9 Ways to integrate your CRM and email marketing software

As a marketer, you strive to deliver the most relevant and valuable content possible to your subscribers.

That’s how you achieve the best ROI for the brands you represent. Focusing on email marketing software alone, however, can only get you so far.

The truth is, CRM software naturally integrates well with email marketing software and campaigns. By using data from both sources, you can improve your customer relations in all aspects of business and deliver hyper-relevant email campaigns.

Sounds good?

This article will go over some of the benefits of integrating your customer relationship management with your email marketing efforts. It will also explain how to easily accomplish the task.

The importance of CRM software and email marketing going forward

You probably remember the Facebook apocalypse from last year. Updated algorithms purged content from pages—particularly small businesses—from the news feeds of consumers.

This was part of Facebook’s rebranding and returning to its roots as a social network for connecting friends and family. If businesses and pages want to keep up with the changes, they better prepare to shell out the big bucks for targeted advertising.

To be honest, this was probably for the best (in marketing terms, anyway). Brands don’t have control over their Facebook audience. Instead, Facebook uses followers as leverage to collect money for targeted advertising. This is all part of Facebook’s business strategy to essentially hold your audience hostage.

We can’t fault Facebook. We can only look to mediums that we own and control to reach our targeted audience.

Switching efforts to email marketing software over social media is the perfect solution. Why? Because it gives brands a direct line of communication with their audience. There’s no more fighting with algorithms.

Plus, super-relevant Facebook ads are pretty creepy. That’s probably why 77% of people across all demographics prefer email for permission-based advertising. It’s truly permission-based because subscribers have voluntarily provided their email address.

Devoting your time, energy, and resources on email marketing produce better results, too.

Email marketing has a remarkably better ROI than social media advertising: $39.40 for every dollar spent on email versus $12.90 on social media.

Why should you bother integrating your customer relationship management and email marketing software?

In 2019, it’s crucial for brands to provide relevant and valuable content that sounds conversational and friendly. Stay away from anything that sounds salesy. To accomplish this, brands need to hone their efforts on customer relationship management.

CRM technology is expected to be the single largest revenue area of spending on enterprise software by 2021. Leading the way, Salesforce generated a whopping $10 billion in the fiscal year of 2016.

The big guys spend money on CRM because they know it’s the only way to maintain customer relationships across multiple platforms without anything slipping through the cracks.

When it comes to email marketing software, CRM can help you provide the most relevant content possible to your subscribers. It’s a win-win-win.

9 ways integration can boost your email marketing efforts

Customer relationship management is a broad concept. And rightfully so—it spans almost all aspects of business. Here are a few ways it can improve your email marketing efforts.

Better data collection

You don’t necessarily need to collect more data about your audience—you just need to make good use of the data you already have. With so much information at your fingertips, it can get difficult knowing how to organize and process everything.

Customer relationship software can help keep all your information about customers and their activity in one place. Once you have that in order, you can use the rest of these tips on the list for better results.

Enhanced personalization

People have come to expect personalized emails in their inbox. Sending out the same email to all of your subscribers with the same coupon and expecting them to take action simply won’t work moving into 2019.

In fact, personalized emails are vital to retaining customers you already have. These customers expect you to know a thing or two about them because they’ve spent their hard-earned money with your company in the past. Treat them right with personalized emails.

Employing the help of CRM software can help you manage information about your customers across multiple channels—like an app for instance—and deliver relevant content to them through emails.

This email from Gas Buddy is both super personalized and extremely relevant. It’s based on information across multiple platforms: their app, email marketing software, and website. It might not seem like much, but emails like this are perfect for keeping your subscribers engaged.

Image Source: Really Good Emails

Specific audience segmentation

One of the best ways to send personalized emails is to segment your audience. Most email service providers offer some kind of segmentation technology to break your audience into different groups, such as new subscribers and those who haven’t opened your emails in a while.

Customer relationship management software, however, can take your audience segmentation to the next level. CRM software uses cutting-edge AI technology to monitor subtle behavioral cues on different platforms, so you can understand how to monitor your audience.

Improved automation

Automated emails based on triggered events are an excellent way to build a relationship with each subscriber. Customer relationship management software provides special tools for ensuring that each automated email you send is as effective as possible. By monitoring customer behavior, this software can help you understand what type of content your customers expect from your brand.

Triggered email campaigns, like this welcome email from Casper, can work wonders for introducing customers to your brand. They’re perfect for breaking the ice and educating subscribers.

Image Source: Campaign Monitor

Great chances for re-engagement

Everyone has those subscribers who stop opening emails. When it happens, you want to re-engage those subscribers with content that piques their interest and reels them back in. CRM software can help you understand why your customers aren’t biting and what you can do as a brand to spice things up again.

Emails like this one from Paul Mitchell are perfect for re-engaging your dormant subscribers with fresh content. Are they still not responding? Take it as a sign to clean up your email list so you’re only contacting people who actually want to hear from you.

Image Source: Pinterest

Deliver more relevant content to your subscribers

This is the real kicker. By using customer relationship management software to better understand your audience across multiple platforms, you can figure out what kind of content is perfect for everyone.

Since you’ll have all your data from social media, Google Analytics, email, and more in one place, you can track, analyze, and interpret that data into useful content.

Better results from testing

Most marketers know by now that A/B testing is important. It's like throwing out a net and seeing what you catch. Customer relationship management software can help you figure out what kind of tests to run in the first place.

With that information, you’ll be able to run the most effective tests possible because you already have a pretty solid idea of what your subscribers want from you. The test at that point just helps you narrow down the finer details.

Less unsubscribes

It’s safe to say if you can provide your subscribers with more relevant content, they’re more likely to actually engage with that content. Using that logic, if you can keep your subscribers engaged and interested, they’ll be less likely to unsubscribe.

According to research, almost 16% of people say they unsubscribe from mailing lists if the content isn’t relevant to them. As technology grows, your subscribers will expect more relevant content than you currently provide. Taking advantage of CRM integration can help fill the gap.

Emails like this one from Handy are the perfect way to boost engagement with your subscribers. Using information from customer relationship management software, you can use these emails to offer super relevant products and connect with customers on the platforms they actually use.

Image Source: Pinterest

Avoid spam filters

Another 17.2% of people say they unsubscribe from emails that look like spam—but that’s if you can make it through the ever-changing spam filters first.

Identifying factors of spam constantly change. It’s up to marketers to understand these changes and keep up. Sending out large batch emails to your entire list without any personalization is a sure-fire way to make it into the spam bin.

Using customer management software, you can provide relevant and useful content to individual subscribers in an almost one-on-one fashion. This, along with other tips, will help you stay in the inbox and out of the spam folder.

Wrap up

Email marketing and customer relationship management are both potent on their own. Together, however, they create a data-driven powerhouse for creating hyper-relevant content for your subscribers. Marketers can take advantage of this integration across their entire digital marketing strategy to retain customers and build relationships with new ones.

Ready to level up your content by integrating your CRM and email marketing efforts? Emma can help. Check out our powerful integration partnerships.