Email Marketing with a Personal Touch

For some companies, email marketing is a one-way street … you send your message and cross your fingers hoping someone will respond.  But what if they don’t?  Do you know how many people opened the email or clicked on a link?  Do you have the information you need to follow up with a more relevant or timely message? If not, it’s time to think about integrating your email marketing effort with the data in your Sage CRM system.

A Quick Look at Email Service Providers

First, it’s useful to understand what an email service provider (ESP) is.  An ESP essentially does the heavy lifting, allowing you to send an email campaign to hundreds, or even thousands, of recipients through their servers.  Once your message goes out, an ESP also provides detailed reporting that includes delivery success, open rates, clicks, and even details about the actions of specific contacts on your list.  These reports provide invaluable information about the effectiveness of your messages and campaigns.

A 2-Way Conversation

When you use an ESP that’s integrated with your Sage CRM system, you transform email marketing from a one-way “blast and pray” to a 2-way conversation with your customers and prospects.  That’s because all of the valuable open, click, and other data is written back to your Sage CRM database.  Now when you pull up those hot prospects you’ve been pursuing for months, you’ll see which contacts are interacting with your email, what products they’re interested in, whether they forwarded your message to a colleague, and even those that have opted out (so you don’t spend time chasing your tail!).  Best of all, the data is sitting right there in the CRM system you’re probably using every day anyway.

Post-Click, It’s Personal

When you combine email campaign responses with notes from phone conversations and meetings in a single CRM database, you have the insight you’ll need to stay in touch with customers and prospects with relevant communication.  You can even create a call list of “hot” prospects based on their open and click activity to ensure you follow up in a timely fashion … without ever leaving Sage CRM.

Other ESP Benefits

There are several worthwhile benefits of using an ESP including the ability to manage bounce backs to keep your list clean, automatic opt-out links to ensure CAN-SPAM compliance, ability to send email surveys, and much more.  Most also provide turnkey email templates for those that want professional-looking communication without messing around with HTML.

Contact us to learn more about Sage CRM and for recommended ESPs that integrate with your CRM solution.