To improve your SMB's email marketing process, you've probably looked into boosting open rates, AI automation and email software – all of which play a role. What you might not know is that your CRM tool contains a wealth of data you can use to personalize emails to customer needs and sales stage. In this article, you'll discover five actionable ways to improve your email marketing with a CRM, plus some powerful CRM software that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Key takeaways
By storing all your customer interactions in one place, a CRM helps ensure you never send a lead the same email twice or waste time on uninterested leads.
Use the CRM data you have for each lead to customize the email content to their needs.
CRM automation lets you write emails with AI, trigger tasks in related tools and skip manual follow-ups.
Pipedrive’s CRM is easy to learn and will make your email marketing more efficient and easier to track. Sign up for a free 14-day trial today.
What is a CRM, and why should you use one for email marketing?
A customer relationship management (CRM) tool centralizes all your interactions with leads and customers.
Those interactions may include:
Sales calls
Demos
Customer service chats
A conversation with a chatbot on a landing page
Marketing emails
DMs on social media
Purchases
Refunds
Storing all your interactions in a central location means you don’t lose important conversations in long email threads. Additionally, if a salesperson leaves your company, their email outreach remains in your CRM.
Since CRM tools automatically pull data from lead interactions, you don’t have to waste time and money on manual data entry. CRM features often include automated follow-up emails, reducing a major burden for sales teams.
If a small business uses a CRM system, its marketing and sales teams can expect to experience the following transformation:
Before using a CRM | After using a CRM |
|---|---|
Sales reps often forget to follow up. | Email automation simplifies follow-up. |
No one knows the status of each lead. | The CRM shows exactly where each lead is in the sales process and what the next steps are. |
The lead generation process differs across channels. | Every lead enters one central pipeline. |
Conversion rate tracking requires arcane formulas in Google Sheets. | Management can generate a conversion rate report in a couple of clicks. |
Multiple sales reps contact individual leads, and it’s unclear who actually closed the deal. | It’s easy to see who’s responsible for which customer. |
A new sales rep only sees their own sales conversations. | A new sales rep has visibility of all previous sales interactions that management gives them access to. |
Read on to discover more benefits of using a CRM platform in your email marketing.
5 ways CRMs help SMBs with email marketing
There are five main ways you can use a CRM to improve the quality of your email marketing process.
1. Personalize emails based on customer behavior
Use your CRM to make your leads feel that the emails you send them really speak to their needs.
Sending all your leads a carbon copy of the same email is both spammy and ineffective.
Take a look at this example:
Customers increasingly expect a certain level of personalization and disdain generic emails. 62% of clients say a brand will lose their loyalty if it delivers a generic customer experience.
Using a mail merge with a merge field for %NAME% is a good start, but the data shows that customers want deeper customization that’s only attainable through a CRM.
Here’s a more personalized email:
This email from Eventbrite resonates much more because the SaaS platform knows from its CRM that the reader has created an event but has not published it yet.
As a result, the reader knows why this email is relevant to them.
There are numerous potential customer insights you can take from your CRM to enrich your sales activities. For instance:
The client’s previous purchasing history
Conversations a lead had with other sales reps
Customer support tickets
The client’s company size
Where the client is based
When your last interaction happened
If this level of personalization sounds overwhelming, consider using merge fields like %LOCATION% to personalize bulk emails.
Using CRM data to personalize emails streamlines your email marketing process. SMBs can expect improvements to the following sales metrics:
Metric | Why a CRM helps |
|---|---|
Open rate | Leads are more likely to open an email that references their past behavior. |
Click-through rate | Leads are more interested in offers that are relevant to their particular use case. |
Reply rate | A potential customer is less likely to ignore an email if it’s clear that you wrote it specifically for them. |
Retention | Users will keep coming back to products that consistently show they understand their unique needs. |
The longer you retain your clients, the more return you’ll make from them, especially if you’re operating a SaaS business with recurring revenue. |
All these improvements ultimately translate into higher ROI and more predictable monthly cash flow.
2. Centralize customer data in one single source of truth
A CRM brings together customer data – including sales conversations, support tickets, meeting notes and purchase history – in one central location.
Without a CRM, disconnected pieces of information remain spread across email, spreadsheets, e-commerce sites, Slack messages and support platforms. This fragmented customer data leads to inconsistent marketing communication. For instance:
You might market a product to a lead without knowing they’ve already purchased the same product through another email campaign.
You end up marketing your services to a lead who’s already told another salesperson they’re not interested.
By contrast, when customer data is centralized, sales and marketing can coordinate more effectively.
Workflow automation firm Assivo shared a case study of how a SaaS company in Silicon Valley got its marketing department to add all lead data to its CRM and give each lead a score. Sales could then focus on the accounts with the highest lead scoring, resulting in faster cash flow.
When customer data appears across multiple platforms, it’s so easy to end up with duplicate leads, particularly if you manage your customers with spreadsheets. Multiple sales reps might contact the same lead without knowing that a colleague has already communicated with them – and without the context of that previous conversation.
Thankfully, most CRMs automatically merge duplicate profiles, so you won’t experience data issues.
3. Automate repetitive email marketing activities
CRM automation enables SMBs to send more marketing emails with a smaller team, resulting in cost savings.
For example, you can send automated email follow-ups, such as this one from sales productivity tool Yesware:
Such emails are time-consuming to send, but they matter.
According to data aggregated by tech intelligence startup Growthlist, only 2% of sales happen on the first contact, and the first follow-up email increases the reply rate by 49%.
If you don’t want to write your marketing emails, consider having your CRM’s built-in AI write them for you.
Here’s an example of an email that sales training firm AscendSales crafted with AI:
Note the personalized touch here. The email specifically refers to a recent LinkedIn post the lead shared.
Even if you only have your CRM’s AI draft the email sequence and then optimize or run A/B tests until it matches your brand’s voice, that’s still much faster than writing emails manually.
Crush your manual admin with this sales automation guide
To take automation a step further, get your CRM to automatically trigger a workflow on another platform when a lead takes a specific action. For example:
Add a lead to a drip campaign in ActiveCampaign after they sign up on your site
Post a Slack alert saying “new demo request”
Add the lead to a retargeting audience in Meta Ads in case they don’t convert
Get the sales intelligence platform Apollo to enrich the data you have on the lead and bring in contact email addresses
Workflow automation of this nature is possible through native integrations between CRMs and the other tools in your stack. Make sure you choose a CRM solution with integrations that are relevant to your business.
If the right integration doesn’t exist, use an embedded integration platform as a service (iPaaS) like Paragon, or build the connection yourself using Zapier.
4. Track where each lead is in your sales process
A CRM organizes your sales pipeline into stages, so you can send emails that match the stage a lead is at.
You can then craft email content that aligns with a lead’s specific needs rather than generic copy.
Here’s an example of a pipeline divided up into stages:
A lead at an early stage in the customer journey typically needs education and increased awareness of your product. Pushing for a sale at this stage is premature and will turn the lead off.
Here’s an example of a well-written product education email from Zoom:
Notice how it clearly explains Zoom’s major functions and why they’re of value. An email like this one might be inappropriate for someone who already uses Zoom frequently, but it’s ideal for someone just discovering the platform.
Leads further down your sales funnel benefit from emails that clarify ROI and pricing, or from examples of results similar companies achieved with your product.
Consider this pricing email aimed at getting free users to sign up for a paid tier:
This email could come across as presumptuous to someone who barely knows what your software does. To someone who’s already on your free tier, the FOMO makes it seem like a good deal.
Intelligent use of a CRM ensures that only leads at the bottom of the funnel ever receive emails like the above.
It’s also worth noting that dividing the pipeline into CRM stages enables SMBs to identify and address email marketing bottlenecks.
For example, if 20% of newsletter sign-ups complete the initial two-week nurture sequence, but only 1% click through from the email suggesting a demo, that demo email needs work.
5. Report on how email marketing affects the bottom line
Your CRM also contains a range of reporting options that let you see the impact of your email marketing on your bottom line.
For example, you could report on:
The amount of revenue an email marketing campaign generated
The average deal size that came out of an email campaign
Revenue per email sent
The number of opportunities in the pipeline that email marketing touched
Which email marketing campaigns generate the highest LTV over a year
Note: It’s common to report on email marketing in isolation in an email marketing tool like Mailchimp, but this is a mistake.
You need all your campaign data in a central location and to see the knock-on effects of your marketing emails on revenue. Surface-level insights like open rates and unsubscribes aren’t enough.
A big advantage of reporting on email marketing through your CRM is that you have segmentation data at your fingertips.
You’ll be able to see which segments convert best, which have the highest LTV and which ones need better nurturing.
If a segment needs more nurturing, create a dedicated email campaign that delivers additional value without trying to sell anything.
In the following example, Zapier’s nurture email shows dormant leads multiple tangible ways they can get value from its product:
The fact that your CRM puts all your customer data in one place also allows you to improve reporting across teams.
For example, it’s all well and good if marketing says it generated 500 leads this month. However, if sales says that only 50 are qualified, that puts a completely different spin on those numbers.
Your CRM lets you analyze trends and forecast patterns using data from your email marketing efforts. For instance:
Identify seasonal trends in your audience’s responsiveness to your marketing
Figure out the length of your typical sales cycle and which points require support from email marketing
Observe how your conversion rates from email campaigns have changed over time
Reports like these contain key data points that executives care deeply about.
How Pipedrive’s CRM can support your email marketing
Pipedrive’s all-in-one CRM perfectly adapts to ambitious teams that want to take their email marketing to the next level.
The platform has a user-friendly Kanban format, with columns representing the different stages of your sales process.
You can customize the columns to match your needs and create custom tags to segment leads by whatever factors make sense – like location or business size.
Splitting leads into different deal stages and segments will help you build email marketing campaigns that specifically target those groups. Use data from each customer profile to personalize the emails you send.
Pipedrive in Action: Training company Trainify used Pipedrive to combine CRM and email marketing in a single platform, enabling audience segmentation and automated contact syncing. Thanks to Pipedrive’s marketing automation, Trainify created 28 different campaigns, saving two hours per week.
When you come to writing the marketing emails, use Pipedrive’s AI email writer to create a solid first draft, then tweak until the voice matches your brand. You can also use readily available email templates or save your own for future use.
Since Pipedrive integrates with email marketing software like Outlook, Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, any emails you send through Pipedrive will reflect in real time in those programs and vice versa.
Also use Pipedrive to automate follow-ups, saving your reps countless hours of tedious manual work.
Pipedrive integrates with project management tools like Asana, which can assign a task to your operations team to create a proposal and forward it to sales whenever leads respond.
Pipedrive’s Campaigns add-on includes automatic email tracking, letting you measure customer engagement metrics such as open and click rates. If you want to go deeper, you can easily generate reports like:
Campaign conversion
Email performance
Lead performance
Lead conversion
Revenue forecast
Creating these reports takes just a few clicks in your dashboard.
If you need to go deeper still – for instance, to analyze multi-touch attribution – connect Pipedrive data with Power BI or Looker Studio.
Final thoughts
Collating customer information inside a CRM creates a gold mine of data you can use to personalize marketing emails.
Email marketing features within modern CRMs like Pipedrive can automate manual tasks, trigger related tasks in other tools via integrations and track success.
The ensuing personalization and automation translate into better ROI from your email marketing campaigns.
Sign up for a 14-day free trial of Pipedrive today and watch the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy soar.
