5 CRM Features that are a MUST for your Email campaigns

With a fair amount of omnichannel marketing adoption, marketers today aren’t just relying upon a single marketing channel. There are chances that you want to target audiences on different platforms for a 360-degree persuasion (in a positive way of course). For instance, when a prospect browses certain products on your website, based on that search, you will want to carry out cross-channel marketing where you advertise those particular products via Facebook Ads, Instagram promotions, affiliate marketing, and email marketing. 

Staying top-of-the-mind is the key and omnichannel marketing utilizes this philosophy to unlock revenues!

Now when you are involved in multi-channel marketing, handling processes becomes tedious and daunting if you go back and forth with the platforms. This is where a CRM comes into the picture! CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management which is now widely acclaimed to be associated with a system that enables multiple sales and marketing tasks from a single tool.

“CRM is a centralized repository tool for all your prospects, leads, and customer data sets” The system largely focuses on collecting, curating, and customizing stored data to build more meaningful relationships with the consumers. More specifically, when we talk about CRM with Email Marketing, a CRM tool allows you to make more informed decisions about the future and existing customers with tailor-made email campaigns.

The Use of CRM for Email Marketing

Just like any other marketing channel, a CRM system for email marketing works to procure, nurture, engage, and re-engage subscribers with the help of collected and stored data. It proves to be a unified hub for all the collected user details along with their behavioral and preferential data and inputs for every customer lifecycle stage.

Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Marketo, come with a built-in CRM campaign management tool that allows all the advanced features designed specifically for email campaigns. Similarly, many bespoke CRMs like Zoho, Agile, and Insightly, provide basic to advanced email marketing services in order to fulfill full-service marketing solutions.

Now your choice might be either one of them, the bottom line is, CRMs are crucial and utilitarian. However, scaling email marketing with the help of CRM campaign management can be tricky, but there are certain no-brainer, must-have features that you need to make sure are available in your CRM. Let’s explore what those features are…

Must-have Features for CRM with Email Marketing

Emails acquire 40x more customer acquisitions than Facebook and Twitter. There is so much you can achieve with the help of betterment tools like CRM. Data is the future, and when you know how to personalize your users’ email experience with its help, you excel.

That being said, here are the five must-have CRM features you require to scale up your email campaigns.

1. A Repository For All Things Data

Whenever you are choosing a CRM for your email campaigns, take note of how well it can acquire, retain, and store subscribers’ data. Personalization is like a second name to effective email marketing, and thus, details about any subscriber are worth a lot. Moreover, just storing and securing data is not enough. It should be segregated accordingly into segments that can be directly used as a targeted email list. For example, based on location, gender, interests, and other demographics, the CRM should be able to generate segments for customized email campaigns. The data should provide real-time solutions and alterations in the lists itself so that they become useful for trigger-based behavioral marketing.

2. Advanced Personalization Capabilities

Marketers have experienced a whopping 760% revenue boost via segmented email campaigns – which is a vital part of the email personalization fraternity. The CRM you pick should support cross-channel and multi-channel integrations in order to understand the user requirement easily. Website tracking, engagement on social profiles, email engagement rates, and past purchase/browsing history are the four key areas from where you can garner the personal data. CRM will then study various touchpoints to come up with email lists that can personalize the individual user experience to make it exclusive. Apart from that, personalization tags like first or last name, year of joining, location, weather, coupon codes, and more can further customize the user engagement on your campaigns. Make sure to double-check all the email personalization capabilities that your CRM offers.

3. Email Automation

Drip campaigns or automated emails work like a charm for businesses that target action-triggers. Welcome emails, cart abandonment emails, and transaction emails are a few instances where you can set-up email automation to send a series of emails that revolve around the same subject. B2C companies that leverage email automation have seen a rise in email conversions as high as 50%. This makes email automation an integral element for your CRM to provide.

4. Email Templates

As basic as it may sound, email templates are still the star players in a campaign’s success. What goes in the backend is never visible or prominently explainable to the end-user, i.e. email recipients. All they will see is a responsive, easily navigable, and engaging email design. CRMs or ESPs like SFMC and Mailchimp come with pre-designed template libraries. A CRM that allows maximum customization in their templates and lets you integrate your custom-templates should be in any marketer’s good books. Email clients and devices render email designs differently, and this is a point where testing proves to be the hero. Go for a tool that combines all the email design best practices for maximum opens. 

5. Analytics and Analysis

The final but vital feature of a CRM is having a class-apart email metrics facility. Email campaigns are measured by their open, click-through, and conversion rates to ultimately contribute to the overall ROI calculation. A good CRM tool will not only help you track all these metrics but will also help you to put this data into action by providing solutions. Analytics are important to measure email campaign performance and improve the operation where needed. Choose a CRM that can easily fetch third-party conversions and other integrated channels to provide holistic reporting.

Closing Note

CRM and email marketing can work as two sides of the coin if they are compatible to improve overall campaign performance. Out of all the latest and intricate features that new-gen CRMs come with, the discussed five are the classic and most fruitful ones. These CRM campaign management features are like the base of cake when anything else would be considered as the cherry on the top! However, if you still need a helping hand in deciding which CRM to go for, consult a CRM manager who can guide you with the right CRM strategy for your business.