When a customer signs up to receive emails from your business, you get a lot of information.

Sitting in a database connected to your email account, valuable information like name, email, location, gender, purchase history, and more, is waiting to be used by your business.

You can use this information to your advantage by segmenting your contact lists, triggering automated email series, or dynamically changing the content of your newsletters to suit the interests of different customers.

All of this increases the success of your email marketing, and drives revenue for your business.

In this post, we’ll show you how integrating business apps can help you grow your revenue, and give you the tools you need to make it happen.

Are you using emails to market your business? Give Constant Contact a try for FREE!

Why email integrations are important

According to a recent study by VentureBeat, email has the highest ROI (return on investment) of any marketing channel available, beating social media, paid search, TV, and radio, among others.

However, a lot of your success depends on getting the basics of your email marketing strategy in place: the quality and depth of your email list. Tracking your email deliverability helps maintain that strategy, once it’s in place.

If you have old subscribers who barely open your emails, your email marketing ROI will be lower than if you had an updated list with engaged subscribers.

How can you make sure your lists are always up to date, with in-depth data about each subscriber?

The answer is to use an integration.

Think about what you already know about your email deliverability and your customers’ behavior, readily available via your email reports:

• Which emails were delivered
• Which ones were opened
• Which links were clicked
• Which emails were forwarded or shared
• Which emails bounced
• Who unsubscribed from your emails

These are great metrics to have, but here are a few more pressing questions that can’t be answered in your standard report:

• Which landing pages garnered the longest time-on-page from your prospects or customers?
• What were they looking to purchase, but didn’t?
• When was the last time someone made a purchase?

If you integrate your email marketing with other data sources, , you have the opportunity to build the perfect customer profile, giving you exactly what you need to target more customers in the future with personalized content.

Tying the information together, using marketing automation, could change how you message that customer:

• Email them about related items. Let’s say they bought a vacuum cleaner. A few weeks later, you could present an offer for vacuum bags.
• Send an abandoned cart email for things they almost bought, with an incentive to get them back to finish the purchase.
• Reward loyalty to customers who shop with you often.
• Entice them to come back if they haven’t made a purchase in a while.

By having more data about a customer in a central, integrated database, you go from generic messages for everyone, to one relevant message, to one customer, at a time. That means you get more interest in the inbox.

Integration tools  to make email marketing more efficient

It’s important to remember that email marketing can’t be used as an isolated tool. Your marketing efforts are far more successful when you properly integrate email marketing into as many inbound marketing campaigns as you can.

When setting up your email marketing strategy, right from the get-go, make sure to keep in mind the integrations that help accelerate your marketing efforts. To get you started, here are some that might help when combined with strategic planning:

eCommerce Tools

If you run an online store, chances are most of your customer data is stored on your ecommerce platform. Make use of this valuable information by integrating it into your email marketing, and drive more revenue.

You could:

Segment your audience to send more relevant campaigns – You wouldn’t want to receive holiday emails during the offseason, and neither do your customers. Rather than sending the same email to your entire customer base, segment your lists based on what you know about your customer to send relevant content that interests them.

Send review request email campaigns – Customer reviews can happen organically, but don’t sit idly by and wait! Instead, make customer reviews work for you by asking for them, responding to them, and promoting them. In fact, research from Bazaarvoice shows products with reviews have a 10% higher conversion rate than those without.

Send birthday and anniversary emails – Every customer appreciates when a business recognizes them, even if that means sending your customers a simple happy birthday email. Integrating your ecommerce platform with your email tool allows you to set up automatic birthday emails that go out to your customers with a special offer or discount for their birthday, driving them to your business to make a purchase.

Send subscription reminder emails – If your ecommerce business operates on a subscription model (like Birchbox or Bagel of the Month Club), then subscription reminder emails can work, reminding them to renew, or presenting offers to upgrade their plan. By integrating your ecommerce platform with your email marketing tool, you can set up a series of reminder emails that automatically go out to customers leading up to their subscription expiry date.

CRM systems

If one of your main marketing goals is to convert customers, a CRM (customer relationship management) system can manage your relationships with prospects and customers.

By integrating your CRM and email marketing tool, you can:

Setup automated lead nurturing emails –When you create newsletters and one-off campaigns, you usually send them to a whole list of people, but automated email campaigns are set up once and automatically send to a segment of your list, or multiples segments, depending on the trigger you set.

For example, when you sign up for Constant Contact, you get a welcome email. This email introduces you to Constant Contact, asks you to verify your email address, tells you how to set-up your account, and explains how to get started with building your brand.

Lead nurturing emails can also be used to send content to prospects who might not be ready to buy or sign up, just yet. These emails can educate them on the benefits of your product, automatically nurturing them through the buying cycle.

Target prospects by stage – Sometimes your prospective clients might just need a little nudge in their decision-making, and sending them a special email (especially with a discount) can get them over the line. By integrating your CRM with your email marketing software, you can segment your prospects by their customer lifecycle stage, and send highly relevant campaigns to close the deal. Special offers or discounts can work well, as well as case studies or whitepapers, depending on your business.

Send upsell emails – These especially come handy during the holidays or year-end sales. You could even send emails upselling your other products, based on a customer’s previous purchase or browsing history. By having your CRM integrated with your email tool, you can segment your subscriber list to only show current customers, and send them a campaign informing them of the great new product you’ve released. This highly relevant email is timely driving increased revenue from your existing customer base.

Blogging and content management

If you want customers to subscribe to your blog, you need to make them aware of your amazing content and give them a solid reason to sign up for your mailing list. There are two ways people can subscribe to your blog: RSS feed or email. While both are valuable, email subscriptions can often have a much bigger impact. Since subscribers are emailed whenever new content is published (compared to manually checking an RSS feed), email has the potential to seriously boost your blog traffic.

Integrating your blog with your email tool can attract new subscribers to your blog and give you an additional opportunity to convert them into leads. The best news? That customer is being educated by the great blog content, thus they become more likely to advance through the sales process quickly.

Accounting and billing tools

For a lot of businesses, you collect several unique data points when you invoice or bill your customers, including signup date and location. These two data points alone are extremely valuable,l because you can send subscription renewal emails or geographically targeted campaigns.

Your accounting program is a wealth of information, detailing who bought what, and for how much. This information is incredibly valuable in your email marketing platform, and by integrating the two tools you can send special offers or rewards to your most valuable customers, and discounts and promotions to your lower value customers.

Grow your list via social media

65% of the top 20% of business-to-business social media lead generation marketers integrate email with social media, according to a study from Aberdeen Research.

Adding social share and follow buttons to your emails extends your reach beyond your existing customer base, expanding the visibility of your content and your brand, increasing the opportunity to generate new leads. Integrating your social media with your email campaigns allows you to send targeted emails to your customers who reach out on different social media platforms.

You can also leverage your social media presence to drive email list subscriptions.. For example, you could place a call-to-action on your Facebook page, allowing sign-ups that keep your list growing with interested contacts. If you post to online bulletin boards, have a sign-up link in your signature. If you write blog posts or comment on another, make sure to mention where you can be found online. Social media is a big part of the marketing picture, especially for small businesses. Let it help you grow.

Drive engagement with every email you send

By integrating your business apps with your email marketing software, you can start sending your prospects and customers compelling email marketing campaigns that close more deals, driving more revenue. Integrating your email marketing initiatives with other marketing channels creates a more streamlined and pleasing customer experience, enabling you to consistently build a unique marketing experience for your customers.

Head to the Constant Contact Marketplace for the most efficient integrations, services, and applications for powerful email marketing.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing Integrations appeared first on Constant Contact Blogs.