Source: Margaret Spencer, www.business2community.com
A well-implemented CRM system and a top-quality contact database can take your email marketing campaign to levels you never imagined possible before. But you first have to take careful note of the terms “well-implemented” and “top-quality” and think about what these mean for your project. This post focuses on the CRM aspect of this tandem and provides some key insights on how you can optimize your CRM system for your email campaign.
A good CRM platform is more than just a piece of the marketing automation puzzle. It can potentially be one of your best tools to achieve strategic goals and business growth. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and shoot for the stars just yet. Let’s begin our CRM journey with a logical place to start – the email campaign.
If properly integrated into your email marketing campaign, a CRM system gives you better capabilities for targeting, nurturing, following up, and engaging contacts in your current customer contact database or updated sales lead database. This is because a CRM platform makes it easier to collect, process, and retrieve information about your prospects and customers as they interact with any area of your business. Here are a few considerations you need to follow in order to achieve optimal integration between your CRM system and your email campaign:
1. Work with clean lists only.
This is an absolute rule without exception. Regardless of whether you’ve developed your contact databases organically or with the help of a reputable opt-in mail list provider, you have to make sure that the lists and the data they contain are accurate, active, and analyzable. The last thing you want is to feed dirty databases to your CRM system and give it a bad case of indigestion.
2. Ensure compatibility with email platform.
The CRM system you’re using should easily be integrated with your email marketing software. This means requiring very little in the way of infrastructure modification as well as preparation for internal processes and people. If you’re not quite sure how compatible your platforms are, your best bet is to seek the advice of CRM and email marketing experts.
3. Monitor recipient actions.
Your CRM system should be able to capture and monitor actions, responses, behaviors, preferences, etc. related to your email readers. This means you need to store and process information such as links followed, topics responded to, calls-to-action taken, unsubscribe actions, passivity/activity to certain messages, and so on that can be attributed to your email recipients.
4. Integrate with other facets.
Clearly, the point raised in # 3 is inclined toward enabling your CRM to collect and process prospect/customer data needed to profile email recipients. To get a more complete customer/prospect profile, your CRM has to be integrated with other marketing channels, departments, and other potential touch points with your target audience.
5. Enable taking the recipients’ perspective.
Your CRM should not only allow you to accurately describe customers/prospects in terms of interaction but enable you to take their perspective as well, i.e., also let you step into their shoes as your email marketing audience.
6. Allow access for your staff.
Your CRM system should be visible and usable for everyone in your organization regardless of your company’s size. Since prospects and customers interact with your business at various touch points, it makes perfect sense to let personnel manning those posts gain access to the CRM platform. In fact, this is one of the main reasons behind implementing a CRM system in the first place.
A CRM platform, no matter how advanced it gets, is only a tool. It’s how you make use of this or any other piece of technology that truly matters in the final analysis. For your email campaign, the value of the CRM interface lies in how the latter boosts your and your contacts’ experience with the former.