How CRM can Help Boost Your Email Marketing ROI

Even as the discourse around the use of social media platforms and other online tools for targeting and converting leads grows, the quaint channel of email marketing continues to remain the most effective. As per the 2019 DMA report, you can expect an average return of $42 for every $1 spent on email marketing campaigns. That’s an ROI of a whopping 4,200%! With 3.9 billion daily email users across the world and 306.4 billion emails being sent out every day, this digital marketing channel can open up huge opportunities to drive up lead conversions and sales.

While these statistics are aspirational, not all email marketing campaigns deliver such astronomical ROIs. As a business owner, you must take stock of how well your marketing initiatives fare vis-à-vis these yardsticks and what you can do to optimize returns. One effective way of curating campaigns that resonate with a broad cross-section of your target audience and not just one specific demographic is to leverage your customer relationship management (CRM) system.

As you know, CRMs are a gold mine of data that can help you understand who your existing and potential customers really are. Let’s take a look at how these data insights can help you transform your email marketing initiatives.

Role of CRM in Email Marketing

For any email marketing campaign to be effective, it needs to speak to a specific audience in a language and tone that resonates with them. Your CRM that is loaded with customer data can be a potent tool in crafting campaigns that are relevant and targeted. Insights such as purchase history, conversation records between customers and support executives, or personal information such as social media handles, job details, age, or pin code help you understand your target audience inside out.

Based on these insights, you can craft highly personalized emails using a marketing automation platform of your choice. It is important to note that while ‘marketing automation’ and ‘CRM’ are used interchangeably sometimes, these services are not identical.

CRM tools are used for customer, lead and pipeline management, and hence, prove to be a rich source of data insights. Marketing automation, on the other hand, is used to craft, test, and execute customer-centric promotional campaigns. When used in tandem, CRM, and marketing automation tools marry the data insights with campaign execution, resulting in improving the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives.

That’s why a lot of businesses today either use CRM tools with built-in marketing automation features or sync CRM data with marketing automation software.

How to Use CRM to Boost Email Marketing ROI

When it comes to email marketing, your automation software and CRM tool can be considered as two pieces of the same puzzle. By basing your email marketing campaigns on comprehensive customer data provided by your CRM, you can create highly personalized and relevant campaigns capable of yielding optimally high ROI, consistently.

Here are 6 smart ways you can leverage your CRM insights to boost email marketing ROI:

1. Promote Upselling Using Sales History

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Your CRM contains details regarding your customers’ purchase history. This data can be used to promote upselling and increase engagement with your existing customers. For instance, ahead of the release of a new product or service, you can analyze past sales data to ascertain which customers would be most interested in these new offerings.

Based on this analysis, you can curate a campaign exclusively targeting those to whom these products or services will be most relevant. In this email, for example, purchase history is being used to promote similar products to a buyer. This helps in keeping your marketing messaging highly personalised and nudging returning customers to engage with your brand. According to a recent survey, 80% of customers are likely to make a purchase from brands that offer a personalised experience, which, ultimately, translate to higher ROI.

On the contrary, if you send out promotional deals, product updates and announcements to your entire subscriber list, you risk antagonising those customers to whom certain messages are not relevant.

2. Target Userbase with Hyper-personalized Campaigns

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The historical data stored in your CRM software can also help you target your user base with hyper-personalized campaigns. For instance, a customer’s contact information such as area code for their phone number or the zip code on their residential address can help you zero-in on which segments of your user base to target with a marketing campaign regarding your business operations in a particular area. Like in this case, the target audience can be segmented based on their zip code, so that the email reaches only those living in or around Greenville, South Carolina.

Besides, location information also proves valuable in tailoring the tonality of your content to suit the sensibilities of the recipients. From culturally appropriate references to preferred languages, there are many ways in which you can tweak the content of your emails to hyper-personalize them based on the insights gathered from CRM data. Hyper-personalization, when done right, can increase the chances of a recipient clicking on your CTA by 202%, which means an exponential rise in your ROI.

3. Discover New Leads

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With a database comprising details of every user who has ever engaged with your brand, CRMs contain an unmatched wealth of information regarding your target audience. Not only do they tell you who to target with your marketing campaigns but also whether or not a lead has been qualified by the sales team.

With a single click, you can ascertain whether a user matches the demographic profile of your existing user base. If yes, you can use the information stored in your CRM to decide which segment a particular lead fits into best. Using these insights, you can start reaching out to them with targeted, personalized emails – such as the welcome email in the example above –  that will push them to act on your CTA.

4. Personalization Through Purchase and Social Media Activity

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Of course, your existing customers’ purchase history is a great way to predict their future buying behavior and curate marketing content that is aligned with these predicted patterns. Discounts, promotions, special deals, announcements of new products can be made more effective using this single data insight.

But you can make your email marketing efforts more pointed and astute by also leveraging insights from your users’ social media activity alongside. For instance, a customer has bought a gadget from you. Based on that information in your CRM, you already know that they have a penchant for gadgets. Now, if you also scan your CRM data for social media conversations on your brand’s page or about it, you may find that the same customer has left a comment regarding another gadget being out of stock.

So, as soon as that item is back in stock, you can send them an email update about it. And maybe even throw in a special price. Voila, a sale is almost guaranteed!

5. Build Customer Personas

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Segmentation has proven to be a vital approach for enhancing the efficacy of your email marketing campaigns. One excellent approach to segmenting your user base effectively is to create customer personas with the help of your CRM system.

Use the data stored in your CRM to research the habits, demographics, buying patterns, likes and dislikes of your customers. Based on certain common dominating factors, divide them into three, five, or ten different personas. For example, if you’re a men’s accessories brand (such as in the example above), one persona could be male buyers in the age group of 30-35, who are young working professionals, financially independent, and in charge of their own purchasing decisions. Another could be college-going teenagers who shop from you only during the End of Season Sale. And so on.

Once these personas are created, you can just go on adding your customers to categories they fit best in. Then, create email marketing campaigns targeted toward each of these personas. 

6. Test Lead Strength

Your CRM system can also determine the strength or quality of a lead. Based on these insights, you can determine where a particular lead falls in your sales funnel and determine how much effort you want to invest in converting a particular lead.

Details such as location, job title, industry, age, among others, can tell you if a particular user does not qualify as a potential lead for your brand. So, you don’t waste your time and effort chasing leads that have no potential for conversion.

This can help weed out redundancies in your email marketing campaigns, and in turn, build upon the ROI.

The Takeaway

With so many brands servicing the same customer base in every industry vertical, your email marketing initiatives have to stand out from the crowd to make a real impact. This can be achieved by combining the power of email marketing with data insights from a well-managed CRM. Thus, giving your email marketing ROI an exponential boost.

At Email Uplers, we provide you with an established ecosystem to help you leverage every critical data point from your CRM. Visit this link if you need help with email campaign management that ensures higher ROI!