‘Outdated’ might be the word that comes to mind when you think of email marketing. In fact, it remains one of the most effective B2B sales channels—but only if it’s done right. In this article we look at how a CRM with powerful data capabilities can make your email campaigns unstoppable.

You would be forgiven for thinking that email marketing is outdated, given the popularity of channels like social media and PPC.

However, email marketing is still one of the most reliable ways to reach your audience.

Research shows that email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter.

Compared to newer technologies, email marketing also has a higher conversion rate of 66% .

This is because businesses are more likely to receive a click-through from an email than from a tweet.

Furthermore, most email platforms are reasonably priced, straightforward to implement and can boost your efficiency through automation tools.

So how has email managed to stand the test of time? The answer is that while the actual format remains simple, the processes and techniques behind email have become far more sophisticated.

The new age of email marketing

The most successful email marketing campaigns are those using cutting-edge techniques powered by detailed customer data.

Popular email marketing platforms like Mailchimp have allowed businesses to embrace basic email marketing with almost no technical knowledge.

However, these platforms may have many shortcomings when it comes to using data:

• They rely on the user to manually upload data and record campaign results, which is time-consuming and difficult to manage.
• You get out what you put in. If the business has poor quality customer data in the first place, the email marketing campaign is doomed from the start.
• They offer limited options for personalisation and targeting.

As a result, many companies are creating ineffective campaigns that aren’t delivering the value they could be.

Here are three steps to bring your business into the new age of email marketing:

Step #1 Get a CRM

A CRM is the core of sophisticated email marketing campaigns. Having a single system for storing customer data, hosting email marketing software and connecting third-party integrations enables you to implement advanced techniques—we’ll go into these later in the article. It also makes the whole process efficient and easy to manage.

Step #2 Get your customer data in shape

Many businesses have their customer data stored on Excel spreadsheets or on other software that has not been designed for managing customer data. It’s stored in different places, is usually out of date and is full of duplications and errors. It is imperative that data is cleansed and tagged when transferring it to a CRM.

Step #3 Unlock a host of sophisticated capabilities

Connecting high-quality customer data with powerful email marketing tools via your CRM unlocks a world of new capabilities. For example, you can begin precisely targeting email campaigns at specific customer groups. You can also record the results in customer profiles, giving you a record of which campaigns have been effective with a specific customer.

The benefits of a data-fuelled campaign

Let’s take a look at some of the more sophisticated email marketing techniques that a data-fired CRM allows you to use.

Segment existing customers by buying habits

Assuming your sales are all being channelled through your CRM (which they should be), you’ll have access to rich data on customer buying habits.

This enables you to segment customers based on factors like average spend and purchase frequency and allows you to identify your most loyal and least engaged customers.

This enables the creation of campaigns personalised to the customer’s unique habits and persona.

This level of targeting granularity also allows businesses to continually improve conversion rates through AB testing.

Use triggered emails and campaign automation

Automation of marketing messages using triggered emails allows you to keep customers informed of changes to your services.

This could include telling them when new offers become available or if an event date has been moved.

This helps build trust with customers and saves you sending out individual messages every time something changes.

You can also automate reminders and thank you messages before and after events and surveys. This shows you appreciate their business and improves customer retention.

With automation like this in place, you can create a highly effective email marketing operation that requires minimal management.

Track responses and campaign statistics

Running email marketing from your CRM allows you to record every time your customer opens or responds to a campaign and assigns the data to their profile. Over time, this allows you to build a rich picture of which campaigns are successful with which customers.

Furthermore, many CRMs have visualisation dashboards that provide detailed analysis of sales and marketing activities, allowing you to produce granular reports on campaign effectiveness.

KulaHub: Data gurus, email marketing ninjas

In this article, we’ve seen what a powerful combination data and email marketing can be—and these are two areas where KulaHub excels.

KulaHub is an online CRM and email marketing system for growing businesses. We’re data experts and can help you get yours into shape and use it to power your sales and marketing activities.

The combination of these two factors allows our customers to create the kind of sophisticated email marketing strategies discussed in this article.

KulaHub also enables you to generate new leads, create detailed reports on your sales activities and get the best out of third party plug-ins.

If you’d like to learn more about how KulaHub can help you develop a data-driven sales process, contact Andrew Booth on [email protected] or call 0800 049 6044.