What Is CRM Email Marketing? Is It Right for You?
What if your marketing had a huge blind spot and you didn’t even know it?
CRM email marketing is one of the best tools used by some of the most successful companies all around the world. However, many business owners and managers that could really benefit from this strategy don’t know the first thing about it.
So, what is CRM email marketing? Is it right for your own company, and how can you get started? Keep reading to discover the answers to your questions!
What Is CRM Email Marketing?
Our guide is going to explain everything you need to know about CRM email marketing. First, though, we need to answer your burning question: what is this form of email marketing?
This is one of the rare cases when the name of a marketing term basically explains its full functionality. In this case, the marketing technique combines the Customer Relationship Management strategies and software of a business with their email marketing efforts.
Think of this as “two great tastes that taste great together.” CRM offers a valuable way to personalize customer interactions while collecting valuable analytics data, and email marketing provides a low-cost way of reaching over four billion internet users across the planet.
By combining CRM and email marketing, even very small businesses can experience very dramatic growth!
How Does CRM Work With Email?
Now you know the basics of what CRM email marketing is. But that brings us to another good question: how, exactly, does your CRM work with your email marketing?
It all depends on where you start. If you already have a CMS software system in place, it may have email marketing functionality that you haven’t yet taken advantage of. And if you have an email marketing software solution, chances are that it can integrate easily into a CMS.
Once you have synchronized your CRM and email marketing, the sky is the limit when it comes to what you can do. Synchronizing customer information helps you send out more precise targeted emails, and tracking customer information more thoroughly can help you better understand their position in the sales funnel, all while helping you make more personalized recommendations to customers based on their purchase history.
Just think: this is only a fraction of what you can do by combining CRM and email marketing.
What Is Wrong With Traditional Email Marketing?
Email marketing has been around practically since the birth of the internet. So while adding CRM into the mix has many advantages, you may find yourself asking a basic question: “what’s wrong with traditional marketing?”
To understand the answer, you need to learn a bit about both the history of email marketing and evolving consumer behavior towards this marketing. In the early days, email marketing was a matter of getting as many email addresses as a business could and then sending out as many messages as were possible. This technique was often described as the “spray and pray” method.
However, let’s be honest: how many times per week, or even per day, do you get annoyed with unwanted email messages? As users got more fed up with this approx, email providers began offering filters that did an effective job of placing unwanted messages in “Clutter” or “Junk” folders. Furthermore, the laws evolved to regulate “spam” email, and consumers gained the ability to unsubscribe from email campaigns they unwittingly signed up for.
The writing was on the wall: if a business wanted to get customers, and keep them subscribed to further emails, they needed to offer more value to customers while also offering a more personal approach. And this is how CRM became the “secret sauce” to effective email marketing strategies.
Adding the Personal Touch
As we noted before, a major function of any good CRM is to collect data about your customers. And the most basic use of this data is to improve sales and marketing efforts. Once you know what customers want (and what they don’t want), you can more easily refine your approach to sales and marketing.
And with a bit of tweaking, CRM data helps you refine your approach to email marketing as well. When you know more about customers, you can send out targeted messages that are tailored to their exact needs. You can also nurture customer relationships more effectively by sending out emails at just the right time corresponding to certain customer behavior.
The best part, though, is that CRM email marketing can transform how customers view the emails that you send them.
Help Customers Rethink Marketing Emails
You don’t have to think too hard to realize why customers got annoyed with the “old school” method of email marketing. Just ask yourself why you delete annoying emails each day? Most of the time, it’s because these emails offer nothing of value to you and it is obvious that the company is simply out to make a buck off of you.
That’s the quickest way to drive your own customers away. If you want to keep those customers, you need to send out emails that help them save money, discover deals, and otherwise get a little more joy out of life.
As you can imagine, this is where CRM email marketing comes in. When you understand what customers’ problems are, you can provide content that offers the solutions they need.
This will take a bit of trial and error at first. But pretty soon, incorporating CRM with your email marketing will revolutionize both the email content you create and the customer reception to each message that you send.
Revolutionize Email Marketing Today
Now you know what CRM email marketing is and how it can benefit your company. But do you know who can help you get started and make the most of this opportunity?
Here at Vertical Response, we specialize in transforming old-school email marketing into a forward-thinking, customer-centric approach. To see what we can do for your own business, all you have to do is contact us today!
© 2022, Chris Duncan. All rights reserved.