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Each issue of CMO Close-up features an interview with a CMO, as well as other marketing executives answering that issue's "Big Question."
This week's feature:
Close-up with Laura Howard, CMO, ECI Telecom
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Secrets & lies: Integrating CRM and e-mail
Karen J. Bannan
Story posted: July 9, 2009 - 9:59 am EDT
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If e-mail is the heart of your marketing program, then customer relationship management data is what makes it tick—if you know how to integrate it. Janine Popick, CEO and co-founder of e-mail service provider VerticalResponse, provides one secret and exposes one lie to help you get more out of using CRM in conjunction with your e-mail marketing campaigns.
Secret: E-mail marketing is the most cost-effective use of your CRM data.
Companies use CRM in a variety of ways. Salespeople use it to keep track of their customers and prospects, tracking and storing data each time they communicate with someone. Call centers use it to provide better service in a more timely fashion. General marketers may use it to create and send direct mailings based on buying trends or create completely new campaigns. Only recently, however, have e-mail marketers gotten in on the action and used CRM to craft campaigns, segment lists and better target messaging, Popick said.
“E-mail makes CRM data instantly more valuable,” she said. “For segmentation and filtering, CRM can add information where there would have otherwise been a void.”
This is especially true for b-to-b marketers that may require only a name, e-mail and title of those who sign up for their lists. By merging e-mail data and CRM, data you can, for instance, identify geographically significant segments or segments that contain only your best customers. “When you combine CRM data and e-mail databases, all of a sudden you see where people are, what they want and what they can use,” Popick said.
Lie: If you use CRM data, you don’t need anything else when planning a campaign.
Yes, CRM implementations generate lots of information, but it’s not the only place you will find actionable data, Popick said. “You’ll still have data in different places. For example, your business might have opt-in forms for white papers on your site, sign-up forms for webinars in GoToMeeting, purchase data in Quickbooks and business card data you collected from trade shows in a spreadsheet,” she said. All that data may be sitting in disparate databases.
You’ll need to make time to gather this data together and, once you have it synched, make sure that it’s updated on a regular basis and used to populate your CRM system, Popick said. One way to do this is to use a contact management solution that can integrate all your data sources and repopulate them with the resulting file, she said—and the more frequently you do this, the better.
But it’s not enough to have the marketing department doing all the work. Everyone else in the company needs to understand how important CRM data is to your marketing efforts, Popick said, or they won’t bother telling you if they create a new data source or do their own segmentation. “You need to show that by not segmenting and communicating to your prospects via e-mail, you don’t convert prospects to customers in a timely fashion, therefore losing potential revenue and [wasting] the money you spend to get your prospects,” she said.
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11 Comments
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Kate
Mayfield Solutions, MD
July 10, 2009 08:42 am
"pulling the data together" is the hardest bit and always gets the least of a mention in such conversations. After that, sure, stick a lovely app on top of your data and yes, you can do great things. But people need to know it's not just a question of choosing the right app. It's just not that simple.
Kim
July 10, 2009 08:59 am
Any suggestions on how to make others in the company understand "how important CRM data is to your marketing efforts"?
Brock Butler
MoreDemand, President
July 15, 2009 08:32 am
May I make a comment? With respect, I feel that sales and marketing executives are missing the big picture. Sales and marketing productivity is a function of your efficient alignment with your customer's single buying process. Until you integrate your customer and prospect data, and your revenue generation processes, you are basically pulling tractors with oxen.
There are inexpensive integrated demand generation systems that integrate, clean, and automate your marketing and CRM data, systems and processes. You can get reviews of these systems at www.raabguide.com . (I have no affiliation)
Your customer's buying process is now occurring over digital channels and internal CRM systems. You can measure, manage and automate much of your revenue cycle. ALL of the industry pundits are predicting tectonic improvements in revenue generation productivity as a result of this shift to digital channels. Our only obstacles as sales and marketing executives are lack of knowledge and a resistance to new thinking.
Our group will be publishing our research and insights in a "How To" blog at www.DigitalSalesPipeline.com. (2 weeks till launch) Drop me an email if you want on the launch list. Agree disagree but get moving.
Veronica
July 15, 2009 10:01 pm
Yeah I think this discussion has gone way past "should we integrate", it's the how that's important, and this article does nothing to help with that. Often the hardest thing in our company is trying to remind people that CRMs and Marketing Automation tools are different things, and you need the technologies that both provide to successfully segment your data, do digital marketing and ensure the campaign results are visible for reporting at the executive level.
John Osborne
Silverpop Engage B2B
July 17, 2009 08:02 am
David,
Engage B2B is a marketing automation solution that utilzes email as one component. The ability to view what a recipient has done with an email (opened, bounced, clicked) along with much more: what web pages they viewed, what direct mail pieces they were sent, what forms or surveys, including the specific answers they provided, were filled out are all available through our out of the box integration with any CRM platform. If you are looking for a way to get to the next level in your B2B marketing, take a look at Silverpop's Engage B2B solution and how easily it integrates with CRM platforms. Visit www.silverpop.com and click on Engage B2B under the Products heading.
Felicity Wohltman
VP of Marketing, Genius.com
July 9, 2009 01:39 pm
Great article and totally agree that email marketing is the most effective use of your crm data. Another benefit of integrating your email marketing with your crm system is the ability to send on behalf of individuals (such as sales reps) in your organization. Emails send from a "real person" tend to have much higher open rates than emails sent from a general company mailbox (and, with "send on behalf", any direct replies go to the right person).
Tony
ABC
July 9, 2009 01:41 pm
This is the most elementary article and a waste of time.
Robert Motley
engagementsystems.com
July 9, 2009 12:12 pm
Email is great especially when you already have a relationship in place. The bottom line is - you must be able use a multi-channel approach, and not limit yourself to email only. Your automation tool must be able to effortlessly integrate direct mail as an option.
Check us out at engagementsystems.com and include direct mail as a touch option in your automated 1:1 and 1:many campaigns. You and your people will be launching campaigns from right inside a “lead” or “contact” in salesforce.com
David Austin
edadata.com
July 9, 2009 12:16 pm
Are there any good ways to record into CRM which recipients open the email they have received? It would be helpful to escalate those who don't open email to a phone call or direct mail.
Joy Spring
Leisure Trends Group
July 9, 2009 12:23 pm
David, absolutely, but it will take some programming. Most good email ESP's have reporting tools that record open rates. We use data from this report to import back into our CRM system. Some ESP's also work directly with CRM programs such as salesforce and Microsoft CRM. An easy way to track non-openers if you don't want to do the progamming is to simply export the non-opener list and use this list to call and noting the call in your CRM program.
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