CRM & Email Marketing: What You Need To Know

What is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a comprehensive approach to managing an organization's interactions with current and potential customers. At its core, CRM involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support processes. The primary goal of CRM is to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty by understanding and meeting their needs.

CRM software typically stores customer information, interactions, and preferences, providing a centralized and accessible database for an entire organization. This enables businesses to streamline communication channels, personalize interactions, and make strategic decisions based on customer data. 

Ultimately, CRM is a strategic tool that fosters long-term relationships with customers, increases customer retention, and improves overall business performance.

What are the benefits of a CRM?

CRM helps companies gain a competitive edge by enhancing their content, user interactions, and overall user experience. Some of the most common benefits of using CRM include more effective direct-to-customer communication, an increase in lead conversion, access to more relevant marketing insights, and higher customer retention.

Effective direct-to-customer communication

Navigating customer communication channels can pose challenges as you deliberate when, where, and how to contact your audience. CRM alleviates this uncertainty by providing insights into customer preferences using contact management systems. By enabling companies to determine whether a customer favors email or SMS communication quickly, CRM paves the way for tailored, compelling content that will resonate with your customers. This personalized approach enhances communication strategies, ensuring better engagement and satisfaction.

Increase in lead conversions

Improving communication increases the probability of converting leads or moving them further down the sales funnel. With personalized communication channels, prospects are more likely to respond..  CRM helps maintain this personalized touch throughout the entire customer journey, ultimately increasing conversion rates.

More relevant marketing insights

When we increase the amount of content, messaging, or digital assets a consumer is willing to engage with, we also increase the amount of data we collect. CRM allows companies to gain insights on a more granular level by collecting a greater amount of customer data. With analytics, you can leverage this data for better business impact.  

Higher customer retention

CRM enables targeted marketing campaigns and proactive customer support through data analysis and segmentation. This fosters stronger relationships, customer loyalty, and brand advocacy. CRM also provides insights into customer behaviors and purchasing patterns, helping companies identify at-risk customers and implement strategies to retain them.

What is email marketing?

If you are looking for a marketing tactic that can be customized, scheduled, personalized, designed, or automated, email marketing may be the solution. 

While email has many competitors today—like social media, SMS messaging, and direct messaging—email is still an essential element of our increasingly digital world. Using email marketing software, you can efficiently send promotional, educational, informational, or design-based content to a pre-existing list of customers, a curated list of accounts, or prospective leads.

What are the benefits of email marketing?

Email marketing is a versatile tool that can bring many benefits when done correctly. Whether you are looking for a B2B (business-to-business) solution or a B2C (business-to-consumer) tactic, email marketing software can be used to deliver content directly to consumers and gather their feedback and reactions. The benefits of email marketing are:

Targeted messaging

Using email marketing tools, you can easily segment customers by their interests or where they are in the sales funnel and adjust email frequency and content accordingly. This can look like a more active email campaign for accounts that may be considered  “warm leads” or tweaking subject lines to better address the interests of each segment. Additionally, you can direct people to specific content, websites, or promotions through attachments or hyperlinks.

Cost-effective

Keeping a healthy bottom line is vital for any business. Luckily, email marketing is a budget-friendly option for those looking for a marketing or branding solution. It can be outsourced to an agency or handled internally with email marketing software. 

You can control the frequency, complexity, content, features, and email service provider to raise or lower email marketing costs as needed. 

Clear analytics

Beyond budgeting, email is a marketing tool that can easily be tracked at all touchpoints to provide a sales team with valuable customer data. These analytics include open rates, engagement, click rates, and more. These insights can be applied to messaging, content, length, time, and style to increase your marketing campaign’s success. 

Direct channel

Email marketing offers businesses a direct link to customers. Unlike other advertising means, which may require several steps before a customer interacts with the content, emails go right to their intended audience. That means your product, service, or message lands right in your target’s inbox. With the right messaging, design, and timing, email marketing is a fantastic way to reach your customers that often also allows them to speak directly to you.

How do you integrate CRM and email marketing?

CRM and email marketing can both be integral parts of successful branding, marketing, customer service, sales, and advertising—especially when used together. The most effective way to integrate these is by choosing a CRM email marketing software.

The Best CRM Email Marketing Platforms

Freshmarketer CRM 

Freshmarketer is a CRM email marketing software designed to improve the selling experience. By integrating Freshmarketer into your business model, you can immediately put a CRM sales strategy into place and take advantage of:

Artificial intelligence

Our AI-powered assistant Freddy helps you create powerful email marketing campaigns that boost conversions and customer retention. Freddy automates tasks, gives suggestions for crafting compelling content, personalizes engagement using customer histories, and provides invaluable insights to optimize your campaigns. With Freddy AI, you can get the most out of your email marketing efforts.

Customer Segmentation

Freshmarketer allows you to segment your customers using pre-built segments or custom ones based on demographics, preferences, behaviors, and more so you can deliver targeted content your customers will appreciate. This segmentation will help your team members prioritize their efforts, ultimately improving conversions, customer satisfaction, and ROI.

Workflow Automation

Freshmarketer has pre-built automated workflows tailored to your industry to make marketing more efficient. From FAQs to email and chatbot templates to reclaiming abandoned carts, our CRM has the tools you need for your marketing campaigns to succeed.

Try Freshmarketer for free today and enjoy a seamless sales and marketing experience!

Mailchimp

This versatile platform excels when it comes to UX and UI. It features easy-to-use drag-and-drop options, allowing users to customize campaigns if needed. Mailchimp's CRM offerings include personalization, segmentation, and detailed analytics that can provide distinct insights.

Constant Contact

Known for its simplicity and efficiency, Constant Contact offers customized templates for marketing emails. It's considered very user-friendly, with intuitive list management, segmentation, and automation features. It also offers real-time tracking and reporting.

Hubspot

As an all-in-one CRM and marketing solution, HubSpot has a long list of email marketing capabilities. It's often chosen for its reputation of smooth CRM integration. HubSpot supports personalized and automated email campaigns, lead nurturing, and behavior-based tracking.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a CRM email marketing platform that seamlessly integrates with its sales capabilities. With Pipedrive, businesses can create and automate personalized email campaigns by leveraging customer data stored in the CRM to tailor content and messaging. Pipedrive offers tracking, lead management, and automated follow-ups.

Salesforce

A well-known name, Salesforce is a more comprehensive CRM software. Businesses can capture personalized data through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and build in-depth email campaigns. Salesforce’s main appeal is its ability to align CRM efforts across departments, providing a holistic view of the customer to be used by both marketing, sales, and research.

How to get started with CRM email marketing systems

Create a CRM email marketing strategy  

The first step of implementing a CRM email marketing system is to develop a CRM email marketing strategy. The goal of this strategy is to improve overall engagement with the content of every email sent. There are several strategies to choose from, including account-based marketing emails, drip campaigns, or full email campaigns. You may also choose to simply send out a single email at one time with a simple message. The form and function of these emails are entirely up to the business. 

Collect customer data

You may already have a large cache of customer data, but you need all of that information to be internally accessible, organized, and up-to-date within the CRM. Once that is complete, you’ll be able to more efficiently identify what is useful, quickly capture it, and use it.

Leverage the CRM data 

Once your customer data is organized, you can begin to build a targeted CRM email marketing campaign. Segmenting the data by demographic, consumer type, persona, history, engagement level, or a business-specific category allows you to put your data to work. 

Simply put, you’re taking what you have learned about your customers and aligning copy or content with it so they are more likely to open your email. The more you do so, the more data and analytics you can gather, and the better you can adjust your marketing tactics.

Take your time 

Building an efficient CRM email marketing ecosystem can take time, and you will need to adjust your timing, content, messaging frequency, and more along the way. You may even need to adjust mailing lists or platforms. However, remember that even the smallest change can make a big difference in refining your CRM strategies, organizing your data, and managing your email tactics. In time, it will grow and begin to provide repeatable, relevant, and scalable results.

Take advantage of CRM automation 

As you begin your CRM marketing journey, your business can take parallel steps to automate tasks wherever possible. Automation can be as high-level or as granular as your business needs.

The first and most simple automation is alerts. Whether you are converting leads, looking for engagement, or collecting pain points, the goal is to receive an influx of open rates, click-throughs, and responses. By implementing an alert system, your team can be notified as soon as an email is interacted with. Then, that data can be collected, and an account can be moved down the sales funnel or placed into a new segmentation list.

You can take this a step further by automating the entire workflow. With a CRM, you can create alerts for certain responses or behaviors that were identified through CRM customer data, which, once triggered, move a customer or client along to the next step in their journey. 

For example, if a specific lead tends to browse your site consistently without purchasing but finally adds an item to the cart, they could be moved into a flow that automatically sends them a CRM marketing email that reminds them to finish checking out their cart, or provides them with a coupon for their preferred product or service.

Personalize campaigns

Personalization is a cornerstone of CRM strategies that often increase success rates and can be implemented at several stages in your CRM email marketing process. Whether you put it in place at the very beginning with your first contact or wait until further down the sales funnel, personalization puts baseline data to use and encourages engagement by humanizing an often cold digital landscape. 

Personalization is very flexible—it varies in form, function, and degree. A smaller business with limited CRM resources may only choose to include a customer’s name in their email subject lines, but a larger business, with access to more tools may personalize many elements of their campaigns. They can send emails encouraging a second look at a recently viewed product, a design featuring previously well-received elements, or schedule their emails to arrive at the optimal time.

Analyze customer data

As your CRM email marketing efforts continue to scale, organization remains crucial. You can look at another aspect of CRM data to keep you on track—this time in your sales cycle. 

You may already have a system in place for estimating where your customers are within your funnel and benchmarks to indicate those values; however, by collecting information regarding consistent behavior patterns, visits, interactions, or inaction, you can achieve a more accurate picture.

 With a clearer picture of your customers, you can begin to segment them into groups, ultimately facilitating a smoother sales process that drives results.

CRM email marketing end-of-cycle analytics

Whether you implement all or just some of these tactics, putting a CRM email marketing plan in place will produce measurable results and new insights.

This is because the CRM features, through many channels, create a customer data cycle in which valuable information is gathered and then immediately put to use to increase performance, which then leads to more data collection. The value of this information is crucial for small businesses and large enterprises alike. This end-of-cycle benchmark, or second-phase data, is just as valuable as the information used to build your initial CRM email marketing efforts to help increase lead generation, improve click-through rate,  and other business goals.

The key to continued success, growth, and integration of email marketing and CRM solutions is not letting this information go to waste. You should aim to consistently collect as many results as possible within whichever metrics you deem valuable. This may include something as simple as the best email open rates or direct customer engagement, but it may also include more complex data points, such as results for specific regions, demographics, or devices. The more data points, the better, so be sure to include as many members of your contact list and email list as possible from the customer experience.

Whether you have a defined end to your email cycle or it is continuous, use this data to help your marketing teams refine your CRM email marketing strategy and improve your campaigns’ ability to reach a potential customer. These analytics, whether dissected or packaged into a group, can be used repeatedly to support, build, or critique other marketing efforts your business or service may want to undertake.

At the end of the day, CRM tools are valuable for a wide variety of business types and can be implemented in several ways, including email templates, email sequences, and email marketing. The marketing service uses and benefits outlined above are just a snapshot of a CRM system’s potential. Taking the time to learn, define, and create the best email CRM-based strategies could be what differentiates you from your competitors.