Email is one of the most important marketing channels available today across almost all industries. But far too many companies run their email campaigns using tools that limit their ability to go beyond just opens and clicks and extract real value from every email they send – even the ones that fail. Email CRM marketing takes that extra step, providing all the same benefits and capabilities as traditional email tools, but also turning email campaigns into powerful customer data collectors. Capturing more data from marketing campaigns ensures that even emails that don’t result in a successful action can still provide useful information and improve future outreach.
What is Email CRM Marketing?
Email marketing is any advertising, prospecting, or sales interaction initiated or continued over email. It doesn’t just mean mass email blasts; it includes everything from individual follow-up emails with leads to confirmation emails – even emails exchanged during the earliest stages of the sales process could arguably be considered email marketing. Essentially, any time a company emails a customer or prospect with the intention of moving them through the buying process, that company is engaging in email marketing.
CRM email marketing simply brings everything into a customer resource management system so that the entire process can benefit from the marketing, customer interaction, and data collection advantages only a high-end CRM can provide.
What are the Advantages of Email Marketing?
According to Campaign Monitor, email marketing campaigns enjoy average open rates between 17% and 25% and click-through rates of 2% to 5%. Those are engagement levels social media marketing just can’t match, and even telemarketers don’t get close to 5% of leads showing interest in their offers. Email marketing offers that level of success thanks to three major advantages: it’s direct, it’s familiar, and it’s relatively unintrusive.
Email is highly direct because we’re exposed to it constantly. If we’re not sitting at our computers at work or at home, we almost all have access to email through our phones effectively every hour we’re not asleep. As a result, marketers can send highly targeted messages to prospects via email with a very high level of confidence that the message will at least be seen, if not read. And because people are so used to receiving offers via email, it’s an extremely familiar marketing channel that doesn’t induce the same kind of negative reaction that telephone calls or even text messages sometimes can. Finally, because customers have control over if and when they read a promotional email, it’s an unintrusive channel – another reason customers are so willing to accept it.
In short, email marketing is an extremely important tool for sales companies of all types and anything that can enhance its effectiveness is worth exploring.
How an Email CRM Helps Improve Marketing
There are a lot of tools out there designed to help companies with email marketing. Stand-alone autoresponders, online services like MailChimp and ConstantContact – even Gmail offers email marketing tools. But, while all are great for sending out mass email blasts, they fall short in a lot of ways when it comes to two areas: single-recipient automation and customer data collection. Email CRM systems, on the other hand, excel in both, making a good customer resource management platform an ideal email marketing tool.
Tie Email Directly into the CRM’s Database
Emailing through a customer resource management system ensures that each email and its result is automatically tied directly to the relevant lead account. That turns every email campaign into a powerful source of customer data and makes it easy for sales and marketing staff to quickly and easily reference the results of previous emails – including open rates, click-throughs, and more – from right within a lead account while they’re working on a sale. No stand-alone autoresponder can match that kind of data collection, management, and ease of use. It turns email into not just a promotional tool, but a business intelligence tool as well.
Automate More Email Communications
Standard email marketing tools are great at automating large campaigns. They make it easy for companies to blast out email series that deliver automatically, one-after-another, on a pre-set schedule. Email CRM tools can do that too – and just as well. But they go much further in the types of emails they allow companies to automate. Because everything in a CRM is tied to the lead database, individually-targeted emails can also be automated, including all-important follow-up and retention emails. Automation can also take into account other communication modes like the telephone or text. For instance, a follow-up email can be set to go out automatically whenever contact hasn’t been made with a lead in X amount of weeks or months. If the lead calls in, the email side of the system will know and can take that into account and delay the automated retention email as needed. It’s a level of holistic control far beyond what email-only tools can offer.
Minimize Platform Hopping
A side benefit of bringing email marketing – and all email communications in general – into a CRM is that it centralizes the task and minimizes the number of platforms employees need to jump between throughout the day. That saves time with everything from logins to moving data back and forth and also minimizes training. It may seem like a small thing, but even the smallest boosts in efficiency stack up over time, making CRMs an extremely powerful time-saving tool.
CRMDialer is a leading customer resource management system that centralizes communications and marketing and ties it all directly into a company’s lead database, sales tools, and more. With CRMDialer, daily email, text messaging, phone calls, and email marketing campaigns automatically feed data directly into lead accounts, providing salespeople easy access to more customer information and ensuring the most informed, prepared, and frictionless sales process possible.
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