Email Marketing Solutions

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***tier3square.shtml***The thing that scares me about email marketing solutions, or any other component of a CRM solution, is how easy it is for an excited VP of Sales to begin pumping out the wrong message.

Did I mention that many sales departments take on the responsibility of marketing?  Does that sound like a good idea to you? Feel free to let me know.

Most of the solutions out there today go well beyond mail merge features you find in most CRM packages. Many business' identified tactical problems with using these "in-the-box" features.

• Doing a large mailing would freeze up a users computer for a few hours
  
• Difficult to schedule bulk emails during off hours
  
• MS Exchange gets slammed, making it impossible for normal corporate email operations to take place.
  
• Bulk emails can use up precious bandwidth, both network and the Internet pipe.
  

The built in email marketing solutions work fine for the one-off stuff, but they just don't work when you start scaling up your communications.

Offsite Email Marketing

In the past few years, companies have been springing up to fill this gap. Their service eliminates the problems mentioned above, because all CPU and bandwidth usage is off-loaded to their servers and network. But they offer a lot more than that.

• The ability to track open rates, bounces and other basic information
  
• The ability to track clicks thru to landing pages and the recipient who clicked it.
  
• Pre-formatted email templates to provide a professional and consistent look and feel to your communications
  
• The ability to track campaigns and statistics for each campaign.
  
• And most now provide synchronized integration with various CRM software packages on the market so you can see all of this information with your software, and even initiate campaigns there as well.

I've even seen services out there that all for advanced decision-based marketing over time. For example, if you're a relatively mature marketing organization that really knows it's customers, you can plan your campaigns based on customer lifecycles. This can be done based on responses to other emails, or it could be in response to behaviors you are tracking in your customer database. A lot of marketers use RFM analysis for this and I've discussed that in my database marketing article and also in my customer tracking article.

I haven't seen too many companies with the ability to take advantage this sort of capability

Email marketing solutions really start with your CRM strategy, just like everything else. Too many marketing initiatives are knee jerk reactions based on internal meetings with the wrong people. Regardless of what marketing solution you end up using, always make sure you can answer this question "yes". Is this email something my customer wants to see right now? And make sure the answer to this question is "no". Is this email something I want to send right now, because I need them to buy this product?

It's pretty simple, Make sure you've put the customer first.

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