March 9, 2018

CRM Email and Reporting Best Practices

Written by
Mallory McGuinness
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Tags: CRM

Have you ever found yourself inundated with advertising emails, only to decide to send these pesky messages to the spam box? Chances are you have. And if you filter your email it would be silly to expect customers not to do the same.

We are constantly being assaulted by bland, junky marketing messages, and the only way to ensure that we get the emails we actually want is to reduce the junk. And you can bet that generic special offers, one-time deals, and “to-whom-it-may-concern” advertisements are crowding your customers’ inboxes, interfering with the messages you need them to see.

To keep your marketing messages out of the spam box, take advantage of CRM email marketing.

Also Read: SugarCRM vs. Salesforce: The CRM Battle Rages On

Email Marketing With CRMs

Companies use CRMs to understand consumers better. CRMs increase positive interactions and improve business relationships. When you use CRM for email marketing, you’re making use of the tools made available for you from your CRM system. The very tools that increase understanding, positive interactions and better business relationships.

CRMs make for more effective email marketing, and they do this by personalizing messages.

A customized approach to email marketing is a deal breaker , it makes emails less intrusive and resonates with prospects and customers. To customize messages, you’ll need a CRM that gets to know names, shopping habits and customer interests. With this information, marketing messages become valuable emails to recipients you know are already interested.

Best Practices for CRM Email Marketing

Drip campaigns fueled by data and reports makes for effective marketing. And when email campaigns are triggered, the time saved can be devoted to other aspects of business. Here are best practices for CRM email marketing.

  • Aggregate data for more valuable insights , draw it from any and all available sources including sales tools, ecommerce files, and your financial records.
  • Put this data to work with triggered messages. The personalized messages can be promotional, transactional, or informational to generate loyalty.
  • Use your CRM to track email marketing KPIs in real time.
  • Using this information, optimize your campaigns as you go.
  • Take all data available into account when you compose your triggered, personalized marketing messages , purchase histories, customer demographics, previous brand interactions and personal interests.
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CRM Email Reporting Best Practices

In order to put these best practices for email marketing in place, you’ve got to use best practices for CRM email reporting. Your CRM has been hard at work accumulating data from anywhere customers and prospects have interacted with you. It’s been integrating disparate data into a cohesive, consumable view of your customer journey.

All you have to do to tap into this powerful mass of data that will amplify your email marketing messages is use CRM reporting correctly. Here’s how:

See how people respond to the campaign.

  • Use CRM queries to identify any and all email campaign data. Then export the data and sort, or sort within the CRM.
  • Sort the query data by emails sent, opens, clicks, and other criteria like time of day to become more informed. After sorting, create a follow up list and score leads to identify the most interested prospects.
  • Use these reports to put workflow into play , after scoring leads, use these new priorities to schedule follow up tasks.

Determine how Effective the Campaign Is

  • Using CRM reporting, identify opportunities and measure email campaign values. Take these numbers and calculate the ROI.
  • Segment data and filter by completed sales and opportunities in progress.
  • Sort email campaign data by time , aggregate this data then measure messages against their performance by analyzing opens and clicks.
  • See how much traffic the email is sending to your site. Report on this weekly, quarterly, or yearly. Compare this report against direct and paid traffic, search engine results, referrals and other sources.
  • See how your campaigns performed over a fourteen day period to see when messages were opened more frequently, and when opens began to wane off.

Determine if Your Email Content is Resonating

  • Compare clicked links on buttons, images, banners, text and headers to see which elements performed best, then optimize the layout for future campaigns.
  • Pull a report on the top campaigns this quarter with the highest unsubscribe rates. Tie this back to the content. What subject lines and internal content did you add that enticed the reader to click?
  • Measure opens to see if the email subject line is compelling.
  • Measure links to determine how useful they are.
  • Track how many times a customer or prospect opened your email and the number of clicks they made. Make note of the time of day the link was clicked, and to what URL it sent the user to.

Find out if Your Email Data is Clean

  • Pull an email campaign report to confirm if messages have been received. This will qualify and clean email data.
  • If the addresses receive a hard or soft bounce, draw a report and remove them from your recipient list.
  • Draw a report on highest bounce rate per campaign and drill down against contacts and leads.

Things have changed drastically in email marketing. Customers don’t want an influx of Hail Mary emails sent to a large pool of recipients , they reasonably demand basic courtesy. They want to know their personal interests are being considered or they will mark these broad net emails as spam. CRM email marketing and reporting makes targeting possible by gathering data, aggregating and analyzing it, and using the information to send personalized emails with value. You’re not the only one in the marketing game , your email is likely a drop in the bucket. You’re going to need a tool that will create, manage, and measure campaigns that stand out from the rest.

Mallory McGuinness writes for LeadMaster CRM on the topics of lead management, lead nurturing, analytics, and marketing automation.

 

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