CRM and email marketing advice for small business

Whether you’re a startup or a well-established small business, the technology you choose to use to run your organisation matters. You want to spend your time and budget on the best systems to make you more productive, save time, and optimise your growth potential.

And yet with so much CRM and email marketing advice out there, you might be feeling bamboozled.

In our latest blog, we’re offering honest advice on email marketing and CRM for small businesses, based on almost two decades’ experience creating software solutions for business.

If you need specific guidance on anything relating to your CRM and email, give us a shout and we’ll walk you through the best options for you at this stage in your business journey.

What’s the best CRM for small business?

Every business is different, so what should you consider when choosing a CRM?

The truth is, picking out the right CRM software is far from a one-size-fits-all-businesses exercise.

Plus, what you look for in a CRM will vary depending on your budget, industry, product and/or services, and business type.

However, as a snapshot, here are some of the most popular customer relationship management software systems for small businesses:

Zoho
HubSpot
Salesforce
Pipedrive
Zendesk
Monday
Freshsales
Vtiger
Capsule

If the one you currently use isn’t on that list, don’t worry. A good software specialist will be able to work with any CRM when it comes to integrating it with your other business tools to make your business run more efficiently.

Should I use CRM email marketing for my SME?

The likelihood is, your CRM offers a host of features to help you run your business more effectively.

And while many of the best CRMs for small businesses include email marketing functionality, using a CRM for email marketing isn’t necessarily the best solution for you.

It all depends on what you need your email marketing to do.

If you have very basic needs like sending out the occasional email newsletter, using a CRM with email marketing solutions may be enough.

However, a dedicated email platform (even if you use the free plan) tends to be a better option if you have more advanced email requirements, like:

Detailed analytics to run better marketing campaigns
To segment audience groups to send more relevant campaigns rather than a bulk email to all
To set up email automation to save you time and prompt more sales
Personalised, targeted email campaigns to build stronger customer loyalty and boost profit
Attractive, customisable email templates in your company branding
Drag and drop email editor to make it easy for your marketing team to contact your email list
High levels of email deliverability (some small business owners find their CRM emails don’t get through spam filters as well as dedicated email marketing tools).

How can small businesses use email marketing to grow?

It’s no wonder 64% of small businesses use email marketing – put simply, it’s a marketing channel that works!

Email marketing is one of the most effective types of marketing and it gives you a lot of stability – after all, relying on channels like social media can be risky. What if Instagram suddenly went down and you lost all your audience?

When you have a strong email list of contacts, you own that data and can use it to build stronger relationships with your audience and market to them more directly and successfully.

How to use CRM and email marketing

Using the data you have in your sales CRM to work in harmony with your email marketing tool is a wise move. After all, your CRM should hopefully be gathering a whole lot of relevant information on your existing audience, so you’d be a fool not to make the most of all that intel!

Incorporating all the data on your contacts into your email marketing allows you to track customer behaviour, tailor your campaigns to different audience groups and customer journey stages through marketing automation, as well as avoiding any embarrassing mistakes – like mistaking a lifelong customer for a brand-new subscriber.

Benefits of integrating email marketing with CRM

When you integrate your email marketing with your CRM tool you can:

Spend way less time on manual data entry
Improve data accuracy and reduce errors
Be more sophisticated in your marketing strategies – e.g. send automated email when customer abandons cart or a create a welcome email sequence)
Enhance the potential and success of an email marketing campaign
Boost conversion rate
Increase the ROI of your marketing
Streamline the work your sales and marketing teams do so it’s more cohesive and successful.

You’ll be amazed how much valuable time you save, especially with CRM and marketing automation – your email marketing efforts ramp up AND your sales team is freed up to focus on converting more of those warmed-up leads.

How to make your CRM system connect to your email marketing software

Most small businesses don’t have a software specialist on-site, so even if you want to connect your email marketing and CRM you may struggle to make it happen by yourself.

At Hanley Digital, we’re software experts who love to get stuck into the nuts and bolts of technical systems to make them work for you better.

We honed our skills with household names like Harvey Nichols, and now we harness the skills we developed there to help small businesses achieve more with the data they already have through sophisticated software solutions.

If you’re ready to sync your CRM and email marketing tools to take your business growth and revenue to the next level, we can help you achieve that.

Whether you know exactly what you’re looking for or you haven’t got a clue at this stage but know you want to be more productive and efficient in how you use technology to boost your business success, let’s start with a chat.

Get in touch at hello@hanleydigital.com or 0114 4055 330 and we’ll make sure your CRM solution becomes the hardest working member of your team!