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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Email Marketing Videos: 3 Great Tips To Get Results

Article by Overcome Everything Inc. – Tommy Knox

If you’ve been involved in internet marketing for any length of time, you are well aware of the power of email marketing as a tool in your bag of sales tricks. But with the flood of cyberspace competition for that precious piece of real estate known as the “top slot in a prospective customer’s email inbox”, you’ve got to have an edge just to get Joe Buyer to even open your awesome email copy with the great deal you’re offering, much less take the time to read it. So what’s a little email marketing fish in a sea of corporate whales supposed to do to get noticed and considered?

Enter: Email Marketing Videos. Surely you’ve seen them in your inbox, these short and sweet emails with a teaser line, and then a link to a video included in the body of the email. You’re probably curious about video email, but not quite sure how to use it. This is natural. This new and exciting idea offers plenty of options email-wise, but you need to know which ways to use it will work best. Here are three great tips to get results using video links in your email marketing campaigns:Great Tip #1: Customer TestimonialsStudies show that a referral from an average, normal human being is way more convincing than any banner ad you’ll find online. For this reason alone, consider the video testimonial to be a great selling point for your products and services. Find someone who has emailed you or called praising your product. Ask them if they’d be interested in filming a video testimonial that you can use on your site and in your email marketing system. Explain how quick and easy the process is, and walk them through it if necessary. As a reward, give them one of your other products for free, or an exclusive offer reserved only for special partners. Great Tip #2: Product Trials and DemosA free or almost free trial offering of your product is hard to refuse by someone who needs it or is searching for it anyway. A great email marketing strategy is to send an email with a link to a video with the offer, and practically every serious customer would quickly drop five or ten bucks on a time limited trial of your product that normally sells for much more. If your product is web-based or an electronic download, your cost is minimal, and your profits are unlimited.

Unless you’re posting detailed videos on how to use your products, a video showing exactly how your product works is a great way to teach your customers how to optimize their purchase. An added bonus? Less returns from customers who mis-use your products. To make things even more targeted, create product demonstrations for your top 10 best-selling goods and email the appropriate one to your customers after they buy one of these products.Great Tip #3: A Personal Thank You MessageMost consumers buy plenty of products and services through email marketing and never get more than an email telling them they’re appreciated for their business. That’s why the personal thank you is so effective. Have your CEO or Company President record a brief but heartfelt message thanking them for their business. Touch upon the economy and how much it means to your company that during hard times, they spend their money on you. A little thank you can go a long way with your customers. A special thank-you email with a link to a thank-you video kicks it up a few notches, and can create serious customer loyalty and increase your credibility with them. There are dozens of great ways to use video links in your email marketing campaigns, but these three tend to be especially effective. To learn more about how your business can benefit from a successful email marketing system, hit the link below and watch this free video: http://www.ListBuilding.com/autoresponder

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Email Marketing for Greater Results

Why would one need to add power to email marketing? The answer is quite simple – for fantastic results! Many individuals, businesses and internet marketers are discovering the power of email marketing and achieving great results from this new age sales tool. By implementing a few simple steps, one can boost the power of email marketing and see the super outcomes that follow.

Listed below are a few steps that add power and zing to your email marketing campaign. These will be explained further and in greater detail:

1. Compose short, succinct emails – This is the first step in adding power to email marketing. Great results will result from it. Emails have to be short and to the point. All information should not be given in a single email. Your intent should be to grab the attention of the reader or potential customer, and then to guide him or her to your website. A long drawn email will most likely not be read through, or worse, trashed. So be sure to keep it short and sweet.

2. Acquire subscriber permission – No one likes to be overwhelmed with junk mail. So always get the permission from subscribers before sending them your email marketing newsletters. Sending bulk emails will no doubt result in your getting spam complaints and ruin your reputation. This is not the perfect scenario while initiating a power email campaign. Instead of great results, most likely your efforts might just collapse. So believe me, it is better to be safe than sorry. Getting the client and subscriber permission requires only an additional button on your website.

3. Personalize – Personalizing your emails goes a long way in the business of email marketing. You can do this by just adding the subscriber’s name to the email. By including the name of the customer to the mail, the receiver will feel that you have created a mail, newsletter or offer just for them and will be more inclined to check the email out.

4. Give Offers – Offering freebies will work like nothing else when adding power to email marketing. Wonderful results like an increased subscriber base and increased sales will happen if you advertise free gifts and other offers on a regular basis. These promotions will no doubt keep the clients interested in your business while earning you their respect as well. All this will result in eventual sales.

5. Make the language easy to understand – Don’t test your subscribers’ intelligence through your emails, nor do you want to test their knowledge of any language. Always avoid using complicated, hard-to-understand and confusing words. Use easy to understand working with short sentences. Even people with the very basic know-how about the language should be able to grasp your the message you are trying to convey. Simple language is an important component to power your email marketing and will get you super results.

6. Avoid using spam words – As much as possible, stay away from incorporating words that could be identified as spam by internet service providers. Some sure shot spam filter catchers are expensive, but make easy money, and earn 00 in just a few hours. Top of the line email marketing software and auto responder services oftentimes come with a built in feature to catch potential spam words in your email. You will definitely want to use this feature regularly.

7. Include the URL of your website – Never forget to use the url of your website in your emails. This should be added below your name and signature. By adding the website url it will add credibility to your mail and directs traffic to your site.

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Google Analytics: Using Metrics to Track and Improve Email Marketing Results

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics has become one of the industry’s most powerful Internet Marketing tools, helping advertisers, publishers and website owners improve their sales conversion, campaign targeting and marketing initiatives. Previously dubbed Urchin, Google Analytics is a robust web statistics software application provided by Google free of charge.

Simple and easy to use, anyone can start benefiting from Google Analytics in just a few minutes. Just add some basic code onto your website, and you’re ready to begin monitoring visitor trends.

After basic set-up, marketers can track important statistics like visitor referrers, navigation paths, page views, geo-location data and browser type. Know where your visitors come from, whether referred by search engines, ads, emails, blogs or affiliates. Know which cities, states and countries your primary visitor traffic resides in, so you can more carefully target future ad campaigns.

While hugely popular with webmasters and usability professionals, some Marketers have yet to realize the value Google Analytics plays when used to monitor email marketing campaigns. Track, evaluate and analyze results using colorful graphs and charts. Google Analytics makes it easier to identify trends, improve usability and increase your return on investment.

Email Marketing Campaign Set-Up

Using Google Analytics, email marketers gain greater control over the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of each campaign. Send carefully targeted, relevant messages, improve revenue opportunities and enhance your business reputation.

To get started, create a Google Analytics account by visiting www.google.com/analytics. Follow the directions provided to place tracking code onto the relevant website files. Once you’ve created a Google Analytics account and placed the provided code into your website, you’ll need to add parameters to URLs in each email marketing message. These denote which visitors arrive as a result of each email marketing campaign.

While some email marketing products, like StreamSend, add these parameters automatically, it takes just a few minutes to set it up manually.

Google Analytics looks for a few basic values in each link, namely the campaign source, campaign medium and campaign name. To set-up these values manually, simply change the parameter names shown in parentheses below:

1. Campaign Source (utm_source). This identifies the name of your email marketing system, such as StreamSend. If you don’t use an email marketing system, you can label your campaign source ‘Email Marketing’.

2. Campaign Medium (utm_medium). This identifies the campaign instrument used. In the case of email marketing, your medium is ‘email’.

3. Campaign Name (utm_campaign). This identifies the name of your campaign. The Campaign Name helps you differentiate between various campaigns or unique messages within each. Most Email Marketers use their message subject line or other identifying value for this parameter.

Using this process, campaign managers can monitor in-bound visitor traffic for any destination URL, whether a main landing page, a product page or other sub-page.

Example: Main Landing Page

* Before tagging: http://www.example.com/

* After tagging: http://www.example.com/?utm_source=StreamSend&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=My%2BEmail%2BSubject

Example: Sub-Page

* Before tagging: http://www.example.com/index.php?page=home

* http://www.example.com/index.php?page=home&utm_source=StreamSend&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=My%2BEmail%2BSubject

Tracking Email Campaign Results

Once an email campaign is properly coded and delivered, Google Analytics automatically monitors resulting website traffic. Find out which links were most popular with your recipients, when they visited your website, how long they stayed and where they navigated following arrival. Then adjust campaigns, body text layout and other variables to improve results over time.

To view campaign results:

1. Log into your Google Analytics account.

2. On your Dashboard, click ‘Traffic Sources’.

3. View your ‘Top Traffic Sources’ or click ‘View Full Report’ to see all traffic sources.

4. Locate and click the link identifying your email marketing Campaign Source. In our example above, your Campaign Source is your email marketing product, i.e. StreamSend, or ‘Email Marketing’.

On your Campaign Source page, Google Analytics provides details on the number of visitors generated by your campaign, the number of pages they visited, average time on your website, percent of new visitors to your website and the average bounce rate.

Campaign managers can also drill-down using the segments drop-down menu. This provides even greater detail on individual campaigns, keywords, geographic regions, browser types, operating systems and visitor activity, like the most popular landing and exit pages. Each results page provides the means to drill-down even further and fine-tune your data.

Google Analytics dramatically enhances the abilities e-commerce firms have in retaining and converting customers. Simply use the E-commerce tab to display purchase information to calculate ROI numbers for your campaigns.

Using Google Analytics, Email Marketers can discover simple ways to more effectively tailor their promotional messages, design and layout to their audience’s preferences, minimize steps in the purchase process, reduce shopping cart abandonment, improve landing page effectiveness and keep visitors on your website even longer by identifying and optimizing the weak links where most of your visitors exit. Use today’s robust delivery and tracking tools, and make each message count.

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Improve Your Email Marketing Software Results with Calls To Action

While many companies are using email marketing software to get their messages in front of their target audience and captive markets, savvy email marketers know that a good ‘call to action’ can take their results to the next level.

A call to action is a standard marketing term that spans all media. Its definition is essentially word usage that encourages a reader or viewer to take action. For example, “Click here to register for the free seminar.” or “Quickly signup for our free trial!” Regardless of whether marketers are talking about an email marketing campaign, radio ad, television spot, or out-of-home (billboard) ad, a first-rate call to action is always ready in their arsenal.

The reason calls to action work so well is because they are direct and to the point. They tell the reader, as clearly as possible, “This is what I want you to do next”. Even though, intuitively, we may think that the reader will figure out what to do next, sometimes they don’t come to that conclusion as quickly as we might expect. Periodically a customer may be thinking, “Do I call them to buy this product?”, “Do I email them to buy this product?” or “Do I click on a link to buy this product?”. If those are the questions your email marketing subscriber is asking, then rest assured that having a big call to action that reads “Click Here To Buy This Product Now” will promptly lead them to your desired answer.

Since your email marketing campaign may have a variety of information, it’s even more important to have clear calls to action because it’s easy for your Recipient to get lost. This is particularly true if your email marketing campaign has multiple links in it, and clicking a link is your desired outcome. Your intention is to make it as obvious as possible which link to click, so your recipient doesn’t get stuck clicking a ‘learn more’ link when they really want a ‘buy now’ link.

Most email marketing software solutions will let you track the links that are being clicked. This is very useful, because you can analyze reports that will clearly show you whether your subscribers are clicking on your call to action link.

It’s important to note that a call to action does not only apply to links. Many email marketers include calls to action such as “Call Us Quickly To Secure Your Spot”, where the desired outcome is a phone call, or “Reply To This Email Immediately For Your Free Gift”, where the desired outcome is an email reply.

The key towards using calls to action successfully with your email marketing software is to ask yourself this important question: What, in particular, do I want my reader to do next? Once you have the answer to that question, you can begin formatting the perfect call to action for your email marketing campaign that will assist in achieving your objective.

Remember that you won’t become the ultimate email marketing guru over night, but with the right email marketing software and some careful planning about the calls to action you want to include, you will be able to quickly boost your results.

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