Just Married: CRM & Email Marketing

Written by Bill Friday, 28 May 2010 16:10

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Is it a match made in heaven? Infusionsoft is charging ahead with their “Email 2.0” program, and occupying a very interesting position in the Internet Marketing arena. Let’s take a closer look at what that’s about and whether it makes sense for small and medium sized companies in Technology industries.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution can help you treat each customer as the unique individual he/she is. It allows you to maintain real-time data on how responsive each customer is to your offers and proposals, and extensive details about their purchase history. A good sales team can use that data to hone a more targeted approach when interacting with their accounts. For example, they can zero in on the accounts that are worth calling on frequently and back off on the accounts where your company could wear out your welcome.

So while CRM is about better targeting and follow up, Email Marketing has historically been a cost-efficient way to reach a large number of customers or prospects with a common message.  It may be your company newsletter, a new product promotion, or an announcement about a new white paper you’ve developed. In most cases marketing emails are not particularly targeted to the recipient. The result, although still powerful, is that some customers get more email from you than they prefer, some would be thrilled to get even more, some couldn’t care less about the topic of your latest email and some immediately go to your website to get more information. Historical Email Marketing is very useful, and far from optimal.

Email Autoresponders such as Aweber have taken a step toward reducing the impersonal down-side of Email Marketing by allowing a sequence of pre-canned emails to be delivered to a specific customer when that customer takes some action.  For example, a customer that downloads your white paper could automatically receive a series of short emails over the next few weeks that summarize the important points made in the white paper, and those summary emails can be interspersed with an occasional attractive offer based on the interest they’ve shown by requesting the white paper. The result is a much more targeted and automated approach to Email Marketing to your customer list.

Infusionsoft takes the Autoresponder to a whole new level by integrating a capable CRM application with an advanced Email Marketing/Autoresponder services suite, and then offers the result as a cloud-based solution.  On the CRM side you can define any number of “tags” that describe some customer behavior and then automatically assign those tags to each customer as they interact with your company. For example, you might define tags for the purchase action on each product, the download of a white paper, or for clicking a “more information” link in a company newsletter.

On the Email Marketing side you can launch broadcast emails or trigger Autoresponder sequences that target any combination of the tags you’ve set up. For example, you could send a sequence of “warming” emails followed by a limited time discount offer to anyone that downloads specifications for a product but doesn’t purchase it.  Then, once they have purchased the product, a new sequence of emails offering tips on how to get the most benefit from the product could be automatically triggered.

This short description of Infusionsoft won’t serve to describe its full range of capabilities – you will need to investigate it more in-depth if you believe it may be right for your company. And how do you decide? Here’s some suggestions:

• First, if you market to a large customer/prospect list then Email Marketing should definitely be considered, if you’re not already doing it.
• Secondly, if you are convinced that Email Marketing will work or is already working for you then there are quite likely several opportunities to incorporate Autoresponders into your strategy.
• Finally, if your company is not significantly invested in an existing CRM solution and is willing to modify your sales and marketing processes to install CRM at the center, then Infusionsoft should be given serious consideration.

That’s a lot of “ifs” to think through. Email Marketing is a specialty in the Web Lever Internet Marketing solution set, and we can help you arrive at the best answer for you – Feel free to get in touch when you are ready.

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