Timing is everything. This is true for everyone especially for people running their own business. More importantly, when it comes to the sales and marketing aspect, businesses always have to communicate at the right moment. It is for this reason communication over email is the most preferred option. We use email daily, be it for a personal or professional purpose. Nevertheless, when it comes to business, it is more than just your email you need to take care of. You need to manage schedules, calendar, contacts, notes etc. as the success of your business depends on the opportunities taken and the ones missed.
Talking about success, small-medium sized businesses usually take the help of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool for analyzing customer interaction through a series of processes in order to predict their behaviour thus, improving the relationship with the customer. However, it might strike you, how and why are we talking about email application and CRM in the same article together? Are they somehow linked? If yes, can we integrate them and what are the advantages of doing so?
In this article, we’ll be covering if a CRM can be integrated with email, the advantages of doing so and how to go about it.
Why Integrate?
The success of your business primarily depends on how well you market and sell your products. But more than that it is the coordination between your marketing and sales teams that determines the final outcome.
Email marketing applications aid you to strategize and analyze your email campaigns in terms of open-rate, click through rate, etc. In fact, if you send your email through a business email address as opposed to a free service viz. @gmail.com/@yahoo.com etc. the advantages to your business are proved to be more and this directly impacts your email open-rate. However, does this give you the conversion rate? Most likely not, that means you neither have a value for your conversion nor are you able to measure your Return on Investment (ROI). The worst-case scenario would be you end up spending a lot of money on marketing activities that would negatively affect your business revenue.
Collaborating email marketing and CRM applications can prove to be effective in enhancing your business as it helps you measure your ROI.
Let us see a few more advantages this union has to offer:
- Targeted Emails
Personalized emails always guarantee more attention than emails sent to many customers at once.For example, let us imagine you run a web designing business. Now, if a customer signs up with you for the first time you don’t directly email them a list of all your services that you provide. On the contrary, you send them a welcome email that talks about your services. Given a few days, if the customer doesn’t purchase any product you send them another mail highlighting the products that would help them to start their business – which in our case would be a domain name. You don’t directly jump into products like themes and plugins etc. instead you offer to guide them depending on their customer journey.What you are doing here, is segregating your customers based on the category they fall in such as are they new or have they already made a purchase etc? This process of understanding and targeting a customer is known as Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM). Your CRM is like a repository with all the relevant data about a customer and this is what helps the sales and the marketing teams connect with customers so that the CLM is planned effectively.
As a marketer, you can now segregate your customers based on any criteria like type of products purchased, the frequency of purchase, services browsed etc. all gathered from your CRM and design your email campaign. Targeted emails thus, tend to improve the customer conversion rate, as well as, increase customer engagement.
- Scheduling and Analyzing Emails
With CRM you have a centralized database with all your customer information therefore, automating your emails is simple. You can automate your email process for a standard response to a support ticket or a follow-up on a customer who had contacted you earlier. This helps you save a lot of time, as well as, keeps your customers happy with timely responses.For instance, if a customer emails the marketing vertical instead of support, then they can respond to the customer’s email, saying that they would be transferring the case to the support. And instead of you (the marketing individual) raising a ticket in a CRM by logging into the account, you can raise a ticket from your email and it would automatically be updated in the CRM, thereby making follow-ups easy.The time thus saved can be invested in analyzing your emails, generating more leads and, improvising your sales processes and marketing campaigns.
- Centralized Records for Support
If you provide support 24*7, then it is very likely that your customers might contact you at any point of time for anything and everything. As seen in the above point, scheduling an auto-response email is a simple way to keep your customer happy. It is equally important that their queries not get lost.Integrating your CRM and email ensures this as you are able to create support tickets from your email directly. This way the customer’s ticket gets raised directly in the CRM and the IT/Support team can assist them with their queries immediately. In fact, since the ticket is created in the CRM system, the possibility of it being lost or forgotten reduces to a great extent. Thus, increasing productivity and improving customer experience.
How to integrate your email with CRM?
There are different CRM tools available and depending on the tool you have you can integrate your business email with it.
Here we’re explaining how you can add your email to Zoho a popular CRM.
Step 1: Log in to Zoho CRM.
Step 2: Go to Settings > Setup > Channels > Email > POP (Zoho Mail)
Step 3: In the Zoho Mail Add-on Page, click on ‘Configure Now’. Next, click on ‘Add Mail Account’ link (add the email account you wish to link)
Step 4: The POP3 Settings page opens, here click on ‘Add POP3 Account’ and fill in all the necessary details.
Step 5: After filling in the details, click on ‘Create Account’
Step 6: Now go back to the Zoho Mail Add-on page. Here click on ‘+Add New Mailbox’ or if you already added an email, directly select from the dropdown (All the emails added via POP3 Account will be in the list)
Step 7: Select the email address you wish to use to send email from. We have added a business email id as opposed to a regular Gmail id (you can add a Gmail id too)
Step 8: Lastly, select if you wish your email to be visible to others. Depending on the purpose of the email campaign you can select the Email Sharing Permission
Step 9: Should you want to list all the customer emails in one single folder, go to Advanced Settings, click the Consolidate all my customers’ emails in a single place inside Zoho mail checkbox
Step 10: Click Save. You have successfully integrated your business email with Zoho CRM
We at ResellerClub offer Business Email packages for your business which you can then integrate with your choice of CRM.
So have you integrated your email and CRM? If yes, do let us know how it has helped you in the comments section below. If you have any suggestion, feel free to reach out to us and we’ll be happy to listen.
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