How to Integrate Email Marketing With Your CRM

No matter the size of a business, success relies on proper management of work, and defining individual roles.

As a small business owner, you may find it overwhelming to do everything on your own; it can be chaotic. Getting more people to help you with specific roles not only makes your workflow better but also gets you more focused results.

It’s not just people, but also tools like application integrations, that play an important role in business management, planning, and execution. Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is one such aspect that helps your business better help your customers. Learn how integrating a CRM tool into your email marketing can make it easier to succeed.

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What is CRM and how does it add value to your business?

CRM is a management tool that helps you better manage your relationship with your customers, both existing and potential. The goal is to boost engagement by knowing your customers better.

From customer data to customer interactions, a CRM tool captures and enables all interactions between you and your customers. In short, it manages the complete customer lifecycle.

Say, for example, you have 1,000 existing customers. These people are already on board with your business, but that doesn’t mean you stop interacting with them, right? You need to plan targeted marketing strategies for these customers to let them know that you still value them.

How can you do that? Send out birthday wishes to them, give them loyalty bonuses, or create other strategies tailored to match every customer’s interests. With a CRM in place, all this information, such as birthdays or trial period details, stay in one place. You can then automate interactions through email marketing without missing any customer.

Managing your relationship with your customers is the key to success.

Integrating email marketing with CRM software

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways of keeping in touch with your customers. You reach your customers right in their inbox and offer them personalized, relevant information, for which they have subscribed.

Integrating email marketing and CRM allows you to enhance your relationship with your customers and improve customer engagement. When you integrate email marketing with CRM systems, you can track and record every action taken, creating a complete history of interactions with each customer. This allows you to better understand the behavior, interests, and likes of your customers, further enhancing customer engagement.

You can also connect your campaign responses and lead generation strategies to your CRM solution to calculate the return on investment, examine future opportunities, boost collaboration, and improve your sales or marketing.

Let’s look at an example, to understand how email marketing CRM integration can be of great advantage to a business:

You run a coffee bean subscription business that lets your customers choose between a three, six, or nine-month subscription package. You have been running this business for a few months and recent social media marketing strategies have led to a surge in subscriptions. When you started with 10 customers it was easy to keep track of the subscription start and end date for each customer. You even sent out reminder emails to renew subscriptions 15 days before the end date.

As the number of customers increases to 100, you can still just manage it. But what happens when the number of users goes to 1,000? What about 10,000? What if it keeps increasing? And that is what you want, right?

Integrating your CRM and email marketing platform is the answer. As the individual data for each customer is fed into the CRM, reminder emails can be sent out automatically. Not just that, but you can now interact with each customer on a regular basis, based on the individual stage they are in in the sales process.

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Integrating email marketing and CRM to meet your goals

Email marketing and CRM are two independent aspects that can work on their own, but when directed at the same goal, they work even better. Here are five reasons integrating email marketing and CRM can boost your business and improve customer relationships:

1. Enhanced sales opportunities

With email marketing, you know who’s reading your emails and taking an action. If your CRM has this data, it gives you a better understanding of who that potential customer is, and in return, gives you a better chance at converting them.

2. A better understanding of ROI

With an email marketing CRM integration, you can assess the returns from your campaigns more comprehensively. Apart from knowing the conversions, the number of customers that bought an item or performed an action, you’ll also be able to evaluate the overall cost of the campaign as a whole.

3. Easy data management

Getting better at managing data makes implementing automation easier, and more accurate. More importantly, your sales team is able to update data in real time, as the information gathered through different mediums of communication is stored all in one place.

4. Targeted communication

Make all of your communication targeted and relevant by understanding a customer’s purchase history. This helps you create a more relevant email, based on data. As a result, you reduce the number of unsubscribes and send more personalized, valuable information to your subscribers.

5. Trigger actions

End of a trial period, at the time of a membership renewal, or simply for new updates to current members, the data for individual customers can be stored in the CRM as action triggers. Using this, you can trigger emails that drive people toward a desired action.

How do you start an email marketing CRM integration?

Set a strong foundation for your email marketing CRM integration to build upon with these basics:

Start with choosing the right CRM system that offers you multiple options like generating reports, and makes it easy to store, segment, and use CRM data.
Use multiple mediums to collect information, and make this process ongoing right from the beginning. Opt-in forms, emails, social media lead generation ads, and other traditional options must be used, and consistently.
Keep your contacts and CRM data up to date.
Create different segments and tags, depending on your business, to be more relevant and targeted.
Use trigger actions, especially for emails such as renewals or updating subscriptions.

Make email marketing more effective with a CRM integration

The benefits of an email marketing CRM integration, are not just for your business, but your customers too. As you create stronger marketing campaigns, your marketing metrics become more insightful, and you cement a relationship with your customers. Make sure none of your customers are left out or ignored when it’s most important for them to hear from you. As a business owner, your primary goal is ensuring that your customers remember you, and love what you do. A CRM makes sure all that happens and much more!