CRM as Email Marketing

The word CRM has so many interpretations that it means different things to different companies. Many times Email Marketing Campaigns (Email Blasts) are what is referred to as CRM. However, Email Marketing is just one part of a multi-faceted Marketing strategy. Email Marketing may be one of the most important ways to get your message out and engage customers, but standalone Email Campaigns won’t cut it, and are actually one piece of an overall CRM strategy.

There are many reasons Email Marketing campaigns are so important. One reason is that Email is now ubiquitous, due to the fact it is such a trusted medium of delivery. This was not true just a few short years ago. Email took time to be trusted but then it became a ‘no brainer’ to have an Email account s a business person. However, people had email accounts and used them to communicate with one another as a tool to keep closer with friends and relatives. In short, Email adoption was driven largely by the need to be Social in a more efficient manner. No longer did the people communicating need to be on the telephone at the same time to have a conversation, so communication flowed due to the convenience. But email adoption by businesses lagged consumer adoption by roughly a decade and came only after email adoption reached a tipping point with consumers in the global market.

With power comes risks, however, and people realized that having the ability to send a message too many people can be risky. You can alienate people easily by sending the wrong message, and not having the face-time to explain the context of your words. Businesses learned the hard way that the same reasons this medium became ubiquitous in the first place was because it was trusted, and the quickest way to cut yourself out of that was to lose the trust of the recipient.

The problem is that Email marketing itself is a tool. A CRM strategy addresses the Marketing, Sales, Support and Fulfillment side of the business as a whole, to make sure the message is true, understood, and is able to be fulfilled as promised with excellent customer service. A successful Email campaign starts with knowing how to under-promise and over-deliver and delivering that in an easy to understand message. It is the customer experience that will build and keep that trust with your customer. Learning what message to send is CRM. Email Marketing is one way to get that message out.

And how about Cloud CRM? It has been engrained in the large companies for years, but new to the SMBs. However, when many companies are looking for a way to improve the business, they search the web for CRM and find email marketing companies claiming they provide Cloud CRM. A true Enterprise Cloud CRM system has Email marketing as a feature within an overall CRM architecture (Sales, Marketing , Support, Fulfillment, etc) built to help you to manage the relationship with the customer.