Integrating your customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing efforts can drive incremental results for your cannabis business or cannabis-related business. In fact, research shows that email marketing messages sent through a CRM database are 40 times more effective at attracting customers and closing sales than Facebook or Twitter.
Bottom-line, integrating CRM and email marketing is a must for every cannabis business and ancillary business.
Think of it this way. A CRM tool lets you gather customer (and prospective customer) data so you can understand them better, including who they are and their histories with your brand and business. An email marketing tool lets you use that information to better engage those people with more targeted, personalized communications that actually matter to them.
In other words, email marketing gives people a way to interact with your business or brand that your CRM tool can capture and track. You can then leverage that data to send better messages in the future, close more deals, and boost your overall ROI.
CRM and email marketing go hand-in-hand. Each works alone, but together, they’re so much better.
RELATED READING: How B2B Sales and Marketing Teams Use Email and CRM to Get Leads, Close Deals and Reduce Churn
Let’s take a look at some of the key benefits your cannabis or cannabis-related business can get when you integrate your CRM and email marketing.
Deeper Historical Perspective
A CRM tool typically tracks data related to each of your leads and contacts’ activities and sales revenue and gives you a clear understanding of your entire sales pipeline. Your email marketing tool typically allows you to track behaviors such as where contacts are in the marketing funnel, which emails your contacts open, which links they click, and if you’ve integrated your email marketing tool with your web analytics tool, you’ll even be able to see what they do after they land on your website.
However, when you integrate your CRM and email marketing, you’ll have a complete historical perspective, which includes who each contact is and what their interests are (based on prior actions and behaviors). With a bit of analysis, you can use that data to send targeted messages that are personalized to them, and you can set up automated messages to engage them on an ongoing basis.
Clearer Insights of Your Contacts
How do you know if you’re sending your contacts the right information to keep them engaged with your brand and motivate them to buy from you? The reality is you don’t know unless you have the right data about your contacts to evaluate first. By integrating your CRM and email marketing, you can collect and analyze this data effectively.
Use the data you collect through your sales team and your email marketing to evaluate behaviors, interests, and preferences so you can develop highly targeted communications that not only get better responses but also improve your email deliverability.
Ultimately, internal collaboration improves and teamwork is more effective, which leads to better results.
Actionable Data
Collecting data isn’t helpful to your business if you can’t use that data. When you integrate your CRM and email marketing, you’ll have actionable data at your fingertips so you can recognize opportunities quickly and respond in real-time.
Just as integration helps you seize opportunities, it also helps you minimize risks. Seamless data integration enables you to identify problems and fix them quickly before they negatively impact your marketing campaigns, customer relationships, and bottom-line.
Having access to actionable data means you can automate many tasks and streamline processes. As a result, productivity and ROI improve.
Better Results and ROI
When you’re able to send more targeted, relevant messages to contacts because you’ve integrated your CRM and email marketing and have a clear understanding of who they are, what problems they have that your business can solve, and what motivates them to take action, you’ll get better sales and marketing results and your ROI will improve.
For example, using your enhanced contact insights and actionable, you can develop automated email marketing messages with specific offers or automatic notifications to sales team members to follow up with contacts based on trigger actions like clicking on a specific link in an email message or visiting a specific page on your website a certain number of times.
Improved Data Management and Accuracy
When your CRM and email marketing are integrated, you can access all of the information you need for sales and email marketing in a single place rather than having contact data, sales data, marketing data, transaction data, and communications information stored in multiple places. This saves every employee a significant amount of time and reduces the risk of errors and the need for duplicate work.
In addition, with CRM and email marketing integration, it’s easy for your team members to update data and make that new data available to everyone in real-time. There is no lag between systems since everything is connected, and there is no need for duplicated work in terms of entering the data into multiple systems. Again, this saves time and reduces mistakes that could be very costly.
Key Takeaways about Integrating CRM and Email Marketing in the Cannabis Industry
To succeed in any industry today, businesses need to stay top-of-mind with their customers and prospects. Email marketing is a great way to do it, and research shows that email marketing is extremely effective. However, by integrating email marketing with CRM, you’ll be even more successful.
As your business grows, managing customer relationships and email marketing gets more complex. Integration is critical from the start.
For cannabis businesses and ancillary cannabis businesses, when you use the Cannabiz Media License Database, your CRM and email marketing tool are already integrated! All of the CRM and email marketing tools you need to be successful as well as information about licensed cannabis businesses and hemp operations across the U.S. and international markets are built into the Cannabiz Media License Database. To see how you can use it to improve your results, schedule a demo today.
Originally published 8/20/19. Updated 5/1/20.
Susan Gunelius, Lead Analyst for Cannabiz Media and author of Marijuana Licensing Reference Guide: 2017 Edition, is also President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company offering, copywriting, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and strategic branding services. She spent the first half of her 25-year career directing marketing programs for AT&T and HSBC. Today, her clients include household brands like Citigroup, Cox Communications, Intuit, and more as well as small businesses around the world. Susan has written 11 marketing-related books, including the highly popular Content Marketing for Dummies, 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps, The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing, and she is a popular marketing and branding keynote speaker. She is also a Certified Career Coach and Founder and Editor in Chief of Women on Business, an award-winning blog for business women. Susan holds a B.S. in marketing and an M.B.A in management and strategy.
Source: https://cannabiz.media/integrating-crm-and-email-marketing-for-powerful-results/
