| Email Marketing & Salesforce Integration: Your Prospects want You to Integrate |
| Wednesday, October 28 2009 02:09 | |||
 Okay, they may not use those exact words. From a prospect’s perspective, they don’t care whether your company’s email marketing and sales organizations are in sync or not. What they do care about is receiving too many unnecessary, non-targeted, or irrelevant email communications from your company that perhaps they didn't even want to receive in the first place.
Both email marketing and customer relationship management tools have become ubiquitous in many B-to-B organizations. Yet each tool not only has unique messaging functionality, they also both have unique customer databases. When companies don’t integrate the databases into one, the resulting uncoordinated marketing and sales messages can translate to lost deals:
Email marketers face a major challenge keeping their online marketing database in sync with the sales team’s CRM system. And, if a sales representative hasn’t updated some records, or if the data changes from the time it’s imported to when the campaign is actually sent, the marketer may not be sending to the entire list. What’s more, sales reps may be informed by marketing when a campaign has been sent, but they have no way of knowing whether or not the prospect opened or clicked on the message. There is simply no way to feed that data from the email marketing tool back to the CRM. As a result, the sales rep misses out on valuable information about the prospect’s interest level during the sales cycle. Disconnect, frustration, lost opportunities. Fortunately, many of today’s email marketing and CRM tools now work together. For example, if your marketing organization uses Lyris HQ for your email marketing, and your sales organization uses Salesforce for its CRM, you can download Lyris' free application that connects the two. The main benefits of doing so are:
By integrating your email marketing and CRM databases together your customers and prospects have a better experience, your sales team is better armed, and your email marketing program is more efficient.
### Related Resources:
|
