Email Marketing and CRM Together to Achieve Your Business Goals

Email marketing can fuel your inbound strategy because it syncs closely to your CRM.  Customer relationship management helps you adapt your emails based on form submissions, website activity, and more. Marketing tools (like email) powered by a CRM turn visitors into buyers.

As an Inbound Marketing and Growth Agency, we understand the email landscape is continually changing, which means your work as an email marketer is not the same as it was just a few short months ago. Moreover, your main goal is to get the right message in front of the right people at the right time. 

We know it's hard to keep up with all the latest and greatest tips for your email marketing, so we put together a checklist to make sure you stay on top of your email game. You can also gain great insight from the 2019 State of Email Report from Litmus.

How is Email Marketing Evolving and What You Must do to Stay on Top of the Changes

1. Seek out and eliminate inefficiencies in the email review and approval process.

"Marketers spend an average of 3.9 hours getting emails reviewed and approved before launch, and they work with an average 2.4 other departments to get emails reviewed".

Tip: Avoid sending emails the day you get them approved. Haste makes waste. Sending an email campaign in a rush can potentially lead to mistakes.

2. Gain greater visibility into email performance to understand the subscriber experience.

Tip: Always track and monitor email performance from open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Two key actions to look at when optimizing your email is the open and the click. One common cause of low click-through rates is that your email is trying too hard. It's doing too many things at once. 

3. Improve measurement of email results to monitor success.

Tip: Measure everything. Analytics will monitor your email success and help you make better-informed decisions about how your company uses email to achieve its business goals. The last step of running effective lead nurturing campaigns is measuring and improving.

source: 2019 State of Email Report from Litmus

Powerful Growth Tool for Any Business (Using HubSpot's Free Marketing Tools)

HubSpot is so passionate about email marketing and so excited about software that they made creating high-performing emails easy.

They couldn't resist ...

Already known for free CRM, they announced that customers on its free tier can now send up to 2,000 marketing emails a month and manage up to $1,000 in online ads.

According to Kipp Bodnar, CMO of HubSpot, 

"We're offering email as part of our free CRM to enable growing businesses to finally see how their efforts impact their customers' experience beyond just a single email or interaction."

They believe it's not enough for businesses to grow. They want them to grow better.

What can marketers do ...

HubSpot, Free Marketing Tools in HubSpot CRM via YouTube,  July 16, 2019

Marketing tools give you everything you need to capture leads and nurture them into loyal customers. Email marketing is vital for reaching your audience. Your email should focus on what your audience wants to hear and not what you want to tell them. 

Your CRM is the glue to hold it all together. It's your system that lets you provide personalized messages to your prospects and customers through their buyer's journey.

Master Your Email Marketing With These 11 Tips

1. Use proven subject lines. Encourage curiosity, a benefit, or results (maybe even scarcity).

2. Use an emoji in your subject line. Look back on your emails. Guess where your eye is drawn to? The subject line that has an emoji. It makes the email stand out in the bottomless inbox. Also great on mobile when you are limited on space.

3. Use your name as the "From Name." Be a person.

4. Include preview text. Consider it your second subject line and make it count. It should complement your subject.

You'll see from the image above; some use personalization too. "Hey, [Name] ."

5. Figure out your best time to send your email based on your contacts. You want to optimize your send time. It's different for every business.

6. Include links in your email. Also, don't forget to hyperlink the image (if you're including one).

7. Use images if appropriate. There are two schools of thought here. Fancy design and images distract people. However, people do click images. So, please keep it simple and use images accordingly.

Liz Murphy, Director of Web & Interactive Content at Impact, says it all depends on what type of email you're sending, who the audience is that you're targeting, and what your goals are.

And she highly recommends running an A/B test for at least a month to see for yourself what your audience actually loves. 

You can read their results when they decided to A/B test images vs no images in emails instead of going with their gut feeling. Images vs. No Images: What Should We do in Our Marketing Emails & Newsletters?

8. Send the email again to those that didn't open the first time (remember to change the subject line and wait a few days before emailing for a second time).

9. Use crafty CTA's. You want to hook your readers' interest. You have one goal for your email, and your CTA should drive your visitor toward that one goal.

10. A/B test your email. You can A/B test your subject line or preview text, testing for language, personalization, or question vs non-question. You can also test your design, fancy vs non-fancy (or plain text).

However...

You shouldn’t A/B test both at the same time as it will be much harder to attribute what effect each had unless your email list is huge and you can do a multivariate test.

11. Segment your email list with your CRM to make sure to get the most from your email efforts.

Back to You ...

Which tip are you going to try first?

Use emojis in your subject line?

A/B test your email?

Let me know, leave a comment below.