Email Marketing Solution that Integrates with Your CRM?

November 7, 2009

crm-email-integration

The Challenge:

There are a hundred different email solutions out there to choose from.
They all claim some level of integration with various CRM systems.
But how do you find the best one for your situation?

Here are some suggestions on finding the right solution without pulling your hair out…

The barrier to entry for creating an email solution appears to be as impenetrable as wet cheesecloth these days with new players popping up every day. And although they all have simple 2.0 looking websites, finding out what they really do is a bit of a challenge. So here are some suggestions, with more to come, as we continue to work through this with several clients.

The Holy Grail – Tight CRM Integration

If you think about it, why don’t CRM systems provide all of this natively? Well maybe they will and they’re just waiting for the dust to settle. Or maybe the market is just too small. Or maybe none of them will do a good job of this until one of them really does. But in the meantime, here’s what to look for…

Initial integration – you’re probably starting with a list so you will need some way to get your existing emails into the product. That’s the easy part although some email services require double-opt in (to protect their spam reputation) and therefore are more difficult. For example, Feedblaster will not allow import for that reason.
Ongoing integration – here you’re really looking for synchronization and there are several areas to look at:
- Signups - does your web form interact with the email solution or your CRM and how do they synch.
- Optout - perhaps you can live with just maintaining these within the email solution but then you need to only send through the emailer.
- Delivery, open and clickthru history – most solutions do not sync this so you need to go back to the emailer to see it. This is actually the major loss when you shift from your CRM’s inboard email campaign management to an external tool.

Blog and Social Media Integration

It usually goes like this… Much of the world is not yet following Blog posts but everyone gets email so should I spend my time blogging or writing newsletter articles? And I’d kinda like to check out this Twitter thing I keep hearing about but who has the time for it. And all of it seems like a lot of redundant effort. So isn’t there some way I can just create a Blog post and have it automatically go out in my next email newsletter and generate a Tweet?

Well there is at least one solution we’ve found so far. The latest system we’ve been looking at closely is the mal-named newcomer – MailChimp. And while I’m not looking forward to becoming a Chimper or whatever the moniker ends up at, it is a very impressive solution that is gaining a lot of momentum. Part of the reason is that it already supports this integration. (The only downside: CRM integration is still pretty limited.)

Deliverability – Without It, You Got Nuttin

That is, if your email doesn’t end up in their mailbox, who cares about anything else. If you haven’t dug into this yet, “Reputation Management” is now a big factor in making it to your target inboxes. And what that means is that major ISP’s are now grading emails based on the reputation of the sender. And what governs that reputation? Spam reports, primarily. And so what that means is you now more than ever, need to conform to the CAN-SPAM act and moreover you need an email delivery provider that manages to that as well.

Although high end players like ExactTarget have done this for a while, you’re still in the dark with most of the other players like VerticleResponse and ConstantContact. But here again, the monkey pops up claiming 97% deliverability for MailChimp emails. Not sure where that number comes from but it was enough to get our interest.

So That’s Us – What About You?

Please feel free to chime in with your stories. We’ll continue to keep you posted on our travels in this area and maybe even put a whitepaper together at some point but let us know what you’re finding. And if you don’t agree with anything we’ve said, let us know that too.