Targeted Email Marketing with SugarCRM
We are leading the ‘SugarCRM’s Secret Weapon: Marketing Campaigns’ webinar with Technology Advisors tomorrow (5/3/12) at 1pm Central, Click Here to register!
Only 42% of all (marketers) make use of advanced segmentation strategies according to a February 2012 study released by email marketing software company, Get Response.
Your CRM is the lifeblood of your organization. In B2B selling and marketing, it’s critical that your data truly supports your efforts. The days of a CRM acting solely as a repository are over.
You have all that data, it’s time to use it wisely. Leveraging your CRM to communicate with your prospect and opt-in lists is necessary to make the best use of your marketing and sales efforts. SugarCRM is one tool that we’ve found that really excels in its native email marketing capabilities. Even against CRM-giant Salesforce.com, Sugar wins the (CRM) email marketing debate hands down.
Assuming the data integrity of your CRM is well maintained, all of this data is just waiting to be sliced, diced, and segmented into target lists.
To launch email marketing with SugarCRM, you just need a handful of components:
- Get your email credentials set up inside SugarCRM.
If you can set your email up in Outlook or your smart phone, you can set it up in SugarCRM.
- Create a new campaign in the campaigns module.
Keep your email campaigns focused around content that educates, inspires, solves, and engages prospects. Unless your value proposition is razor-sharp, you won’t get much of a response.
- Build your target list.
Within SugarCRM, you can run reports to build contact lists based on industry, type, or previous marketing activities (i.g. click throughs, opens, content downloaded). If you are just starting to run email marketing with SugarCRM, begin with smaller groups of contacts. Work out kinks early on, before you initiate larger campaigns.
- Create a URL tracker (to track click throughs).
Another great feature of email marketing with SugarCRM is the ability to embed tracker URLs in the call-to-action link in the body of the email (i.g. Click here to learn about mobile technology trends for retail companies). Every time someone clicks the link, their activity is recorded in SugarCRM. We also like to use Google Url Builder to tag campaign keywords that are viewable within Google Analytics (I personally love doing this for the added insights you get!).
- Write an email.
Don’t get hung up on HTML designs and funky email styling. Focus on the message and the call to action. Just because you have the functionality, doesn’t mean you should lose sight of the reason for the email in the first place – to engage your target audience. Your target decision makers’ inboxes are likely littered with internal emails, sales emails, and everything else in between. There is an art to creating marketing messages, talk with us if you need help crafting and communicating your value.
The email channel is commonly used as a way to sell directly to prospects. Why not use it to market your content? Complementing your inbound marketing activities, or any marketing activities, with targeted email marketing campaigns is a comprehensive approach. Your efforts to create content – writing blogs, case studies, white papers, etc – can serve as the catalyst to cutting thought the noise in the market.
Hundreds of email tools are available. Some are relatively inexpensive, while others can cost several hundred dollars a month. SugarCRM even has free open source versions (although we recommend the professional version for $30/mo) and gives you CRM and email marketing capabilities.
Be part of the 42%. Make your life easier, your data more useful, and your email marketing more effective.
(If you missed our recent “Using SugarCRM for a Lead Generation and Inbound Marketing Hub” webinar, you can still download the slide deck!)
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