Point and Click Email Marketing Platform Integration and Marketing Automation Tools
Despite the rise in social media, email is still one of the most useful and powerful tools available to marketers and businesses alike. The B2B market has been quite slow to adopt social media as a form of communication and therefore email is still the most prevalent method of communication. In fact, it is widely acknowledged that this is the most appropriate and effective way of conducting business.
This isn’t surprising since, according to KISSmetrics, “email has nearly three times as many user accounts as Facebook and Twitter combined”, and that “Facebook and Twitter combined make up just 0.2% of the number of emails sent each day”. Those are fairly significant and convincing facts.
In light of this, there are numerous services and software available to help businesses manage email marketing campaigns, such as MailChimp, CommuniGator, dotmailer and HubSpot.
Email Marketing Automation Tools: Synchronising marketing lists and unsubscribes
These email marketing products can provide businesses with superb ROI and are generally one of the main lead generation tools. In fact, this activity is so fundamental to businesses that many don’t question the costly and employee intensive process of list management and unsubscribe updates.
With a legal requirement for organisations to provide email campaign unsubscribes, most solutions have this feature built in. The trouble is many businesses run both an email marketing solution and a CRM/ERP solution (Infor CRM, Sage CRM, SAP Business One) in tandem, which results in users having to manually synchronise unsubscribe data.
Codeless Platforms’ BPA Platform and its email marketing automation tools make it possible to automatically synchronise unsubscribe data between your email package and your CRM/ERP application, therefore protecting your business.
Full email marketing automation to business rules
From time to time, businesses may need to run ‘unplanned’ email campaigns. Factors such as slow moving stock or pressures to cross sell/up sell all mean more email campaigns need to be processed by the marketing team. Yet, finding the time to run these unplanned campaigns can be difficult.
In this instance, the BPA Platform can automatically create and send email campaigns via a chosen solution based on defined data events, such as slow moving stock or a topical date. It will also update the CRM/ERP application with the results.
Automating campaign report distribution
Once a campaign has been distributed most businesses will want to create open and click through reports, which are then sent to the sales team for them to update the CRM/ERP system and set up follow-up activities. Again, this is usually a manual, time-consuming process, which results in more administration for the company to absorb.
The BPA Platform can automate this process by automatically extracting the reports and updating any CRM/ERP system, allowing the sales team to focus on the primary objective of sales.
Automating email verification
Successful email marketing is largely dependent upon on the strength of your actual email lists. One of the critical ways to improve data hygiene is by verifying and removing bad email addresses with email verification software. Email data can decay due to staff departures, domain name changes and other factors.
By integrating email verification software with your CRM/ERP system it is possible to remove the manual process of email validation, improve the quality of email records and enhance email campaign delivery rates.
The BPA Platform can automatically extract email data from both your systems, send it to one of many email list verification solutions for validation and identify which email records are good, bad or require further investigation.
Many companies rely on employees to manually process any bad emails, but this is time consuming and often a viewed as a low priority task. The BPA Platform can automatically identify the problem emails returned by the solution, update the CRM/ERP system and set activities for users to call the account.
To find out more about Codeless Platforms’ BPA Platform and its email marketing automation tools, please download the brochure or call us on +44 (0)330 998 8700.
