CRM and email marketing have traditionally been considered departmentally and functionally different systems. One used by sales and customer service and the other by the marketing department, however with a little thought, combining the two can produce amazing results.
Email marketing delivered professionally returns a massive ROI in excess of 4000% yes 4000%.
Here are some of the reasons why:
- Over 70% of customers prefer to receive emails over other forms of communication
- Over 60% percent of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of email marketing
- Customers who receive emails will spend more than those that do not
Clearly these are numbers that cannot be ignored by any forward looking sales and marketing team, but there does need to be a bit of joined up thinking here. Modern marketing techniques allow much more information to be captured and analysed - opens, clicks etc. This information is highly useful to all concerned, but in different ways.
The marketing team need to target different groups with appropriate messages, understand the quality of the database and what emails are being read and acted on. Managing the database is often the biggest headache for any marketing department, especially maintaining the integrity of existing active customer databases, which are always changing.
The sales team want quality leads (of course) with quality information, what was the customer’s main interest? What is their company turnover, how many employees?
If a customer opens an email twice then that may not be a lead, however if they open an email on different devices, their PC and mobile, for every campaign, and always follow the call to action then that is a lead!!
So…By integrating the email marketing process with CRM and automating the qualification process it is now possible to deliver a constant flow of leads which gives the sales team all the information to allow them to engage with that lead. The CRM database needs much less work for the marketing team and they can be confident (well pretty much so) that the information is as up to date as it can be.
By , Director webCRM UK
