For Best Results, Integrate Your Email Marketing & CRM Databases

Article by Lindsay Kloepping

What’s the one thing you can do this year that will have the biggest impact on both your sales and marketing teams? The answer is simple: stop working in a silo and start integrating your sales and marketing resources. By synchronizing your email marketing data with your customer relationship management system, you’ll be improving communication, customer relations and company efficiency. Don’t want to integrate? The downsides of staying in the silo are plentiful – and potentially damaging to your business.

The Danger of the Silo

Your marketing team wishes they had access to the sales data to better target their communications. The sales team wishes they weren’t the last to know when an email marketing campaign had been delivered. Both teams are communicating with the same prospects on different levels, and each of their software systems contain valuable information that the other team could really use.If this describes your business, you are not alone – in many organizations, sales and marketing activities take place in their own separate silos. Data and information must be painstakingly and tediously imported and exported between the two programs, increasing the chance of data corruption in the process. Or even worse, data must be manually entered into to different systems, making updates painful and increasing the opportunity for human error.

The pain of working in silos also affects your customers. Imagine for a moment that Ted Smith just hit the ‘unsubscribe’ button on your newsletter and opted out from receiving email communications from your company. Wouldn’t that be good for your sales manager to know before she hits ‘send’ on the sales email she’s just getting ready to send him? Probably so. But unless your email marketing software automatically updates your CRM software when events like unsubscribes occur, your sales manager will be in the dark…until she gets Ted’s angry email.

What about a Workaround?

There has been no shortage of companies trying to create workarounds in order to combine their sales and marketing data. Some businesses will hire expensive IT consultants to engineer custom API solutions to get their two programs talking to each other. This solution is time consuming and tricky, oftentimes with less-than-ideal results. Other businesses will buy into a hybrid solution – either an email service program that has some semblance of lead tracking functionality added on, or a CRM program that has basic email functionality. But the reality is that none of these solutions are ideal. For mid-sized businesses that need to send out to lists of 1000+ recipients and want access to professionally designed templates, personalization, testing & pre-scheduling services, continuing to count on your email service provider (i.e. Lyris HQ) to handle your mass mailing needs is your best bet, and tracking your sales leads in a proven CRM system (i.e. Salesforce CRM) makes the most sense.

Integration is the Solution

It’s clear that there is a serious need to combine your marketing and sales functionality. But how do you do it? Through professional integration. By integrating your ESP with Salesforce.com or your CRM of choice, you have one single database of record for your CRM and email marketing, and all of your information can be easily and seamlessly shared back and forth between the two departments.

The Benefits of Integration for Sales and Marketing

Integration has a number of advantages for both sales and marketing teams. Integration will provide the sales team with a “big picture” view of larger company marketing campaigns. This means that they can better time their sales conversations by understanding what offers and messages have recently been shared with prospects. The sales team can focus their efforts on the prospects that marketing analytics show to be the most engaged and responsive to email marketing campaigns.

Marketers benefit, too. By having access to this synchronized data, the marketing team has a clearer understanding of which messages and campaigns are having the biggest impact on the bottom line, allowing them to target their email messages even more effectively. By taking advantage of this data, the marketing team can further segment email lists in their ESP where personalized email messages and scheduled campaigns are easy to set up and implement, rather than trying to create a workaround within the sales program. And while the sales team is focused on closing hot leads, marketing can focus on nurturing the warm leads via trigger campaigns and other communications until the prospects are closer to making a purchase.

An Investment in Integration is an Investment in Success

Successful businesses take a holistic view of their company’s ongoing marketing and sales efforts. Integrated email marketing and CRM systems – such as the Lyris HQ for Salesforce integration – help make that holistic view a reality. By investing in integration, your company can enjoy increased efficiency, additional sales and marketing opportunities and higher conversions. Move your information out of sequestered silos and into the world of integrated marketing; your sales and marketing professionals will thank you by increasing your ROI and growing your bottom line.

En este webinar explicaremos que la diferencia entre enviar emails y hacer email marketing está el retorno de la inversión. Hacer email marketing es mucho más reentable a corto, medio y largo plazo para la empresa. Trataremos en esta charla de seguir los pasos que implica hacer una campaña de email marketing (vs. un simple envío de un email). El objetivo es que cada empresa sepa al término de esta sesión, qué tiene que tener en cuenta para hacer su campaña de email marketing.
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Customer Engagement – The best way to get more out of Email Marketing

Article by AlterSage

Email marketing is still one of the most powerful (proverbial) arrows in the eMarketer’s quiver. Email marketing is so effective because it puts your brand and message directly into your customers’ inboxes – many people’s most frequent touch-point with the Internet.

Fundamentally, email marketing is a customer relationship management tool and, when used effectively, this direct marketing method can be used to directly drive customer engagement with your business.

We all know that email marketing messages need to be relevant, permission-based and personalised to maximise open rates and responses. Segmenting your subscribers certainly enables you to deliver more targeted emails which are less likely to be perceived as spam, but now that you’ve passed the first hurdle and convinced the recipient to open the email, you’re ready for your second challenge – getting them to take action.

As we’ve seen through the rise of social media and social media marketing, customers like to be involved, they enjoy talking to brands and they value others’ opinions. Businesses that are able to understand the changes in their customers’ behaviour and mindsets, and that retain a focus on delivering added value, will enjoy the rewards of customer engagement. Ultimately, increased customer engagement translates into increased brand awareness, leads and sales.

In November 2009, Econsultancy published a great blog post detailing six steps to improve customer engagement in 2010. The post works to dispel the myth that email marketing is on the way out thanks to the meteoric rise of social media and other new channels of communication. Effectively, email marketing material needs to be relevant and worth reading – you need to cut through all the other noise to really reach your customers. The post’s author, James Gurd, summarises the challenges to engagement when he says:

“Where I think the challenge lies is in understanding how to engage customers using email marketing, integrating with other channels like social media, instead of relying on blast broadcasts and hoping that someone will respond because you’ve taken the time to email.”

Some of the tips for increasing user engagement and ultimately driving leads and sales through your email marketing initiatives include:

- Encourage your customers to engage through social media. This can be as simple as including a standard button on each mailer that links to your social media profiles. Also, use the opportunity to educate your readers about how they can engage with you elsewhere, and what benefits they’ll derive from such an interaction.

- Improve relevance with triggered emails. This works best if your site allows functionality such as bookmarking and wish lists. Basically, by allowing customers to tell you when important events are happening, what their interests and so forth, you can create a dynamic, tailored email to be sent at a specific time with relevant content and offers to meet their needs. This is essentially an extension of CRM.

- Drive clicks with customer reviews. People trust what other people say. Recent studies show that 74% of people indicate that they are influenced by the opinions of others when making a purchasing decision. So, first and foremost you need to get customer reviews onto your website. This shows credibility and drives customer engagement on the site. Next, you can use email marketing to drive traffic to your customer review pages.

If you think your Email Marketing campaigns needs sprucing up, contact the AlterSage team. Whether you are looking for an email software solution, a fully-managed solution or simply newsletter content creation, we will gladly assist.

Email Marketing Is The Best Way To Promote Your Product!

Article by Steve Duval

Direct email marketing can be an effective tool to promote yourself and for various other reasons. Every email that is created and blasted to your customers has some purpose to achieve it.

An email can just be for promotional purpose which you usually get to see in your inbox from even companies that you don’t know. But there are companies who keep on reminding their customers about their new offers so that they make a repeat visit and get benefited by the new products that they are offering.

In such case these companies have your details of what you are interested and what you had bought from them last time. So every time they have something new to offer their customers they would be blasting emails detailing about the new product and offers they have for you. If a company has its customers’ data they make sure they keep on building their relationship through the email marketing. The company will make sure whatever news or offers they have would be informed to their pre-existing customers.

There are companies who do email marketing to get new customers. Such email marketing are basically would involve information about the offers that are different from their competitors. And only by providing such offers they know that they can win new customers. There are a bunch of people who try to earn by email marketing. For example, if your portal is very popular, obviously there might be many who might have registered to get news letters from you in the form of emails. You might have noticed that when you get an email or a new letter that is online there are many advertisements below it.

These are also the paid advertisement and this way company the portal makes some revenue. Email marketing is very popular among many companies for varied reasons, and these include: it is said that the exact return on investment can be tracked. Some take it email marketing seriously and it is usually second only to search marketing in terms of effective online marketing ways. Secondly, you are blasting email to only those who have subscribed for the service and hence such customers would show real interest in your products. While email marketing, make sure you are not violating any law. You need to take permission for email marketing. In the contract it would be mentioned that the advertising via e-mail whereby the recipient of the advertisement has consented to receive it.

It is a concept developed by marketers to remove the disadvantages of email marketing. Apart from email marketing you need to look at the other way you can promote your products online. If you do little bit of research on the internet you would get many ways bring traffic to your website. Although email marketing is just one way of promoting things online, but to get a better result you need to make sure that while planning to do online marketing, you need to do a mix of different ways of online marketing.

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Email Marketing Services: Best to Reach Targeted Audience

Advertising had never seen such a big profit till the concept of online advertising came in the market. Advertising has always been an integral part of marketing and this is a reason why online marketing companies are making use of different techniques to advertise a product online. It is seen that among different marketing techniques email marketing technique is the most effective way to promote a good/service online. People use emails to communicate with their friends and relatives all over the globe and it is possible to target these people through effective email campaigns. Email marketing services help to provide marketers the best marketing techniques to reach their targeted audience.

Through email marketing services a producer can reach the customers at any part of the world without facing any kind of barriers. Utilizing an email marketing service does not cost much and this marketing technique helps to bring an immediate response. Utilizing opt-in email marketing technique can help to target a specific group of people who are actually interested in the product advertised by the producer.

Email marketing services deals with formating an email addressed personally to the users. This kind of a service makes sure that a user is not forced to use any good/service rather the service believes at simply informing the user. People who are really interested in the product even write back an email to know more about the product features. It is very easy to keep a trace of email marketing performance.

Email marketing service is the most effective form of direct communication that helps a producer to talk to every individual person. People have now become net savvy and they prefer email marketing concept because it is easy for them to access information about a new product and even place an order for it through online facility. Online marketing companies make use of email marketing services to drop information about their latest services in the inbox of the users. An online marketing company must make use of emails to target large groups of people sitting anywhere across the globe. Use the email marketing services to serve every consumer personally.

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Email Marketing Solutions: Best Way to Reach Targeted Audience

Emails are the best way of communication nowadays that help in communicating a message personally to an individual. Marketers are also making use of email marketing solutions to reach their targeted audience at a simple click of mouse. Producers now hire email marketing companies that help in providing email marketing solutions to meet the targets of the clients. These companies communicate both internal as well external messages to people by sending emails, newsletters, promotional messages etc as and when required.

To make an online business flourish email marketing solutions are really helpful in providing cost effective and efficient solutions. Email marketing technique helps in targeting the exact market to meet the desired results. The most effective way to reach the online target audience is through email marketing solutions that make the consumers aware about the announcements, invitations or general information. Sending an email to a long list of customers does not take much time because the mail is sent to all by clicking the mouse once. Email marketing solutions help in converting a large group of audience into a small target audience that can be covered easily.

There are so many online marketing companies that provide with email marketing solutions to their clients at reasonable rates while covering all the objectives of the clients. These companies have email marketing lists, personalized messages, welcoming notes and other database to serve the clients in the best way. Being a perfect hub of marketing these companies help in launching effective email campaigns by satisfying the needs of a client.

Going for email marketing solutions a producer can have a healthy relation with the customers, generate more sales, enhance the number of customers, address every customer in a very unique way, build a loyal relation, retain best customers that often respond etc. No doubt that seeing so many advantages any producer would like to go for email marketing that does not even cost much. Customers might be segmented but email marketing strategies will be planned in such a way that every customer is chased and targeted in the right way.

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