The email marketing tool defines your chances to launch a profitable project that will mean a lot to your company’s status. You should also be aware of how to write email content that will convert to perfectly manage email marketing processes. With numerous marketing strategies and channels, it may be challenging to engage many potential clients, as testing all of them is time and money-consuming. Let’s explore CRM and ESP that are useful tools for email marketing and define which of them is perfect for your project success.

Table of contents:

• What Is Customer Relationship Management?
• CRM Types
• Functions of CRM
• Customer Relationship Management Components
• Reasons to Choose CRM
• What Is ESP?
• Email Service Provider Types
• ESP Features
• Reasons to Choose ESP
• CRM and ESP Integration
• Conclusion

Taken from: https://www.10xdigitalinc.com

What Is Customer Relationship Management?

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is an email marketing tool used for contact and sales management as well as interactions with potential, existing, and past customers using data analysis. The study of personal information obtained from different communication channels, such as telephone, email, chat, website, marketing materials, and social media. CRM enables businesses to better know their target audiences and allows them to cater to their needs in the best possible way. It’s useful for those into professional service who need to maintain relationships through extensive notes and customer monitoring. Check the article to find the list of best CRM for small business and choose between the following tools: 

• Hubspot
• Freshworks
• Zoho
• EngageBay
• ActiveCampaign
• Pipedrive

Read a detailed description of each tool and choose the best one for your needs. 

Customer Relationship Management Tool Types

In order to better understand this technology and decide if you need to choose it for your marketing project, find out five main CRM types:

• Strategic CRM makes your business customer-centric resulting in improved Customer Lifetime Value. 
• Operational CRM consists of sales force automation, marketing automation, and service automation used for automating sales, marketing, and customer support.
• Analytical CRM processes the data to improve services through the analysis of a customer base.
• Collaborative CRM incorporates external stakeholders to share customer information for better targeting marketing products and services.
• Customer Data Platform is a computer system that assembles data about individual people into one database for the purpose of marketing departments.

Functions of Customer Relationship Management Tools

Customer Relationship Management has many great functions, but here we collected the most appropriate for your interaction with clients. So CRM can:

• Maintain a database by sorting contacts and giving relevant information that’s readily accessible.
• Score leads by defining whether a prospect is profitable for you, thus you can offer more tailored messaging paying attention to the person’s status in the CRM.
• Keep records using individual notes to have a short description of people that helps to avoid any challenges in the future.
• Keep email marketing deliverability at a good state as using CRM your emails won’t go to a spam folder. ReturnPath report shows that 17% of global email marketing campaigns fail to reach consumers due to redirection to spam. 

Customer Relationship Management Tool Components

Take into account that the main components of CRM are building, managing at each stage, observing, and recognizing customer relationships. Organizational tools and profitability accounting help to optimize the reaching to the different types of consumers. Relational Intelligence classifies customers into profitability tiers analyzing the interdependence of a person’s age, income, and education with purchasing information. Take a look at the image presenting the interrelation of CRM components: 

Taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org

Reasons to Choose Customer Relationship Management Tools

Customer Relationship Management is about comfortable use of marketing tools, so explore the main reasons why you should opt for this tool: 

Integration With Various Marketing Channels

Salesforce says that 94% of companies use a business website, 83% – email marketing, and 79% – social media marketing. We have an article on the topic of integration of email marketing with social media, check it out! CRM systems help you coordinate and integrate your customer journey aspects in one place. Whenever the marketing channel you manage, every customer’s interaction is recorded and synced in your CRM tool.

Marketing Tasks Automation

There are many repetitive time-consuming tasks you need to complete alongside selling a product or service. For example, it’s necessary to fill forms, send reports, and issue legal documents and invoices. CRM systems can easily tackle these issues to enable you to focus on more important deeds. 

Customer Journey Clear Overview 

A CRM tool can enable you to define where a customer is in the sales funnel and help close the deal with customer journey mapping. It is the process of visualizing interaction between your business and the customer. Steve Jobs said: “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves” that perfectly illustrates the result of the customer journey. Marketing and sales channels’ CRM connection means a perfect customer journey. A visual overview of your customer’s journey gives you the display of their experience, their journey challenges, and conversion steps. 

Taken from: https://www.emailvendorselection.com

What Is an Email Service Provider?

An Email Service Provider (ESP) is a technology company that facilitates the process of building email lists and sending email campaigns to subscribers. You will be able to track information and segment an address list into interest groups or categories to target email content. Among the most popular ESPs, you may find the following tools:

• AWeber
• GetResponse
• MailChimp 

Email Service Provider Tool Types

Different email providers offer paid and free services and may be sustained by advertising. They can require identification credentials or provide users with complete anonymity. Find out types of Email Service Provider and choose yours: 

• ISP-based email recognizes its clients by the IP addresses it assigns them.
• Free mail providers do not require any payment and can advertise their service on every message. 
• Premium email services are paid and provide better services than ISP-based email.
• Vanity email allows running a shim service, as it provides no access but forwards all messages to another account.

Email Service Provider Tool Features

An ESP has many compelling features and in the list below, you may find a lot of useful data for successful email marketing: 

• Templates which you can create, using UI/UX services, or use premade ones tested for compatibility with email applications.
• A subscriber list uploaded by the user for holding additional information for each subscriber to properly target messages. 
• A send engine enabling users to distribute their messages to the subscribers.
• The subscriber list updating to suppress unwilling subscribers. 
• Statistical email reviews to explore the campaign’s success rate.
• Spam testing to avoid risks of being blocked.
• HTML and plain text formats sending help to enhance delivery success rates.
• Email content customization is needed for tailoring relevant communication.

Reasons to Choose Email Service Provider Tools

In order to effectively communicate with customers, you need to consider ESP, and here are some of its advantageous features:

• Bulk communication means that your email will be received by thousands of clients! Send the same message to as many people as you wish at a time with an ESP tool.
• Creating lists stands for the possibility to segment your contacts into individual lists. It enables you to send different emails to those who are your customers and to those who aren’t yet which makes a big difference to email marketing.
• With automatic messaging, you can send pre-created messages on particular events that you’ve determined previously. 
• Servers dedicated to emailing are fast and efficient messaging tools.
• A user-friendly email builder provides pre-made email templates to facilitate and accelerate the mailing process.
• The report option helps you measure the success of their campaigns.

CRM and ESP Integration

You found many features of these tools that coincide and on the contrary are unique, so consider the integration of CRM with ESP. The CRM-ESP integration means that two platforms will be connected and share useful data with each other. You will benefit from automated marketing that alleviates the monotonous mailing process. CRM differs from ESP by the lack of optimized deliverability and integration will allow both systems to effectively cooperate. For example, Salesforce CRM and MailUp users can connect two systems for fruitful integration. Among the mentioned above benefits, you will also save your time and increase value, automatically synchronize data, have better personalization, unlimited segmentation abilities, and advanced workflows.  

Taken from: https://www.clever-age.com

Conclusion

Take into consideration the information on mailing tools that extensively describes all their functioning aspects. Email marketing can bring your project to a higher level and engage lots of clients. Thus, you need to make a choice and decide whether one tool can satisfy all your needs. CRM and ESP engagement can give you a new level of marketing proficiency and boost your business.