Email Marketing Insight: advanced email marketing means total integration

Remember the Email Marketing Insight post ‘How are your basic email marketing skills?‘. I posed that advanced email marketing was all about automation, and high-end about total integration. But looking back to that post I’m actually inclined to say that that total integration part already starts at advanced email marketing.
Here’s why. Imagine having a small email campaign running on your email marketing platform. It’s got some forms, some notification emails and such. The results and effectiveness of that campaign however often do not show up in your webshop platform or your CRM tool. There’s no connection, no integration between the systems: they are silos of data.
What if something goes wrong with the campaign? What if you get odd signups, notification emails are not sent or there’s no followup by your sales people? The only way to keep track of all that efficiently is by having one central point of reporting: a dashboard in your webshop or CRM platform. That way, everything from a simple email campaign as the above example all the way trough to customer lifecycle management campaigns (aka drip campaigns) can be monitored and managed.

Integration might not always seem easy, or even cheap: but often the benefits are underappreciated and not clear enough. Time is one big benefit: you will have more of it because a lot less manual actions are needed. Marketers (especially email marketers) should love that.
Furthermore, the budget needed should not be seen as cost but as an investment. In the long run, it will pay back soo much that they only question you and management will ask yourselves: “why didn’t we do this sooner?”. No more separate silos with disconnected data and information.
If you can track your leads and existing customers all the way from email delivery to the conversion point (regardless whether it’s about sales, signups or information requests) and do that in a lifecycle fashion, you’ve hit gold. Keeping customers with you will keep revenue with you as well: something upper management will like too.
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