This morning started with a flood of calls with various eMarketing questions. Small wonder considering that the Triumvirate of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Christmas are right around the corner. Not to mention the various health insurance and other industry-specific deadlines.
Why Can’t I use Outlook For My eBlasts?
In short, while Outlook is useful for basic personal or business communications, eMarketing products are built specifically for email campaigns and provide various tools to make your marketing campaigns more efficient, effective, and compliant including
- List Management: Email marketing software allows you to manage and segment your email lists more effectively. You can target specific groups of subscribers, send personalized content, and maintain compliance with email marketing regulations through “Bounce” and “Opt-Out” management.
- Templates and Design: eMarketing products provide a range of professionally designed email templates that are optimized for mobile devices and various email clients.
- Automation: You can set up automated email sequences and triggers.
- A/B Testing: Many eMarketing products support A/B testing, allowing you to experiment with different subject lines, content, and sending times to optimize your email campaigns.
- Deliverability: Email marketing software has features to improve email deliverability. They manage aspects like sender reputation, bounce handling, and spam compliance.
- Scalability: As your email list and marketing efforts grow, eMarketing products can easily scale to accommodate larger volumes of emails and subscribers. Outlook can’t handle large-scale email campaigns efficiently.
- Reporting Insights & Analytics: Email marketing software provides detailed reports of your campaigns. You can track open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and other valuable metrics to assess the success of your campaigns. Integration: Email marketing tools often integrate with other marketing and CRM platforms, enabling you to streamline your marketing efforts and synchronize data with other systems.
Why Should I Use the eMarketing Product That Comes with My CRM?
Integrating eMarketing with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system offers several benefits that can significantly improve your marketing and customer management processes. Here are some key reasons why you should consider integrating eMarketing with your CRM:
- Seamless Data Synchronization: Integration ensures that data is shared between your eMarketing and CRM systems in real-time. This means that the data in your CRM and in your eMarketing product are the same.
- 360-Degree Customer View: Combining eMarketing and CRM data provides a comprehensive view of each customer or prospect. You can see if a Prospect has opened one of your emails, or if an important Customer opted-out of your mailings.
- Personalization: With integrated data, you can send highly personalized email campaigns. You can tailor content based on a customer’s past behavior, preferences, and purchase history. Personalization is proven to increase email engagement and conversion rates.
- Lead Nurturing: CRM integration allows you to create automated lead nurturing campaigns based on the information gathered in your CRM. You can trigger follow-up emails, reminders, and offers based on specific customer actions or milestones in their relationship with your company.
- Efficiency and Productivity: By eliminating the need for manual data entry and reducing the need to switch between systems, your teams can operate more efficiently. This saves time and minimizes the risk of errors.
- Automated Workflows: You can create automated workflows that trigger actions in both your CRM and eMarketing system simultaneously. For example, you can automatically move a lead to the next stage in your CRM when they engage with a specific email campaign.
- Lead Scoring: Integration allows you to implement lead scoring, where leads are assigned scores based on their behavior and engagement. This helps your sales team prioritize their efforts on leads that are more likely to convert.
Does My CRM Have Integrated eMarketing?
Probably, if you’re using a well known CRM like Act or Zoho. However, if you are using an eMarketing product like Mailchimp or Constant Contact then the answer is that your CRM is NOT fully integrated with your CRM. That means you are probably spending a great deal of your valuable time exporting your contact data from your CRM and then importing it into your eMarketing platform. And, more than likely, you are not seeing the results of your eMarketing campaigns in your CRM.
Both Act CRM products – Act! Premium Desktop and Act! Premium Cloud – include the basic version of Act Marketing Automation which will allow you to send 2,500 templated, personalized emails/month to the CRM contacts of your choice. Zoho CRM allows you to send between 250 – 1000 emails/day depending on your level of Zoho CRM service. Zoho One adds Zoho Campaigns and Zoho Marketing Automation into the mix giving you virtually a limitless amount of email.
Not sure how to get started with your own eMarketing campaigns? We’re here to help. Call the Act! Marketing Automation and Zoho Marketing Pros at 561-470-5450 today!
