your prospects. For instance, if you find a customer has frequently visited your site through your email call-to-action buttons, you can send them more informative emails frequently as they seem to value your emails.
3. CRM lets you simplify the email creation process with the help of pre-built email templates. For the most common use cases, such as presenting a sales pitch or collecting user data through forms, you can easily set up an email using the pre-made templates provided by your CRM application. This lets you save time and cost that goes into crafting emails for each scenario from scratch.

Additionally, the email workflows provided by some CRM applications such as GoCRM enable you to automatically segment customers as well as provide a full-funnel marketing approach. Meaning, you can seamlessly integrate SMS, phone and automation into your marketing campaigns. Thus, achieving state-of-the-art customer experience without any added effort.

What Kind Of Emails Can You Send?

The primary reason emails are still considered effective is that they let you establish a close and personal connection with your audience and customers. So, you must send emails at the right time and follow up with them appropriately to establish a trusting and loyal customer relationship.

But doing that manually could lead to errors, delays, and inaccuracies. This is where a CRM could help you out by automating your email messages and ensuring they are personalized without discrepancies in the information shared.

There are two main types of follow-up emails that you can send for effective customer relationship maintenance. You can also further classify your emails for each scenario, sales stage, and the personal preferences of your customer.

📧➡️ Pre-transactional

Pre-transactional emails are sent to generate interest in a new product launch, gather leads for a product, or inform the customer of any new development, offers, and events prior to the purchase. You can use them as alerts or reminder emails to keep in touch with your customer and keep them informed of any new offers and deals they might be interested in.

📧⬅️ Post-transactional

Post transactional emails are to be sent once the customer has already made a purchase. It is often a neglected practice that could cost in terms of customer retention. Customers like it when they are cared for. You have to keep them engaged and feel valued. You can send personalized email follow-up messages that give further insights into the previous purchases they made. Post transactional emails can also collect customer feedback and as reminders for further product renewals or subscription extensions.

You can also use these emails to inform your customers about new offers and deals exclusively available for them due to their previous transactions.

How To Combine CRM And Email Marketing?

The very classic way of combining CRM with email marketing is to import customer data and automate your email campaigns.

A lot more can be done by combining CRM and email marketing than just getting access to customer contacts from the CRM database. There is a whole set of optimization and personalization that can be done with automated CRM features.

You can easily collect the lead generation data, segment your email contacts, find qualifying leads with ease and make sure your efforts are focused on high return tasks. The personalization level you can achieve with email marketing in CRM is also relatively high and gives you many options.

Here are some things you can achieve or optimize by integrating email marketing with CRM.

More Effective Segmentation

Customer segmentation is a crucial part of any marketing strategy. It helps fine-tune your user personas and achieve a better personalization level across all your customer-facing business operations.

In normal circumstances, you can only collect limited information about a customer. In contrast, with a CRM system, you get loads of data that can be used to segment and personalize customer interactions easily. Both emails and CRM provide you with immense opportunities to collect data from the user.

Third-Party Software Integration

Have you ever wondered how you can embed email forms and social media features into your email? Now you can do it with ease without necessarily having to add in extra coding or manual effort. You can easily integrate social media tools and other third-party software into your email messages using a CRM. Using tools like Zapier, you can integrate hundreds of apps including  other email marketing software and further enhance the CRMs functionality.

Even if your CRM does not currently offer in-built support for specific third-party integrations, it will let you build it yourself with the help of APIs.

Email Personalization

The more personalized your emails are, the more effective they will be in terms of lead generation. As revealed by HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report 2020, personalization was considered the best tactic to improve email engagement.

Email marketing CRM lets you consolidate data from multiple channels and offers a sophisticated level of personalization. For instance, if your contact has searched for a product in any of your social media handles or has made a query regarding the same,  you can log such data into CRM with ease. You can use the collected data to craft personalized email messages to reach out to the customer and increase your chances of securing a successful sale.

Alerts for More Useful Follow-ups

Do you know an excellent way to increase your sales? Try sending useful follow-up emails that introduce the customer to any related products, better deals, exclusive offers, and more.

With CRM email marketing, you can set up automatic alerts and notifications to be sent to selected email contacts based on an event or a deadline.

Improved Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process by which you gently nudge your customers into the various stages of a sales funnel, from the initial discovery point to the final sales. CRM equips you with the correct information that will help you quickly craft the personalized journey for each customer and make sure the lead nurturing process is smooth.

About 65% of marketers feel that lead nurturing is one of the topmost challenges involved in marketing. Being able to do it efficiently is an excellent advantage that email marketing in CRM gives you.

Customizable Email Marketing Templates

Your CRM application can create pre-defined templates to quickly craft and send email messages. As a step further, you can also customize these templates by using the specific customer data you get from the CRM.

Using the email marketing templates from CRM can also ensure you have a uniform look and feel across all your channels. These templates are also responsive and bug-free, ensuring a high level of reach and quality operation.

Email Marketing Automation

As mentioned earlier, CRM can automate your email marketing communications. You can set up events based on customer interactions, past purchases, product inquiries or engagement workflows. You can set up reminder emails, automate newsletter mailings, send email confirmations and acknowledge each sales activity. Marketing automation can greatly save your time and the way you target your customers.

Mass Email-Sending

Mass email sending becomes the most straightforward task when you combine your email marketing with CRM. You can set up customer segments, select contact lists, and send mass email communications instantly.

Detailed Analytics

With just email marketing in place, you will not be able to track the customer interactions and data collection effectively. When you use it in combination with CRM, you can easily log each customer’s interactions and make sure you make data-based decisions in the future. The ability to collect data and analyze it lets you recycle your most successful campaigns and get to the bottom of what works and what does not.

Better Customer Service

Combining CRM with email marketing gives you the ability to enhance customer engagement. It lets you keep track of all customer interactions and ensure all of your customers are promptly taken care of with timely communication.

What To Look For in CRMs For Email Marketing

If you are convinced of the various benefits that combining email marketing with CRM can bring you, do not wait longer to put it into action.

Get the best email marketing CRM for your needs, and provide a new dimension to your email marketing campaign.

To help you make the right choice, here are a few features you should look out for:

• SMTP routing
• Contact list management
• Email automation
• Built-in and customizable email templates
• Drag and drop email builders for customization
• Email analytics
• Pre-made content for emails
• Customer segmentation feature
• Responsive email design
• Dynamic email content
• Email testing for all your email marketing software
• Third-party software integration

That said, it is essential to mention that our email marketing CRM provides all these features and more. Ah, no, we are not promoting (*wink*), but it does pay to weigh your options well before making a decision.

💡 Takeaways

When you start using CRM with your email marketing, you will realize the power of the data you are presented with. By making innovative use of all available data, you can find newer and better ways to engage your customers and establish an effective and long-standing customer relationship. You can contact us today to get a free GoCRM demo and explore its email marketing features in detail.

Effective marketing strategies result in tangible, measurable behavior from target audiences. Identifying and using these strategies can improve your ROI, but doing so isn’t always straightforward when using multiple channels to market your business or brand.

When someone fills out an online form or calls your business, you need to know why they made that decision. Was it your Facebook ads or your Google Ads? Your latest email offer or your flyer?

Enter advanced marketing attribution (AMA). Using detailed analytics, this type of marketing attribution can pinpoint which marketing efforts resulted in conversions. But what is marketing attribution? And how can you get started? Read on to learn more.

What Is Advanced Marketing Attribution?

Marketing attribution is the process of associating specific marketing efforts, called touchpoints, with specific customer behavior.

For example, if you track how many people opened and responded to an email, you are engaged in a straightforward form of marketing attribution called single-touch attribution.

Advanced marketing attribution takes this process further. Sometimes referred to as multi-touch attribution, this process evaluates and compares the impact of multiple touchpoints.

You may even be able to determine which touchpoint played the most considerable role in encouraging consumer action. For example, if an individual sees both your Google Ads and your flyer, you can use AMA to determine which of the two ultimately convinced them to act.

What Are The Benefits Of Advanced Marketing Attribution?

Taking your marketing attribution to the next level presents two main benefits for your business, these are:

Optimized Marketing Strategies

AMA allows you to evaluate each touchpoint’s relative effectiveness and focus only on the most productive ones.

It also shows you essential granular information, such as which touchpoints:

• Combination works best
• Delivered the most conversions
• Resulted in the most significant profits
• Work best for each target audience
• Work best at specific stages in the sales funnel

Because you can use AMA to determine the most effective approach when targeting specific audiences, funnel stages, and more, you can personalize your approach for individual leads to maximize your chances of eliciting action from them.

Optimized ROI

Personalized, targeted marketing efforts allow you to maximize the results of your marketing budget and tactics by focusing on those that are proven to deliver the best results for your business.

By spending less money to achieve more sales, you can achieve a more significant ROI, thanks to the AMA that tells you which marketing tactics are driving consumer actions.

The Tools Of Advanced Marketing Attribution

Advanced marketing attribution relies upon many sophisticated tools and strategies that deliver the in-depth analytics necessary to view a consumer’s journey to conversion and pinpoint the critical influencing factors along the way. Next we’ll discuss its two main tools.

Data Collection

AMA focuses first on collecting data regarding every lead who engages with your business. In particular, this approach identifies the touchpoints that drove consumer actions.

Take dynamic number insertion, for example. This strategy involves creating a unique phone number for each of your touchpoints. For example, your Google Ads and your email offer landing page would each have a separate phone number that forwards to your business.

If you can see which phone number each lead called, you can see which touchpoint convinced them to act. Collecting this data from every lead allows you to see whether your Google Ads or your email offer were most effective in generating leads.

Dynamic number insertion is only one tool that allows you to evaluate the driving force behind only one type of customer action: Phone calls.

You need data on what is the driving force behind leads who contact you in other ways. Such as via your website or by walking into your store, for example.

Besides, you need to know how a lead behaves after contacting you and whether specific target audiences differ in the type of marketing efforts that prove most useful.

AMA uses a variety of tools to help you capture a comprehensive picture of your marketing effectiveness and collect information such as the following;

• Lead origination across all forms of contact (Phone calls, emails, online forms, foot traffic)
• Impact of both online and offline marketing efforts
• Lead action after brand engagement

Data Analysis

AMA also enables you to analyze all of this data to gain actionable insights into your marketing efforts. Use it to accomplish the following:

• Evaluate the impacts of marketing on leads at every stage of the sales funnel
• Track each lead’s entire journey through the sales funnel
• Break down lead response to your marketing efforts based on demographics (e.g., age, location, income level)
• Analyze all data to determine the most effective marketing strategies

You can even use AMA to evaluate the best way to approach leads based on their demographics, thereby personalizing your response and maximizing your chances of winning a conversion.

How to Get Started

The only way to obtain all of this data and analyze it effectively is through a platform that can deploy advanced marketing attribution, centralize the data, and evaluate the analytics.

There are many platforms available for implementing AMA, but it’s best to combine the benefits of CRM with the advantages of AMA. For that, you need GoCRM.

Our platform makes it simple to collect and analyze the information you need to pinpoint the touchpoints that generate specific consumer engagement with your brand.

Here are just some of the features that make AMA easier for you:

• Dynamic number insertion and call tracking
• Automated tasks and workflows
• Centralized data storage
• Integration with hundreds of platforms
• Automatic data importing from each platform
• Detailed analytics
• Lead origination tracking

If you want to get started with advanced marketing attribution, reach out to us today. We can provide you with a free demo of GoCRM and the tools it offers you to help you understand and act upon the driving forces behind consumer behavior.

Customer relationship management (CRM) has long been considered the purview of a company’s sales team. Marketing delivers the leads, but it is the sales team’s responsibility to nurture those leads through the sales funnel.

Not anymore. With CRM software rapidly advancing in its features, capabilities, and customization options, it is now as much a tool for marketing as it is for sales. In fact, when businesses use CRM software to merge the efforts of marketing and sales, they create a powerhouse of customer conversion.

CRM marketing strategy focuses on a number of specific areas where the CRM’s functionality can inform, automate, and improve the marketing field.

Lead Targeting

The importance of CRM in marketing begins with identifying the best audiences to target with specific marketing efforts. CRM software also allows marketers to identify and target the most profitable prospects, as well as qualify leads before handing them over to sales.

CRM software accomplishes this task by pulling in information about potential prospects from every possible source. GoCRM, for example, can pull data from hundreds of sources in order to create a complete picture of every prospect. This data is placed in one central location for easy access by marketers and sales teams alike.

Marketers can identify the audiences that make the most purchases, deliver the most revenue to the business, respond the most to certain marketing tactics, and more. Armed with this information, they can deliver targeted marketing that maximizes revenue and profits.

Lead Qualification

Without the right CRM marketing initiative, businesses have two options: Send every lead to the sales team or spend many hours manually qualifying leads before handing them over to sales. The first option overwhelms sales with leads that may or may not be ready to engage with the business, while the latter consumes time the marketing team needs to reach new prospects.

That is why one of the most useful marketing CRM features available to businesses is automatic lead qualification. As leads begin to come in, the CRM software can analyze the information associated with the lead, assign it a lead score, and take automated action depending upon that score.

Among the many CRM marketing examples available is the CRM’s ability to automatically send high score leads to the sales team, along with all relevant information. At the same time, low score leads may trigger additional marketing campaigns, automated follow ups, and more.

Lead qualification is useful from a marketing and a sales perspective. It allows the marketing team to identify prospects who require marketing follow up, while saving both marketers and sales team members time and effort. With more qualified leads and greater clarity about those leads, sales can focus on what they do best: Closing the deal with the leads that marketing delivers.

Audience Segmentation

Any CRM marketing strategy has to include segmenting audiences. Chances are, you already segment audiences in order to deliver impactful campaigns to the right groups of people.

However, segmentation can be an arduous manual task that is prone to errors. Without enough information about a potential prospect, you may place them into the wrong category, which means they receive marketing messages that are not relevant to them.

Today, marketers need the ability to personalize their messaging to every potential prospect, and that means they need detailed information about every potential prospect. CRM software delivers by gathering information about prospects from every possible source into a single, organized location.

Imagine moving your marketing segmentation from broad categories like company or industry, to specific categories, such as last product viewed, emails opened, hobbies, social media frequented, and more. Imagine the level of personalization you could achieve, as you craft messages tailored to every prospect’s needs and interests. CRM for marketing makes this possible.

Personalized Messages

Personalized marketing gets results. Consider these statistics:

• 72% of consumers will only engage with personalized marketing messages
• Marketing’s digital personalization can cut the cost of acquiring a customer by half
• Personalization increases brand loyalty among millennials by 28 percent
• 80% of customers say they would be more loyal to a brand that showed they really understood them

That is why CRM marketing initiatives have to include personalization. With the CRM software at their fingertips, marketers can immediately access a wealth of information about their target audiences, and they can automatically craft personalized messages to them.

For example, an email campaign to an email list can include a prospect’s name, as well as personal details such as the company they work for. More in-depth information, such as a prospect’s hobbies, can also be used to identify messages and channels for effective marketing communication.

The key to this type of personalization is marketing CRM features that give marketers insights into their target audiences. Customizable fields, like those in GOCRM, for example, allow you to capture and organize any information you find helpful in crafting your marketing messages.

Segmentation and personalization work hand-in-hand. Marketers can customize their CRM to gather any data they need to achieve their desired audience segmentation. Then, they can use that data to choose which messages will be most impactful for each audience and even each individual prospect.

Together, segmentation and personalization drive more qualified leads into the business, and then help to nurture those leads through the sales funnel toward conversion.

Automated Lead Nurturing

Marketing doesn’t just stop at passing a lead over to sales. Marketing messages delivered at every stage of the sales funnel can provide prospects with the information and the encouragement they need to take the next step toward conversion.

Identifying where every prospect is in the sales funnel and delivering the right message at the right time and in the right place is impossible for businesses attempting to track their leads manually. Leads will fall through the cracks and sales will be lost.

CRM for marketing, however, closes the gap between marketing and lead nurturing and automates the process of analyzing and responding to leads at every stage of the sales funnel. The software can accomplish these tasks because of its ability to collect and analyze large amounts of data about every customer.

For example, your CRM software can identify a prospect who makes a purchase and automatically begin a campaign to win that customer’s repeat business. In addition, the CRM can see how that client prefers to receive information (i.e. Facebook ads or emails) and deliver the re-engagement campaign through those channels.

Lead Follow-Up

Following up on prospective customers isn’t just the responsibility of the sales team. Marketing also requires certain actions in response to prospect activity.

For example, social media engagement requires a prompt response, as does a review left on your website. Your social media manager needs to know when individuals take these actions.

Similarly, new information about a prospect may require a new marketing message. That means your marketing teams needs to know when new information arises.

At these times, CRM software can enhance marketing’s ability to respond in a timely and appropriate manner. Automated processes within the CRM (which you can customize and integrate into your existing workflows), ensures that no follow up task goes unnoticed.

For example, the CRM may alert members of the marketing team when prospects take certain actions, like opening emails, responding to a social media post, or leaving a review.

The software also provides a place where new information about prospects is gathered, integrated, and made available to every marketing and sales team member. Everyone has access to the most accurate and up to date information about every prospect.

The right CRM platform may even be able to automatically complete some of that follow up for you, reducing your team’s workload and allowing them to focus on the more complex and important marketing interactions necessary to drive customers down the sales funnel.

Performance Tracking

Analytics are central to any marketing campaign. With data on the performance of individual campaigns and advertisements, your marketing team can pursue the most successful efforts to maximize leads and conversions among every target audience.

CRM for marketing delivers the most detailed and organized analytics possible for your marketing team by tracking the origin of every lead, the quality of that lead, and the revenue generated by that lead.

With the right CRM, there is no guesswork about the success of your marketing. With that knowledge comes power: The power to fine tune your messaging to get the most qualified prospects to engage with your business.

When you optimize your channels, your messaging, and your prospects based on real-time data and actual results, you can develop an ongoing marketing plan that drives leads and sales for your business.

As your marketing becomes smarter, thanks to your CRM software, you gradually drive down marketing costs and costs per acquisition. You also save time, which means you have the time and manpower you need to expand your efforts to reach new prospects.

To enjoy the benefits of CRM for marketing, you need the right CRM software. GoCRM delivers a full-funnel approach and integrated CRM marketing features.

Request a demo today to find out how a customized, integrated, powerful CRM software can turn your marketing team into a marketing powerhouse.