How Your Mailing Lists are Wasting Your Time and Money

Most companies have lots of lists, but not much useful information. Key client lists, email marketing lists, event invitation lists – at least five or six lists for each department. These lists are the enemy of your ROI.

For example, your email management platform keeps track of which email addresses start bouncing, but if the information from that list never gets into the CRM, then your salespeople may not be aware of when their contacts have changed jobs. Out of date contacts can stay in your CRM forever.

A totally efficient company should have one list. Any more than that is a waste of resources and a barrier to profits, so managers should constantly be striving to reduce the number of lists they are using (and cut the hours spent maintaining these lists). To target your clients for different campaigns or purposes, you can divide your list into segments, but all of those segments need to remain part of a unified list.

Why Your CRM and Email Marketing Need to Talk

One of the biggest steps that can be taken toward unifying your client lists is to synchronise your CRM with your email marketing platform. At RightSite we have linked our CRM and the contacts it contains to our Mailchimp email marketing platform, and the result is richer information on our clients within the CRM, and easier updating of the mailing list in Mailchimp.

We can now see which of our clients have read which campaigns, and more easily select contacts for event invites or targetted communications.

This unified approach to managing customer interaction information used to only be attainable at major enterprises running SAP or other expensive solutions, but now there are some affordable applications that will allow you to link common business applications such as SalesForce, SugarCRM, MailChimp and Constant Contact without blowing your budget.

Syncing Your Lists Without Sinking Your Budget

At RightSite, we have started using an off-the-shelf sync app made by a company called Cazoomi, to join our SugarCRM solutions with MailChimp, our preferred email management platform. (Expect to hear more about these apps in subsequent posts). The Cazoomi sync application allows us to automatically share our CRM contacts into MailChimp, and to to pull the results of our Mailchimp campaigns back into SugarCRM. No more exporting contact lists and no more manually updating the campaign data directly in the CRM.

The Cazoomi sync app is cloud-based, but it sets up a new module in your CRM for managing email campaign data. In this new module you can see basic analytics on your email campaigns, including which clients received which campaigns, as well as whether they opened the mail or clicked on any of the links. Perhaps most importantly, you get automatic updates when contact email addresses bounce, so you can follow up with the contact by updating their information or deactivating their record.

The new module created by the sync app is called Email Marketing History, and you can get a look at it in this screenshot. The app also creates a subpanel in the CRM’s contact record that shows detailed information about the email campaigns that your client has received.

Sure, you can do email campaigns directly from SugarCRM or SalesForce, but neither of these CRMs give you the features that a dedicated email management platform provides. So most companies have been stuck getting their admin or marketing staff to export new contacts from their CRM into MailChimp on a weekly basis, and then importing the results of the campaign back into their CRMs.

Sync apps like Cazoomi’s effectively solve this problem – as well as the security risks that arise when you start giving staff the right to export from your CRM – without costing you a lot of money. The various application options that Cazoomi provides range from $9.99 per month to $99.99, so this is a pretty low price for helping you achieve the kind of information management efficiency that formerly was available only to large enterprises.

How Efficient Marketing Boosts Your ROI

At RightSite, we work with Fortune 500 clients every day advising them on how to manage their sales and marketing effectively, and it does take time for managers to realise how their many lists can be merged into one, however, the companies that can achieve this are the ones with the best profit margins and the greatest ability to grow their sales effectively.

I will keep you updated on how the Cazoomi sync app performs for RightSite, and I’ll have more posts soon about how to better manage your company’s customer data to improve your return on information.