Making the Leap: 4 Key Benefits of Switching to a CRM for Email Marketing

Get the most from customer relationship management

Key Takeaways:

• Leverage CRM for comprehensive customer insights: Use CRM to gain a deep understanding of customers’ interactions, preferences, and history, far beyond surface-level metrics.
• Streamline multi-channel communication: Centralize and manage customer communications across email, social media, and customer service through CRM for consistency.
• Align sales and marketing efforts: Share data and insights through CRM to foster collaboration between sales and marketing, leading to more effective lead management and targeted marketing.
• Enhance efficiency with advanced CRM automation: Automate key processes such as task management, lead assignment, and sales forecasting to save time and increase productivity.

Email marketing is a must-have accessory in a business's toolbox. Need proof? According to Hubspot, there will be approximately 4.6 billion daily email users by 2025. If you're not impressed, you must not be using email. The undeniable truth is that leveraging email marketing to its fullest is an absolute must.

Email marketing campaigns often face hurdles, even with proper execution. After crafting meticulous campaigns, segmenting audiences precisely, and sending emails into the digital realm… ever get lackluster engagement? This stagnation stems from email marketing's inability to adapt to each customer's evolving interests. Or capture their real-time interactions across different platforms. Bummer, right?

Wouldn't you fix this problem if you had the answer? Of course! This is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems come into play. Switching to a CRM can revolutionize communication, replace impersonal blasts with meaningful insights, and empower stronger, more rewarding customer relationships.

To back up our claims, we'll reveal four key reasons why transitioning to a CRM is your business's move - today!

1. Enhanced customer insights

Email marketing providers offer a glimpse into customer interactions and actions, primarily through open and click-through rates. Both metrics warrant close attention, but what happens after an open or a click? That's where things go dark.

It's the opposite with CRM.

A CRM shows the customer journey beyond initial engagement, tracking interactions that email marketing tools can't capture. Here's how:

• Comprehensive contact history: Every interaction, whether a customer service call, an in-store visit, or a social media engagement, is tracked and recorded. This continuous history provides a complete view of each customer's journey.
• Detailed preference insights: CRMs dive into the specifics of your customers' preferences, from product categories they browse most to the offers they redeem. Understanding these preferences enables hyper-personalized marketing strategies.
• Behavioral tracking: Beyond opens and clicks, CRMs analyze behavioral data like how customers use products or services, feedback provided, and purchasing patterns. This paints a clearer picture of customer needs and potential churn risks.
• Segmentation capabilities: With rich data, CRMs enable precise segmentation based on various criteria, allowing for targeted communication that resonates with each segment's unique characteristics and needs. If your CRM data needs organization, we have a guide to help you fix this problem!
• Sales and marketing alignment: CRMs facilitate a unified approach to customer engagement by sharing customer insights across departments. This ensures that up-to-date customer data informs marketing campaigns and sales efforts.

This detailed customer knowledge is priceless. It enables businesses to develop personalized marketing strategies that align with individuals’ needs and preferences.

For example, observing content that customers frequent about eco-friendly products can lead to targeted campaigns focusing on sustainability, significantly improving customer engagement and satisfaction. With CRM, you can send the right message to the right person at the right time. 

And that, right there, is marketing gold!

2. Streamline communication across channels

These days, your audience is everywhere online, which means you need to be as well. CRM's beauty lies in its ability to centralize and streamline communication across multiple channels, including email, social media, and customer service, within a single platform. 

Why does this matter? In a world where customer expectations for quick and personalized interactions are at an all-time high, managing and responding to communications across channels improves customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Here’s how CRM changes the game:

• Unified customer view: Businesses gain a unified view of customer interactions by integrating all communication channels into one CRM platform. This consolidation enables quicker response times and more personalized customer service, as the customer's history and preferences inform every communication.
• Omnichannel presence: CRMs allow businesses to maintain an omnichannel presence, guaranteeing whenever customers reach out via email, social media, or any other channel, the quality and timeliness of responses are consistent. People will appreciate it since human interaction is dwindling by the day. And it's something traditional email marketing services don't typically offer. 

If you'd like to see the power of a CRM implementation firsthand, check out these two success stories:

Case Study #1: Activision

Activision needed to improve customer satisfaction and stay in contact with gamers via email marketing and social media. To accomplish this, they integrated Marketing Cloud, leveraging its power to monitor social media conversations relevant to its products. 

This allowed Activision to stay on the pulse of gamer discussions, ensuring no feedback or trend was missed. With Service Cloud, Activision acts on these conversations, following up with personalized engagement that resonates with their audience. This strategy creates a dialogue where every player feels heard and valued.

Using this CRM-driven approach, Activision reduced its annual customer service operating expenses by 25%. Tim Rondeau, Activision's Senior Director of Customer Care, sums it up perfectly: "We're reducing costs and increasing satisfaction at the same time."

Case Study #2: Casio

Casio wanted to improve their email marketing strategy since their previous system offered limited insights and personalization options.

By utilizing HubSpot's Lists to segment contacts based on specific behaviors and characteristics, Casio crafted emails that spoke directly to the interests and needs of their audience. This targeted approach was simpler with no-code design integrations, enabling Casio to design visually appealing campaigns without requiring extensive IT or designer input.

The impact was profound. Over 12 months, 27 million marketing emails were sent, and engagement improved. Open rates increased by over 10%, click-through rates saw a 7% average uplift, and net revenue from email marketing exceeded £1 million.

3. Improved sales and marketing alignment

CRM systems break down barriers that traditionally separate sales and marketing departments. When both teams can access shared insights and data, everyone works from the same playbook. This unified approach means marketing efforts are directly informed by sales insights, and sales strategies are refined using marketing data. The result? A cohesive strategy that moves leads smoothly through the funnel.

Here's how this manifests in tangible benefits:

• Enhanced lead scoring: With shared data, sales, and marketing can collaboratively develop more accurate lead-scoring systems. Leads are scored based on comprehensive interactions captured by the CRM, ensuring that sales optimally engage with the most promising prospects.
• Streamlined lead nurturing: Marketing gains insights into the sales process, tailoring content and campaigns to address common questions or hurdles. This targeted nurturing keeps prospects engaged and warm, boosting conversion rates.
• Efficient conversion strategies: The feedback loop between sales and marketing ensures that conversion strategies are continuously optimized based on real-world data. Marketing efforts can be adjusted to generate higher-quality leads, while sales strategies can be fine-tuned to close deals.

The impact of improved alignment is clear: Businesses report tasty boosts in conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and marketing ROI. By leveraging a CRM to unite sales and marketing, companies can unlock a level of coherence that is virtually impossible to achieve otherwise.

There’s no need to have your super sales team at odds with your marketing mavericks. With CRM, they’ll work from the same data and make better decisions together. 

4. Advanced automation and efficiency

CRM offers tools designed to boost efficiency across business operations, automate mundane tasks, and predict future sales trends. Traditional email marketing platforms can only dream of this. CRM allows reallocation of the most valuable resources (attention) to where they're most needed.

Here are a few ways CRM automation transforms businesses:

• Task management automation: Forget manually tracking follow-ups or customer interactions. CRM automates these tasks, sending reminders to your team and ensuring everything is noticed. Now your staff can focus on engaging customers instead of administrative work.
• Lead assignment: Gone are the days of leads languishing in your inbox. CRM automation ensures that leads are immediately assigned to the appropriate team member based on predefined criteria, such as geographic location or product interest. A swift assignment like this increases the chances of converting leads while their interest is peaked.
• Sales forecasting: With advanced analytics and automation, CRM provides accurate sales forecasting, giving you a clear view of your pipeline so you can make informed decisions for the future.

Businesses using CRM automation report significant time savings and productivity boosts. For example, the team at Zoho, a leading CRM provider, has documented the considerable impact of CRM on business performance:

• Lead conversion rates: CRM has proven to improve lead conversion rates by an astonishing 300%, underscoring its effectiveness in turning prospects into customers.
• Customer retention: By fostering better customer relationships, CRM contributes to a 27% improvement in customer retention, ensuring long-term success.
• Shortened sales cycles: CRM systems' efficiency and organization can shorten sales cycles by 24%, enabling faster closures and revenue generation.
• Increased revenue per sale: Businesses leveraging CRM see a 41% increase in revenue per sale, highlighting the system's role in improving the value of each transaction.
• Reduced sales and marketing costs: CRM helps save 23% on sales and marketing costs, illustrating its capacity to streamline operations and reduce expenditure.

Switching to CRM for email marketing is a no-brainer: it provides the tools and insights needed to transform sales strategies, marketing efforts, and customer interactions, propelling businesses toward goals with greater speed and less expense. 

Ready for CRM benefits?

While traditional email marketing has a place, achieving increased ROI is possible only with CRM. 

If you're still unsure, remember, the key benefits of embracing CRM include:

• Enhanced customer insights: CRMs offer a 360-degree view of customers, enabling personalized marketing strategies that engage and resonate with audiences better.
• Streamlined communication across channels: With CRM, all communication channels are in one platform, giving consistent and timely interactions that boost customer satisfaction.
• Improved sales and marketing alignment: CRM breaks barriers between sales and marketing teams, building a collaborative environment that enhances lead scoring, nurturing, and conversion strategies.
• Advanced automation and efficiency: Beyond email automation, CRM integrates task management, lead assignment, and sales forecasting. This drives productivity, more sales at a higher value, faster, and less cost.

Imagine a world where insights, efficiency, and alignment converge into a customer experience that exceeds expectations and propels business to great success. With CRM email marketing, this is a reality.

Before you go, we have one question: If you need help setting up your CRM for email marketing, speak to one of our specialists today to find out how we can support your CRM content needs!