Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) by LongJump

Email marketing campaigns can be one of the most cost-effective campaigns you can employ to both drive new business, as well as keep you top-of-mind with your customers. That’s because while educating your customers takes more effort than simple branding, an educated customer is also more likely to spend more and spend it with the person who is educating them.

Email marketing campaigns deliver a lot of information while also providing measureable results in both how many people see your message (opens) and how many actively wanted more information (clicks). You also capture information about prospects that don’t want to be bothered (unsubscribes).

In the past, CRM users had to employ a separate email delivery service to send whitelisted bulk emails to your constituents. This limited your ability to track the results of your campaigns as they related to new sales opportunities. You either had to pay for an additional service, pay for integration between two services, or manually reconcile campaign results with existing CRM data.

By combining CRM sales force automation and email campaigning in one application as LongJump does, you can specify your lead, prospect, and account targets, embedded personal information into each email, and measure results across your sales cycle.

Here are some terms you should be familiar with when using email marketing:

• Whitelisting - Known spammers are often blacklisted by networking agencies and email filters. A whitelisted delivery service is one that has commited resources and efforts to maintaining a good standing with these filters and ensure greater delivery of emails.
• HTML - Emails that are formatted in HTML are similar to web pages with links, images and table layouts. You’ll want to remember to not use Flash, animated graphics, and frames most email readers do not support them.
• List Management - Rather than importing names from wherever you get leads into your other CRM data (which can lead to duplication, bad data, and a lot of cold leads), it is often better to manage multiple lists individually. This allows you to send a specific group a certain set of information.
• Personalization - Like a mail-merge letter, including information about that particular person in your email adds a level of personalization which also improves the chance that your message will be heard. This can be done by embedding variables into the email template that call out fields like ‘first name,’ or ‘company name.’
• Callbacks - Callbacks are tasks or emails that are automatically triggered when the receiver of your email takes some action (open, click, open and click). This provides a proactive way to follow-up on a customer.

One other thing to keep in mind is content. As stated earlier, education is a very powerful tool in the sales process. That’s why newsletters make excellent campaigns. They provide the reader with information that will help them improve their situation in an unobtrusive way. Meanwhile, it positions you as a reputable source of useful information. The better your content is, the better your chance that they will forward the newsletter to colleagues and peers or look forward to the next email from you.