CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and refers to tools that help businesses improve and maintain processes. This includes:
Here’s an example of what a CRM system can do — this sales dashboard in Zoho shows a bunch of sales metrics, including forecasting trends using historical data.
It is also useful for small and medium businesses doing account-based marketing. CRM systems help you identify your most convertible leads and execute the perfect strategy with marketing automation. With CRM software, you can:
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses email to nurture leads, connect with existing customers, and build customer loyalty. Emails can come in handy if you want to:
There are many types of email marketing campaigns. Depending on your objectives and audience, you can try sending welcome emails, email newsletters, lead nurturing emails, and more.
If your email marketing software offers a native or integrated CRM system, you can use it for better email personalization and automation. Can you still send personalized messages with an ESP alone? Sort of — but your opportunities are limited.
The available customer data in your email marketing software mostly depends on which fields you include in the sign-up form. Some forms require an email address alone, others will ask future subscribers for a country of residence, gender, zip code, job position, birth date, and more. The data you collect this way will be stored with your contact list and you can use it for segmented and personalized campaigns. For example, you can send location-based suggestions or birthday emails.
But do ESPs store any customer data by default? Yes but not much. Let’s take a look at a baseline contact information card in Selzy — it looks like this:
Here’s all the data it contains:
You can add more data like name, other contacts aside from email, technical data like UTM campaigns, and a lot of personal information — manually. In the case of this contact specifically, it’s not enough data even for adding a name merge tag to a subject line. The thing is, CRM systems have all this basic data too — but they also store:
As a result, if you combine data from ESP with data from CRM, you’ll be able to amp up your personalization using:
Using email marketing with CRM can offer you many benefits over using traditional email marketing alone.
When choosing a tool that combines CRM and email marketing, consider your business needs, budget, and integrations with the systems you’re already using. You need to keep both the CRM functionality and email marketing in mind. But features are not your only concern — let’s dive into all that and more.
The first thing to consider is what features you need. Here is the table showing some of the possible business goals, which features will help you achieve them and how.
Main goal | CRM feature | Why do you need it? |
Increase sales revenue |
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Improve customer satisfaction |
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Enhance team collaboration |
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Save time and resources |
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Grow and scale your business |
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Email automation saves you time and allows you to run the email sequences that directly respond to users’ actions. For example, you can send an email to say hello when someone joins your email list, or to say thank you when someone buys something from your website.
Email automation can help you save time, connect with your customers, and sell more. It can also help you see how well your emails are working and make them better.
Different apps that have the email marketing feature may offer different email automation options. Some of the most common ones are:
Usability is a measure of how easy and pleasant it is to use a product or a system. For an ESP, usability means that the system allows users to create, send, and manage email campaigns hassle-free. Pay attention to these:
Usability is an important factor. For example, you’ll take a lot more time implementing a hard-to-learn tool, and a slow platform will slow down your business.
If you want to use a CRM system for emails, here’s all the data your platform should track:
The third thing to consider is integration with other platforms and tools. You want to find an app that can seamlessly connect with them, enhancing your CRM and email marketing capabilities. For example, some of the useful integrations include:
Look for third-party integrations that are easy to set up, compatible with your software versions, and secure with data encryption.
Security and compliance are other important points to consider when choosing software. You need a tool that can keep your and your customer’s data safe. It also needs to be able to ensure compliance with the rules that apply to your business, such as GDPR or CCPA.
Here are some security features to pay attention to:
The average price of the platform that combines CRM and email marketing is $23/month per user — and depending on the tool, the tiers can reach up to $400 and more. Some providers also offer a free plan or a free trial between 14 and 30 days, but such free options usually have limitations and restrictions — lower email sending limits, fewer landing pages, fewer automation capabilities, etc.
The best option is the software that has:
You need a provider that can help you whenever you have a problem or a question. The ideal situation is multi-channel customer support available by phone, chat, or email. You can get an idea about a tool’s customer support by checking out the reviews on websites like Capterra or G2.
Here are some questions to consider:
We made a list of five email marketing solutions that have an in-built CRM or support integrations with CRM platforms. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
Selzy is an email marketing platform with 24/7 support, automation, segmentation, templates, and analytics.
Key features:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Pricing:
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a versatile marketing automation platform offering email, SMS, chat, and more.
Key features:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Pricing:
You can also try it for free with up to 300 emails per day and unlimited contacts.
ActiveCampaign offers email marketing, automation, and CRM tools for excellent customer experiences. It includes transactional email, forms, tracking, segmentation, and dynamic content.
Key features:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Pricing:
You can also try ActiveCampaign for free for 14 days with no credit card required.
Keap is a comprehensive platform with email marketing, automation, and CRM. It also offers forms, tracking, segmentation, and dynamic content.
Key features:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Pricing:
You can also try Keap for free for 14 days with no credit card required.
HubSpot is a CRM platform with all the software, integrations, and one of the you’ll need to connect marketing, sales, content management, and customer service. These exist as independent modules so you can only use the ones you actually need.
Key features:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Pricing:
You can also try HubSpot for free for 14 days with no credit card required.
Folk is a comprehensive CRM solution that brings together all of an organization’s critical relationships in one place. It allows you to centralize and customize workflows, encompassing various aspects such as Sales CRM, recruitment pipeline, deal flow management, prospecting management and more.
Key features:
Pipeline management
Bulk email campaigns
Integrations
Chrome extension
AI & enrichment
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Pricing:
Email marketing is a powerful way to reach and engage your prospects and customers. Integrating CRM and email marketing allows you to create a seamless and effective marketing strategy that boosts your conversions and revenue.
When choosing the software for your business, here are the questions to ask yourself: