Email management is an important part of your business. Emails are one of the most common ways you communicate throughout your workday. So it stands to reason that they way you manage your company’s emails is an important part of your business. Depending on your role, at least 30% of your work time is devoted to reading and responding to emails. The performance of your emailing efforts is dependent on the tools you have available to you. Look beyond your MS Outlook or Gmail accounts and identify what’s not working for you. We look at some of the issues companies currently face with email management. We discuss how you can apply solutions and the right tools remedy those challenges.
Consistency
Consistent communications or messaging throughout the organization are elements often overlooked. From one employee to another, the company branding, letterheads, or signature blocks may be different. Another example may be that your salespeople or customer services agents may be approaching prospects or clients with other messaging. This inconsistency can result in clients believing that your team members are not all on the same page.
Templating emails for employees to use throughout your company keeps your messaging steady and tightens up loose processes. Templating emails also saves time for your staff with options like auto-populated fields. Automatically have the contact’s name, company name, or other essential fields in place and click send! Features like this are a terrific alternative to repeatedly re-writing the same email.
Email Marketing
Email marketing or campaigns are an essential part of both your client retention and client acquisition strategies. According to several CRM developers, at least 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach their audience. A lack of email campaigns in your strategy makes getting clients and keeping clients a longer process to manage. Most importantly, you won’t be able to analyze the results of these inferior marketing efforts. Another scenario is your business could be running campaigns with a standalone email marketing tool. While this maybe email marketing, doing this outside of a CRM means going back and forth between two programs. You then manually enter data which can be prone to errors, time-consuming, and ultimately lead to a loss of opportunities.
Creating campaigns within a good CRM is easy. You can create several different custom campaigns with unique templates that will be attractive to prospects and clients. Set the parameters of when you want a campaign to run and copy over a template to make minor changes. Create specific recipient lists so you can hyper-focus your campaign to a targeted audience. You’ll be able to monitor the success of the campaigns and their performance. Built-in reports show you how many emails were successfully delivered, bounced, opened, and clicked on. Once your campaign has run its course, drill down on the report metrics to view each email activity. This helps you see what resonates best with your audience. You can imagine that understanding how your products or services are purchased is valuable insight.
Email Tracking
Tracking communications outside of campaigns is just as important as a campaign itself. Individual communications with a client or prospect measure how your sales are progressing or track your customer’s satisfaction. Lack of record-keeping or relying on your staff to copy & paste emails into your CRM leaves room for many errors. This lack of communication tracking with your existing and future customers means your team is missing out on important details. Imagine it to be like a case of broken telephone; part of your staff has no idea what’s going on with a client and only has bits of information. Ultimately leaving the client with a feeling of being misunderstood and undervalued.
Saving email communications to contacts, opportunities, and individual or multiple records requires an intelligent and robust email integration. These integrations allow you to save emails to numerous entries by searching for your contact within your email platform. Other functionalities include saving emails to a sales opportunity. With email integration, you can pull up the different sales opportunities created in your CRM and attach the desired communication. Today’s email tracking features are time-saving and by far beat out the copy and paste way of doing things.
The Follow-Up
Following up is a crucial step in all sales and customer service processes within any company. Without the follow-up, your business loses. When too much time passes between communications, your business is no longer top of mind. This leaves prospects and clients to find what they need from your competition. On the flip side, when communications are too frequent, you can seem too eager or even annoying to your prospect. Both hurt your chances of success. Either way, an inaccurate measure of time between communications results in lost opportunities and unsatisfied clients.
A follow-up list schedules different follow-ups and campaigns complementing the already existing email tracking functionalities mentioned above. Something like a “Hotlist” creates follow-up actions that can be manually carried out or automated. A Hotlist prioritizes your communications and gives your staff a clear direction of who they need to contact that day. These lists use filters to focus on a specific kind of follow-up, such as a call, task, or email. There’s no need to scroll through sent messages looking for the last communication. Or then count the number of days that have gone by since the last communication. Using a Hotlist feature allows you to set and forget with confidence and carry out your next communication successfully.
Accountability
Being unaccountable is the nail in your coffin when it comes to your business and its processes. It’s awful for a prospect or client to hear “my colleague didn’t inform me” or “I can’t find that email”. These types of issues aren’t acceptable in today’s world. You are responsible for how your prospects and customers feel after dealing with you or not hearing from you. You live in a culture of accountability where social media ratings have a significant impact on your business. 92% of customers will call a company out, whether your business has social media presence or not. A lack of data management, poor communications, inconsistent messaging, and untimely emails contribute to your brand.
The solution for your business lies in a reliable and user-friendly CRM. One solution that houses all your data, activity, communications, and more will produce a rapid ROI for your company. Tools like Maximizer empower your staff to perform at a gold standard level, keeping clients happy and winning sales opportunities.
You may think that a CRM is only helpful for selling. However, this valuable tool is for more than just the sales team. Client retention is equally as important as client acquisitions, and you already know how powerful a customer referral is. Regardless of which industry you belong to, a CRM solution like Maximizer can benefit your internal communication processes. Your business has a clients and accepts new clients. So your email management needs to be on point with a powerful CRM.
Contact us today for a free consultation and demo of how Maximizer can remedy your company’s email challenges.
