Email Marketing Automation & CRM Integration
Seamlessly connect HubSpot, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, or Salesforce to drive leads, nurture clients, and boost ROI. Email marketing delivers an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent, equaling a 3,600% return on investment – OptinMonster Connecting your customer relationship management software with your email marketing system allows you to track the entire customer journey. Managing your audience profiles, email campaigns, and engagement metrics from one unified dashboard helps streamline your
Email and CRM Integration Help Marketing and Sales Work Together
Integrating your email and CRM platforms creates a seamless flow of data between the two, helping you manage the entire customer journey – from the very first email through sales follow-up.
This integration leads to better outcomes in your email campaigns, since you can segment audiences based on previous customer interactions. It also improves your sales efforts, as you can track leads’ interest based on their interactions with your brand. Since both teams use the same data, you will eliminate costly overspending on duplicate software – a huge concern, since 36% of teams report that toggling between too many software platforms actually makes routine tasks take longer!
How Our Workflow Automation Saves Your Business Time and Money
You know that email is a crucial part of your lead nurture process. While social media platforms come and go, 92% of Americans actively use their email. Simply sending out general messages every day is ineffective, however, and is likely to get your communications flagged as spam.
A data-backed email marketing tool lets your business make informed decisions using the latest data. Integrating it with your sales team’s information provides instant updates on customer interactions so you can further tailor your communications and design increasingly more relevant marketing campaigns for each subset of your customer base.
Even better, it saves your team precious time, since they no longer have to perform repetitive data-entry tasks. Automation handles updates across the system, so your team can move faster and avoid duplicated effort.
So, how do you get started? There are numerous options available, ranging from those suitable for small local businesses all the way up to enterprise-level solutions.
Let us streamline this process for you. Here’s how it works.
CRM + Email Platform Evaluation & Selection
Step one of our process is to identify which CRM or email services you are currently using and whether another platform might be a better fit for your business.
There are many marketing tools available, but most businesses stick to whichever platform they chose when first starting out. We get it – it’s hard to learn a new system midstream!
We’ll handle the heavy lifting of comparing prices and functionality for you and recommend the CRM with email marketing integration that best meets your business goals and your budget.
Our team works with all the major platforms, so you won’t be shepherded into a bad fit – check out our comparison of different CRM email marketing tools below.
If you’re starting from scratch, don’t worry! Our team can help you with every step of the process, from building your email list to setting up detailed analytics and reporting.
CRM + Email Platform Setup
Workflow Design & Automation
Drip Campaigns & Nurture Sequences
Data Segmentation & Personalization
CRM Integration & Data Architecture
Reporting & Analytics Setup
Workflow Design & Automation Setup
Next, you need automations that actually save you time. Many businesses report having too many platforms to manage and confusing processes that actually cost them time – that’s the opposite of what you want! In fact, automation is the most important feature 45% of businesses report wanting in their sales CRM.
As a full-service digital marketing agency that has helped hundreds of small businesses grow, we understand that your marketing automation tools need to make sense for the tasks you perform every day. We will work closely with you every step of the way to identify your preferred workflow, make constructive suggestions, and pinpoint which automations can speed up your processes and save your team precious time on repetitive tasks.
Lead Capture, Trigger Automation, CRM Sync
One of the main benefits of integrating your CRM tool with your email marketing platform is the ability to complete automations for the same customers across both sales and marketing sides.
For the vast majority of customers, this will start with an initial lead capture that triggers a predetermined action, called an automation. For example, a potential customer may download your lead magnet, a free e-book titled “12 Ways to Get Your Real Estate Business Off the Ground.” In exchange, they enter their email address on the download form.
Once the email enters your CRM, it triggers an automation that sends a series of lead nurture emails. Perhaps the customer clicks on the second email, showing interest in your next workshop. This triggers another automation that will send them reminders and discounts for your workshop, and so on.
Most importantly, each step of this is synced to your CRM in real time! That means you won’t keep sending the same top-of-funnel information to a lead who is already engaged with your business, and you won’t waste time selling your high-ticket items to basically uninterested leads.
Some of the most common automations include:
- Lead scoring
- Audience segmentation
- Call tracking
- Integrating SMS, email, and call marketing
- Triggering retargeting campaigns
Drip Campaigns & Nurture Sequences
So, what kind of campaigns do you need your CRM and marketing automation software to handle for you? For most of our clients, we’ll set up drip and nurture sequences to help move your customers closer to an actual purchase.
Drip campaigns are one of the most fundamental strategies for incorporating email marketing into your advertising. They are cost-effective, deliver a high return on investment, and keep leads interested in your business. We’re all familiar with these workflows. They generally start with a welcome email from the brand you visited, followed by a series of emails designed to get you more interested in the company, and end with promotional emails.
Data Segmentation & Personalization Strategies
Your CRM and email marketing efforts will only bear fruit if they are selling something that your target audience wants to buy. That’s why the next step in our process is data segmentation and personalization.
When it comes to email marketing campaigns, segmentation is absolutely crucial. Customers are 75% more likely to open emails from segmented campaigns than non-segmented ones. This aligns with common sense – if you regularly browse for dog food on a website like Chewy.com, you probably aren’t interested in receiving marketing emails for parakeet feed.
This is where your CRM data needs to inform your marketing campaigns. At a minimum, your CRM software should ensure that customers are receiving relevant information that matches their name and shopping interests.
With proper automations and email list segmentation, each customer can receive communications that feel like a personalized email tailored to their interests – making them more likely to click, browse, and purchase, regardless of the industry.
CRM Integration & Data Flow Architecture
Are your automated marketing emails using the correct information? The next step our team will take is to make sure that your marketing system is actually using CRM data to update your campaigns in real time.
Your email automations should import customer information directly from your CRM into your lead nurture or drip campaigns so you don’t have the dreaded “Dear {NAME}” showing up in your email sequences. Customers should feel like your brand is speaking directly to them and their interests at all times.
The old saying is true – “What you measure, you improve.” How do you know that your email nurturing sequences are resulting in more purchases or leads? Data.
Our team will create a robust reporting and analytics dashboard that you can access 24/7. In other words, you won’t have to wait for our marketers to produce a report for you – you can access your business’s data at any time and make improvements to your strategy as you gather more information.
Platforms We Work With
The key to choosing the best CRM and email tools for your business is to decide what marketing automation features you want it to handle, what metrics you will track with it, and how much you might need it to scale in the future. We can help you identify the best tools for your goals.
At SEO Design Chicago, we specialize in custom-quoted digital marketing solutions tailored to your business goals – not in selling you a predetermined product. In other words, we want to set up the best marketing automation platform for you – one that grows your business and actually makes it easier for your sales and marketing teams to do their jobs.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a popular choice for small businesses, thanks to its low starting costs. As a marketing automation and CRM tool, it has an intuitive dashboard with an easy automation builder. You can create drag-and-drop campaigns that include everything from advanced email workflows, SMS messages, and social media retargeting ads.
While HubSpot does offer a free CRM tier and a low-cost but robust small business option, its Professional and Enterprise tiers can get pricey.
The O.G. email builder, most of us have used Mailchimp at one point or another. Its email marketing capabilities are strong but intuitive, and it even includes AI-assisted content writing.
Mailchimp has expanded with an optional sales CRM add-on that lets you integrate various marketing tasks, like a CRM interface and SMS campaigns. So if your team likes the templates provided by Mailchimp’s builder and is already accustomed to this interface, it can be a good way to add a basic CRM to your toolkit without a massive learning curve.
ActiveCampaign has a massive selection of 900+ automations and triggers. Customization is where it really shines. If you use marketing automation to manage a large contact list or multiple audience segments, it can be a great CRM, suitable for small businesses all the way up to enterprise-level organizations. It allows you to fine-tune your automations while keeping things accessible for your team.
Finally, Salesforce is another powerful tool to streamline marketing automation and sales processes. Its Marketing Cloud is a strong choice for larger businesses that want to run data-informed automated email marketing campaigns, but it isn’t always the most accessible for general users.
Regardless, Salesforce holds the largest market share among CRM providers, between 20% and 23%. This puts it at the cutting edge of making updates based on customer behavior and new business intelligence, such as integrating AI-informed management automations.
Do you have the best CRM supporting your email marketing efforts? SEO Design Chicago will design a customized strategy that puts data and insights at your fingertips. Request your free consultation today!