Marketers today aren’t just relying upon single-channel marketing; now, it’s all about the adoption of omnichannel marketing. Because of the far reach of omnichannel marketing, it presents a unique opportunity to target audiences in 360 degrees (positively, of course).
When a prospect browses certain products on your website, you’ll want to carry out cross-channel marketing to advertise those particular products via Facebook ads, Instagram promotions, affiliate marketing, and email marketing. Staying top-of-mind is key, and omnichannel marketing utilizes this philosophy to unlock revenue.
Now when you are involved in multi-channel marketing, handling processes between platforms can become tedious, daunting, and complicated. This is where a CRM comes into the picture.
CRM, which stands for Customer Relationship Management, “gathers customer interactions across all channels in one place. A CRM system largely focuses on collecting, curating, and customizing stored data to build more meaningful relationships with your consumers.
The Use of CRM for Email Marketing
When we talk about CRM and email marketing, we’re talking about the use of a CRM tool to make informed decisions about future and existing customers with tailor-made email campaigns. Just like any other marketing channel, a CRM system for email marketing works to procure, nurture, engage, and re-engage subscribers with the help of collected and stored data. It proves to be a unified hub for all the collected user details along with their behavioral and preferential data and inputs for every customer lifecycle stage.
Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Marketo, often come with a built-in CRM campaign management tool that allows all the advanced features designed specifically for email campaigns. Similarly, many bespoke CRMs like Zoho, Agile, and Insightly, provide basic to advanced email marketing services in order to fulfill full-service marketing solutions.
5 Must-Have Features for CRM with Email Marketing
The bottom line is that CRMs are crucial and utilitarian, but scaling email marketing with the help of CRM campaign management can be tricky. To alleviate that stressor, consider these 5 must-have features that your CRM should have before you start leveraging one for your email marketing service.
1. A Repository for All Things Data
When you’re choosing a CRM for your email campaigns, take note of how well it can acquire, retain, and store your subscribers’ data. Personalization is integral to effective email marketing, so details about any subscriber are worth a lot.
Moreover, just storing and securing data is not enough; it should be segregated accordingly into segments that can be directly used as a targeted email list. The CRM you choose should be able to generate segments for customized email campaigns based on things like location, gender, and other demographics. The data you have stored in your CRM should be able to provide real-time solutions and alterations in the segmented lists so that they become useful for trigger-based behavioral marketing.
2. Advanced Personalization Capabilities
Marketers have experienced a whopping 760% revenue boost via segmented email campaigns, a vital part of email personalization. The CRM you pick should support cross-channel and multi-channel integrations in order to easily understand the user requirements.
Website tracking, engagement on social profiles, email engagement rates, and past purchase/browsing history are the four key areas from where you can garner personal user data. Your CRM will (and should) then study various touchpoints to come up with email lists that can personalize the individual user experience to make it exclusive.
Apart from that, personalization tags like first or last name, year of joining, location, weather, and coupon codes can further customize the user engagement on your campaigns. Make sure to double-check all the email personalization capabilities that your CRM offers before choosing one.
3. Email Automation
Drip campaigns or automated emails work like a charm for businesses that target action triggers. Welcome emails, cart abandonment emails, and transaction emails are a few instances where you can set up email automation to send a series of emails that revolve around the same subject. B2C companies that leverage email automation have seen a rise in email conversions as high as 50%, making automation an integral element for your CRM of choice to offer.
4. Email Templates
As basic as it may sound, email templates are still the star players in a campaign’s success. What goes in the backend is never visible or prominently explainable to the end-user; all they will see is a responsive, easily navigable, and engaging email design.
CRMs or ESPs like SFMC and Mailchimp come with pre-designed template libraries. A CRM that allows maximum customization in their templates and lets you integrate your custom templates should be in any marketer’s good books. Email clients and devices render email designs differently, and this is a point where testing proves to be the hero. Go for a tool that combines all the email design best practices for maximum opens.
5. Analytics and Analysis
The last — but incredibly vital — a feature of a CRM that you should look out for is having strong email metrics capabilities. Email campaigns are measured by their open, click-through, and conversion rates to ultimately contribute to the overall ROI calculation.
A good CRM tool will not only help you track these metrics but will also help you to put this data into action by providing solutions. Analytics are important to measure email campaign performance and improve the operation where needed. Choose a CRM that can easily fetch third-party conversions and other integrated channels to provide holistic reporting.
Close Note
Emails acquire 40x more customer acquisitions than both Facebook and Twitter, and there is so much you can achieve with the help of tools like CRM. Data is the future, and when you know how to personalize your users’ email experience with the help of CRM-based data, you (and your company) can excel.
CRM and email marketing can work as two sides of the same coin if they’re compatible to improve overall campaign performance. Out of all the latest and intricate features that new-gen CRMs come with, the five we outlined are the most fruitful and important ones.