Using a great CRM system (Customer Relationship System) helps businesses keep customer contact details up to date, but just as importantly it allows you track customer interaction and manage customer accounts. They are often designed to help businesses improve customer relationships and market to their audience in a targeted and effective way.
We often talk about email marketing at InSynch and there are many ways to engage with an audience, to achieve specific business goals. Be it to target a group within your database who have actively engaged with your previous newsletter, or a segment of your audience who have a specific interest, or individuals you’ve tagged as having personally met at a networking event.
In this blog I am going to run through the easiest way to manage your audience within the popular CRM Mailchimp, allowing you to understand your data, and make your marketing budget go further. Other CRM systems are also available and operate in a similar fashion, but as Mailchimp is what many of our own clients use, as it is free for us to 2,000 subscribers, up to 10,000 sends a month, with a daily send limit of 2,000, I will be focussing on this platform in this blog.
So, gathering data from your audience is hugely valuable to help improve your marketing and grow your business. By studying this data, you will gain an insight into who your audience is and what they love about your brand.
A good CRM will provide with those tools to capture, organise and analyse this data, to help you better understand your customers and how best to market to them.
You can then, get a better sense of who your audience is, send the right content to the right subscribers, find new ways to engage with subscribers who have specific interests and even find new customers.
Mailchimp has several tools that will help you collate and organise data, helping you send higher converting emails.
Firstly Put your audience in one place
This allows you to get a holistic view of your audience and see patterns that will emerge over time which can help with future marketing. However, by having your audience in one place, you will rarely want to send a newsletter to your entire audience. Enter Tags, Groups and Segments.
Tags
Tags are insights about your audience that you add, such as if you met them in person at an event, or for example if they have children they like to buy for.
It’s important to remember that tags are totally flexible, you can create tags, have multiple tags, as well as add and remove tags from contacts whenever you want to, you can even tag a whole list of people on importing into your audience.
By using tags you can send targeted messages and create automations that trigger when you add a specific tag to content.
Groups
If you’d like your contacts to tell you of their interests themselves you can use groups. These are created through a form field that people fill out when they subscribe to your newsletters/marketing, from an exit intent pop up or a form on your website.
Note: If you are using these fields on your forms, keep it simple. It is often the case that too many fields will not encourage a sign up. However, form fields are a way of allowing the customer to tell you what information they do and do not wish to receive from you.
Segments
From years of digital marketing, we know that a message is much more successful when received by a specific subset of an audience, such as an audience who has previously engaged with your newsletters on a specific topic or purchased from your store in the last 30 days.
Segments are dynamic and update automatically, so that you know you are always talking to the right audience.
Example:
If you have an online shop, you can save a segment such as contacts who purchased in the last 30 days and subscribed in the last 60 days. This allows you to target this fresh audience who are new customers who have recently engaged with your business.
Much the same as you could create a segment of contacts who have not purchased within the last 60 days but have opened your last 5 newsletters and sending that segment a discount code to encourage them to return to your online shop.
If used correctly these tools can be very effective!
There are many inbuilt insights, you can draw from within your Mailchimp CRM when segmenting your audience such as demographic and behavioural data like:
- Who have opened/not opened recent emails?
- How often they buy from your online store.
- Age
- Gender
- Location and much more
So, Start turning your data into action and get more from your marketing!
Email marketing is covered under our Total Digital Marketing Packages
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