I love simple and elegant solutions to complex problems. And complex and expensive CRM deployments are problems greatly in need of easy solutions. These are the things that keep IT departments entertained, but it's no cup of tea for Marketing Managers who have to navigate all the of intricacies of their CRM system – feeling the pressure to leverage their investment without losing productivity and momentum. This can be especially true in the case of email marketing. Your CRM system can manage your subscriber list, but how well does it manage your content? How well does it send volume email? How much is successfully delivered? And what about reporting on your results? Is there an extensive set of reports at your fingertips?
Recently IMN sat in front of a large corporate customer. This customer had a problem. The marketing team was frustrated with their current newsletter production environment. Their IT department had created a custom system for them and had tailored their Seibel system to manage and deliver their newsletter mailings each month. Despite the sizable investment, marketing was having trouble producing the newsletter content and layout in a cost efficient manner. In addition, little or no useful data was coming back to them. Adding to this dilemma was that the IT department was scarce on resources. This made it difficult for the marketing team to affect changes on their newsletter program in a timely manner.
IMN was brought in to solve the marketing department's problems. They were seeking a secure outsourced email service provider that could give them all the flexibility and control they needed to achieve their goals in a timely and cost effective manner. However, as we sat in this meeting to discuss integration, marketing (to my left) and IT (to my right) started a stare-down contest. The IT team, already unable to fully service marketing's core business needs, was reticent to provide the resources needed for the integration work. Likewise, the marketing team felt strong pressure to do their best to leverage their substantial CRM investment.
An intractable problem? Not with today’s technology. Solving this standoff is simply a matter of providing the marketing team a solution that embraces their existing CRM system. The marketing team can regain control of the cost-efficient content management and analytics that matter to them, while letting the IT-modified CRM system continue to manage their core mailing lists and email distribution.
How would this work? Using the IMN system, the marketing team is able to establish a template that exactly matches their branding and design needs. Then, they upload and enter content through our content management system and eventually publish all of this information via the IMN micro-site. HTML and plain text versions of the email message are automatically generated, encoded, and then delivered to the marketing manager who then passes the material to the IT department for distribution via their CRM system. After the emails are delivered, the IMN system takes over and tracks all of the results. All of the subscriber actions (i.e., opens, clicks, etc.) are tracked and recorded by IMN. Our system can even tell who clicked on what link. This information feeds back into our complete analytics and reporting system, providing this client with nearly all the same benefits as though we did the mailing and managed their lists.
From this experience we learned that not all problems dealing with legacy systems and CRM deployments are as difficult to resolve as you might think. Marketing teams can leverage existing investments in their enterprise databases, customer management systems, and email campaign management engines, yet still gain the significant benefits of layering easy-to-use newsletter production environments and email marketing analytics on top. It’s a win-win for all.
Do you have a CRM issue that is interrupting your e-marketing campaigns? If you’d like to learn more on how we can solve these issues, contact me for more information.
