It has long been believed that email offers the lowest on-going cost for any type of marketing campaign. As a result, and with the added bonus of an often seismic success rate, email is eating up significant shares of the average digital marketing budget.

As long ago as 2010, 36% of consumers felt compelled to make an online purchase as a result of receiving a promotional email. Furthermore, 27% confirmed emails prompted them to make an offline purchase, proving the format works well for both digital shop fronts and those made out of stone and mortar.

Those figures are rising every year, as is the percentage of the average digital marketing budget being dedicated to email marketing. However, while email may well be at the heart of many organisation’s marketing plans, the ability to integrate it with other forms of advertising and, crucially, reporting, is what really helps realise its true value.

Marketers constantly have to justify expenditure and make sure the methods they’re using to reach customers are the right ones. The goals might vary wildly – for example, generating new leads, or ensuring that loyal customers remain advocates of the business. Whatever the targets are, the technology now available to help measure their success is, frankly, mind-blowing.

Email marketing and CRM

Today, we’ll focus on two great bedfellows: email marketing and customer relations management (CRM) software. They are more intrinsically linked than you may think and the type of reporting you can generate as a result of amalgamating the two will be great use. You’ll wonder how you ever did without it.

Before CRM and email marketing clients, spreadsheets were the tool of choice for keeping track of prospects and Outlook was the way in which you reached out to them. Thus, integrating them was next to impossible.

Getting a view of email recipient activity is crucial, as is keeping an eye on the progress from lead to sale. One often isn’t possible without the other. And, while we’ve come a long way since spreadsheets and Outlook, having to log into separate systems and piece together results is a pain. Imagine your sales team being able to instantly see whether or not a prospect has been contacted via email recently and exactly how they responded. With clients such as mailingmanager, this kind of stuff is absolutely possible.

Integrating CRM with email – what’s important?

Surveys suggest that the following elements are important when integrating email marketing and CRM:

  • Ability to export customer lists from CRM
  • Ability to see all marketing activity in one place
  • Automate email campaigns based on prospect activity
  • Ability to feed campaign activity back into CRM
  • Aligning both sales and marketing activities

Unsurprisingly, the last two were deemed the most important to marketers.

If you’re lucky enough to be using mailingmanager, it can link with a wide variety of CRM applications to make sure this feed of data is automated. Check it out.

Email marketing and Google Analytics

Never heard these two mentioned in the same breath? Now you have! mailingmanager enables you to integrate your email campaigns with Google’s Analytics service. The latter is typically used for websites, but offers fantastic insights into other forms of digital marketing, too.

Firstly, it should be stated that Analytics certainly isn’t a replacement for mailingmanager’s inbuilt reporting suite – it rather compliments it, quite beautifully. We wrote a blog post about this a little while ago and I would encourage you to check it out by clicking here.

One of Analytics’ strengths is its Goals feature, which enables you to set up (as you would expect) marketing goals. In the world of websites, these relate to visitors reaching certain pages or clicking specific links, but the same theories can be applied to your emails.

It’s true that Google Analytics is a bit of a behemoth, and I could fill this blog with tips on just getting started with it. Instead, I’ll point you in the direction of a post on our sister website, in.house.media, which offers some advice for Analytics newbies. Read it here.

Images courtesy of Stuart Miles, Idea go, renjith krishnan / freedigitalphotos.net