Email marketing is reported as the #1 most-effective tactic for lead nurturing by top-performing B2B marketers. (Forrester Research, Gauging Your Progress and Success, Dec 2013)
The power of email marketing stems from its ability to create and manage one-to-one customer journeys. From lead generation, to lead nurturing and beyond, Best-in-Class marketers know how important it is to enable their sales teams with quality emails, and they achieve this best when the Marketing and Sales process is aligned; and there is nothing that aligns Marketing and Sales like marketing automation (MA) and CRM integration.
Email marketing is a big part of the sales enablement process. Marketing spends a great deal of time planning, building and executing email campaigns to enable Sales to have meaningful conversations with interested customers. With personalized and targeted emails, Marketing and Sales can work on triggering customer pain points and inspiring customer engagement.
From whitepapers to case studies, presentation graphics, brochures, user guides and more, MA software is a place that can store all of these valuable assets – in addition to it’s approved email templates, too.
However, is there a way to ensure that these powerful email templates are at the immediate disposal of sales reps, in real-time, as they are working on building relationships with contacts and opportunities?
Yes. Enter the world of a MAP-integrated CRM.
For Best-in-Class performers, every email lives in their MAP, and when it comes time for the sales team to create an email touchpoint with a customer, marketing has already enabled the ability to send off an organization-approved email template directly from the CRM. With a simple click of a button, Sales gets immediate access to the templates, can personalize them as needed, and most importantly track the behavior of that email (open, click, download, etc.). The sales rep can personalize the template as they wish, tweak it here and there, and still ensure that it retains marketing approved language. From here on out, Sales reps send off the email to the prospect and the email works to drive them to an asset – whether a PDF, a white paper or a landing page – all this data becomes trackable for Marketing and Sales to see who opened what assets and what kind of an interaction took place (who is engaged).
A CRM not only enables Sales with access to data such as leads, contacts, accounts, opportunity and Wins, but it is also used as a link between the Sales and Marketing process. This is why alignment is so important for sales enablement – not only do the two departments need to have an agreed upon set of definitions for what constitutes a sales-ready lead, but they also need to work together when it comes to interacting with customers through email marketing; and one way to achieve this for Sales is to ensure that there is a database of MA templates in their customer relationship platform.
How is your marketing team making use of CRM for customer engagement?
