Email Marketing and Customer Relationship Management Software, A Perfect Marriage

Why is email marketing and customer relationship management software (CRM) a perfect marriage? There are many reason why this is so and we’ll take a look at them  in a moment but before I go on to talk about why the two are a perfect fit, I like to first clarify what a customer relationship management software is to those who never used or been exposed to one.

Businesses are realizing the importance of having loyal clients and are creating opt-in lists with prospects who are interested in receiving products and/or services updates. Not only are businesses realizing that it’s important to have loyal clientele, but businesses are also realizing that they can decrease the cost of marketing, increase business ROI, and build a winning marketing program with a customer relationship management system.

Customer relationship management software also known as CRM is an application that lets an organization collect the most significant elements of the relationship with the prospect and/or client. An organization may employ a customer relationship management software to collect and insert data throughout the whole relationship cycle including the prospecting phase, as well as the client phase.
Upon studying and analyzing the data that is entered in the CRM software an organization can look at the end results to understand and  find the factors that either contributed to the overall accomplishments or failures in each step of the relationship with the prospect and/or client.

A well integrated customer relationship management system will help an organization’s sales team, the marketing team (which is where I am going to focus on), the customer service team, and the executives of an organization better understand the client’s requirements, preferences and overall purchasing habits. Businesses can also use the data that is captures in the customer relationship management software to improve customer service and retain loyal clients thereby increasing long term ROI of an organization.

If an organization does not have a customer relationship management system in place then sharing of information between departments becomes cumbersome and inefficient. Imagine this, the sales department would like to contact all previous clients who made a purchase in the past but have not done any transactions with the company for the last 12 month. They would like to reestablish a relationship by sending an email campaign to promote the latest products and services.
If a company does not have a customer relationship management software in place, the following process would need to take place before an email marketing campaign is set up with the email service provider.

1. Sales would contact IT to request a list from the database for such clients.
2. IT has to pull a list from the database.
3. IT would have to export the list into Excel.
4. IT sends the list to sales.
5. Sales reviews the list to choose which customers they would like to contact by segmenting the list.
6. Sales sends the list to the marketing department.
7. The list is uploaded to the Email Service Provider.
8. The email marketing template for a specific campaign needs to be uploaded to the email service provider.
9. The email marketing campaign is sent to the email subscribers on the list.
10. The marketing department needs to log in to view email campaign reports.
11. The marketing department needs to export the reporting data and put a report together for the sales team.
12. The marketing department sends the email campaign report to the sales department for review.

With a customer relationship management system in place the sales team can pull a list of prospects, current or past clientele and be able to instantly look at it with up to the second updates. Perhaps the sales team would like to go a step further and segment the list of clients to a more specific user group such as by gender or age group to target them with specific email marketing messages before the holidays to promote the products for that segment of the list.
The marketing department would have access to this list within the customer relationship management system, set up the campaigns and not only send the email campaigns from within the CRM but also view along with the sales department reports of the email marketing campaign from within the customer relationship management software.

Another example of the power of customer relationship management software is when it can act as a sales lead generator when the sales department would like to contact clients who have called the support department in the last 12 month for service calls on equipment.
Perhaps these clients are willing to pay for an upgrade on equipment which has the latest technology and would result in less downtown. The sales team can have access to this information within an arm’s reach and work with marketing to set up new email marketing campaigns and promote such equipment upgrades in a much more efficient way.

As you can tell a customer relationship management software increases efficiency, productivity, revenue and ROI. In part two of Email Marketing and customer relationship management software, a perfect marriage, we’ll look into how integrating a customer relationship management software with email marketing can increase the effectiveness of a stand along CRM by 100 fold.