A Go-To Guide to CRM Email Marketing for Businesses

Dec 06, 2021

CRM email marketing is the strategy of using CRM tools to provide more personalized marketing practices to customers and give them an individual approach.

The strategy fights against spamming the potential customers and delivering messages only when it’s necessary and needed. Imagine how nerve-wracking it is to constantly receive emails that you don’t need.

As the complaints started to rise new regulations were put in place, in order to show consideration to the customers and accelerate their satisfaction. As of 2003, FTC mandates each email marketing campaign to have an opt-out option, so it can be less intrusive and more appealing to the customers.

CRM email marketing is the combination of CRM and email marketing. First, let’s look at them separately.

What is CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It’s a system that businesses use to interact with customers and potential clients. The large database available is used to analyze to further accelerate their strategies and segment further the target audience. It helps businesses to better personalize and customer their approach with the consumers.

What is Email Marketing?

Email Marketing is a form of business messaging, i.e. businesses send information and news to their current and potential customers via emails. Businesses can send;

Promotional messages
Sale discounts
Advertising

Furthermore, email marketing helps promote the company’s products and services, increases customer loyalty and brand awareness.

What are the advantages of combining CRM and Email Marketing?

Segmentation and Personalization

If you want to send highly targeted emails, you can use the data to segment your audience further by gender, location, interest, behavior. According to statistics segmentation improves click rates by 65%.

You can opt for the trampoline by personalizing further the messages. The recent statistics show that personalized emails have 6 times higher transaction rates.

Personalization builds a stronger customer relationship and increases loyalty as businesses show an individual approach to each and every customer.

ROI

Did you know that for every $1 dollar spent, email marketing generates $42 in ROI. The return rate helps businesses better assess the situation and make better adjustments to the overall email marketing strategy.

High-Tech

New technology with new tools and features emerge basically every day. New automation techniques and AI are used to make CRM email marketing more data-driven and digitalized.

What is CRM Email Marketing?

Businesses use CRM email marketing to build relationships with customers, potential ones, generate leads and speak directly with them right through the customers’ inboxes.

It’s email marketing that uses CRM tools to provide a more personalized and customized email approach with customers to reach business goals.

Top 4 CRM Email Marketing Case Studies

Some companies put in effort and means to increase their success. The top 4 include:

1. Mailigen increased its open rates from 20% to 29% with behavioral segmentation.

So, what the company did first was to understand its target audience. And the most effective way for segmenting is to use user behavior.

Behavioral segmentation helps companies group email subscribers according to demographics, target, goals in order to create relevant and optimized content for each.

Behavior data includes:

Types of content the selected group will prefer
When they open emails
How they respond to emails

Mailigen collected all the subscribers that hadn’t opened their emails and resent it, only this time, they added symbols to the subject line, which ensured an open rate of 20.5%.

Other such tweaking examples include:

1. Reach out to unresponsive subscribers with SMS, which includes one key message. If you want your subscribers to take some sort of action, don't go overboard with information, just tell them one simple message.

2. Reach out at the right time, to ensure that the traditional 90% open rate of SMS will be 98% when sent at the right time. Unfortunately, the behavioral segmentation will get you halfway through the road, but for the other half, you need to test in order to determine the exact timeline for each segmented group.

3. Make the message simple enough to understand and digest.

4. Add a CTA in the subject line.

5. Make the purchasing process simple enough, so the customers don’t become hesitant midway and decide to cancel altogether.

6. Persuade subscribers to take action by offering discounts and incentives.

2. Digital Marketer increased its open rates by 3 times with subject lines.

So, what did the company do exactly?

They engage the subscribers by providing them value, e.g. s topic on how to increase Facebook ad conversions.
They send millions of emails a month to collect vast data and be able to better segment subscribers.
They use symbols and send personalized messages.
They use specific subject lines for each newsletter.

There are generally 4 types of subject lines:

Direct or benefit-driven: states what benefits the reader will get, (e.g. “How to Write a Blog Post That Will Rank higher?”.)
Scarcity or urgency: states a clear message on what and how to take action for a specific cause (e.g. “Final Notice, Don’t Miss Out”.)
Proof or credibility: states social proof and that you know what you are doing (e.g.” How this particular company generated 170% increase in Sales”.)
Blind or curiosity: peaks interest and states that you know something that the reader doesn’t (“Why Did This Particular Company Do This?”.)

3. David Huffman increased email open rates from 15% to 20% with content-packed emails.

As there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to CRM Email Marketing, you can’t really follow just one rule and expect results. Each case is different. We were recently speaking about how neat and short and clear the message needs to be so as not to bore the reader and let them lose interest, but it turns out it’s not the case with everyone.

This example determined the opposite of what we talked about and is proof that any example or strategy out there needs to be analyzed with all the available data and optimized to your strategy and your company personally.

David Huffman, a content webmaster for Deaconess Health System, used a 6-week test of email marketing to re-engage passive readers and leads.

Let’s have a look at how he was able to have an increase in open rates.

They segmented their audience into two main categories for enrolling into their program:

A number of people enrolled in the program.
Click-through rates, average open rate, and unsubscribes.

They sent one email to subscribers every week for 6 weeks.
The content for each included content without CTA, content with CTA, useful and valuable content.

The results of the test, shall we say, came in quite handy:
The conversion rate on gated content increased by 5%, and 40 leads reconverted
Generated 7 enrollments (equalling around $100k ROI)
Saw zero unsubscribes
The Click-through rate increased by 3.5%

4. Gregory Ciotti increased newsletter open rates by 59% with a specific CTA.

Click-through rates can increase dramatically when a clear and powerful CTA is included. It’s not a one-time or on a first try, though. You still need to do some testings.

Our 4th example did exactly just that and tested several CTAs before reaching their increased results. How did they do it?

They split test all components of their email campaigns
They added only one CTA for each email blast
They focused on the right subject line, punctuation, capitalization, and even formatting.

The subject line content is a handful and can be tricky sometimes. For example which one to write in the subject line: “A 10% discount” vs. “Save $20”?

Many subscribers state that the higher perceived value works best, so in this case, it’s best to write the “Save $20” in your subject line.

Here are a few additional do’s and dont’s for when writing a subject line:

Keep it short and simple (4-15 characters).

Define exactly what the message is about.

Keep the same text in the subject line.

Ask Readers to take action.

Test.

Invoke Emotions.

Ask Questions.

Be Creative.

Proofread.

Don’t

Don’t use FW or Re.

Don’t write in all caps (I personally hate it. It feels like someone is demanding me what to do and is mad at me).

Don’t include exclamation marks (It’s not a Nazi subtitle).

Don’t use spammy words (e.g. “Open Now”).

Don’t sound sales-y.

Don’t use symbols and uncommon characters.

Don’t use your recipient’s name

What is CRM Email Marketing Automation?

Can you imagine the time and effort you can save with automation?

The thing is that you can automate email marketing to save time and accelerate your campaigns to the next level.

It helps businesses with:

Save time as you can schedule everything in advance
Follow up with customers for reminders and trigger CTA
Automate sales cycles
Remind about abandoned shopping carts
Personalize and customize content to your preference to give a one-on-one vibe

Businesses use marketing automation to automate tasks and communication between CRM and marketing automation software.

It will help to:

Automate manual tasks
Streamline processes
Route sales lead to the appropriate salespersons

Fortunately, there is a lot of software that has CRM autoresponders incorporated into the system that businesses can use to send automated replies and follow up with them later.

Now, without further ado, we present to you the top 15 CRM Email Marketing Software that businesses can use for their marketing purposes.

CRM Mailchimp

Pricing: Free - 299 USD

Inclusions:

Custom-coded templates
Audience features
Personalization options
Behavioral targeting
Creative assistant
Send-time optimization

Drip CRM

Pricing: 19 USD - 22 USD

Inclusions:

Pre-built playbooks
Behavioral segmentation and personalization
Easy integrations

Salesforce Email Automation

Pricing: 400 USD - 3,750 USD

Inclusions:

Data gathering
Personalization and customization of messages
Behavioral targeting
Mobile messaging
Journey builder
Automate messages

SendinBlue CRM

Pricing: Free - 65 USD (different pricing for Enterprises)

Inclusions:

Best for transactional mails
Mobile-friendly
Templates
Personalization and customization of messages
No daily sending limits
Landing page builder

Klaviyo CRM

Pricing: Free

Inclusions:

One-click integrations
ROI-based reporting
Segmentation
Target-based behavior
Facebook advertising
Pre-built autoresponder
Website tracking

Pipedrive Email Automation

Pricing: 12 USD - 99 USD

Inclusions:

Calendar management
Customization
Email syncing
Templates
Open and click tracking
Triggered automation
Workflow builder

Microsoft Dynamics Email Marketing

Pricing: 95 USD

Inclusions:

Boost productivity
Collect customer data
Predefined sales paths
Personalized sales processes
Automated cash management
Reporting feature

Zoho Email Marketing

Pricing: 14 USD - 52 USD

Inclusions:

Accounting software
Email functionality
Templates
Drag and drop capabilities
Reporting features
View analytics to determine improvements

Bitrix24 Email Marketing

Pricing: Free - 159 USD

Inclusions:

Emails to/from CRM
Mailchimp integration
API and source code
Virtual PBX
Templates
Widgets

Dynamics 365 Email Marketing

Pricing: 250 USD - 1,500 USD

Inclusions:

Personalized interactions
Self-service for communities
Transfer cases from channel to channel
Analyzed contact center and employee interactions
Games and team competitions
AI-driven insights
Analyzed data from connected devices

AWeber CRM

Pricing: Free - 16 USD

Inclusions:

RSS to email
Drag-and-drop email builder
HTML email
Dynamic content
Email split testing
Behavioral automation
Purchase tagging

SugarCRM Email Marketing

Pricing: 41.60 USD - 800 USD

Inclusions:

AI-based analysis
Multi-channel marketing

Insightly Email Marketing

Pricing: 29 USD - 99 USD

Inclusions:

Automation features
View real-time analytics for campaigns
Templates
Can be integrated with Outlook, MailChimp, and Zapier

Hubspot CRM Email Marketing

Pricing: 45 USD - 3,200 USD

Inclusions:

Automation features
Template editor
Detailed analytics
Sore leads
Behavioral predictions on historical data

Dotmailer CRM

Pricing: 995 USD

Inclusions:

Improved ROI
Synchronize contact lists
Automate reports
Reporting features
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics

You may think that CRM email services maybe a handful, but with automation in place, the usage becomes fairly easy. CRM and autoresponders save a lot of time for marketers in the long run. You can combine email with CRM and use the database and interactions, that will better help segment your audience and deliver each message to the right target.

The best CRM for email marketing depends on the business goals, the target audience, and the messages that the business wants to deliver. The email marketing CRM system is an easy-to-use process that marketers can incorporate into their strategies.

Let's go over a few stats and best practices that will further help the case of CRM Email Marketing.

Email Marketing Statistics

99% of consumers check email at least once a day.
Email marketing returns $42 for every $1 spent.
59% of users say email influences their purchase decisions.
An email has a conversion rate of 2.3% compared to 1% for social media.
85% of US consumers consider email marketing the best client acquisition tactic.
30% of companies worldwide will use AI somewhere in their sales process by 2020.
81% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters.
On average, B2B companies send one email marketing campaign every 25 days.
31% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads.
87% of B2B marketers say email is one of their top free organic distribution channels.
90% of content marketers say email engagement is the top metric they track to measure content performance.
89% of all B2B email campaigns are sent from a company name.
99% of email users check their inbox every day, with some checking 20 times a day. Of those people, 58% of consumers check their email first thing in the morning.
40% of consumers say they have at least 50 unread emails in their inboxes.
Emails sent by independent artists, writers, and performers have the highest open rate at 34.4%, followed by education (34.1%) and travel and tourism (32.6%).
On average, the highest email click-through rate goes to the Consulting services industry at 25%, with Administrative and Business Support services in second at 20%, and Home and Building services in third at nearly 19%.
26% of retail emails bounce, putting it well above the 9% average bounce rate for all industries.
20% of retail, e-commerce, and consumer goods and services companies are personalizing emails based on gender, race, ethnicity, versus 11% in 2019.
59% of Millennials primarily use their smartphone to check email, while 67% of Generation Z scans their inbox on mobile.
74% of Baby Boomers think email is the most personal channel to receive communications from brands, followed by 72% of Gen X, 64% of Millennials, and 60% of Gen Z.
91% of women in the US use email, compared to 89% of men.

Email Marketing Best Practices

Send welcome emails.
Send to only opt-in recipients.
Include an email signature.
Input CTA above the fold.
Personalize the email greeting.
Keep your email 500-650 pixels wide.
Use high-quality images.
Test subject lines and CTA.
Put your logo on the upper left-hand side of the email.
Use incentives to increase open rates.
Reward loyal subscribers.
Don’t over-send emails.
But, send consistently.
Schedule in advance.
Segment your email lists.
Allow recipients to subscribe to your newsletter.
Write subject lines
Use auto-responders for opt-ins.
Add two opt-ins.
Avoid “no-reply” sender address.
Use “thank you” pages
Integrate email marketing with social media

In Conclusion

The first marketing email was actually sent in 1978.

Today, it’s estimated that there will be over 4.1 billion email users by the end of 2021.

Email marketing has gained popularity among businesses of any size and industry due to its high ROI and customer satisfaction.

And, wouldn’t that be a good enough reason to consider for your marketing purposes?!