A quick introduction to Pipedrive Email Marketing Software. Since email marketing is an inbound marketing tactic, it’s a strategy that can be used by any business big or small. The 3 reasons you should use Pipedrive for your email marketing is because of the various tools that make up this best email marketing software (or any other tool) are A/B testing, landing page building, responsive design and drag and drop user interface.
Email marketing that works. Pipedrive is a sales pipeline and team management software for small and medium sized businesses. It is great for email marketing because it helps you to grow your business by sending automated emails at the right time and track their performance.
Best Email Marketing Software Pipedrive is a program that allows you to manage your email campaigns from a single dashboard. It is based on web, with tools for campaign creation, audience segmentation, analytics, and tracking.
Email marketing is simply the best way to market your business. No matter whether you have an ecommerce business or service based business, email marketing is absolutely essential for any company’s digital presence. In this article, we will review Pipedrive which is one of the best email marketing software available in the market today. In our detailed review, we’ll analyze its features and functionality in a clear manner to give you a better insight on whether to go with it or not
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that engages with customers and leads through email. Unlike other forms of marketing like advertisements, email marketing is an ‘opt-in’ channel, as your email list recipients sign up to receive your promotional content.
Marketing emails have two primary purposes: to promote or to inform.
Informative marketing emails aim to educate customers about your brand, products, services, or your brand’s work. For example, informative emails include:
Welcome emails thank the recipient for signing up to your mailing list and can form part of an email sequence designed to convert the reader to a customer
Newsletter emails inform the recipient about your latest products and services, news and updates about your company
Company milestone emails inform recipients about large changes to your brand (like a change in CEO or an acquisition)
Free gift emails offer recipients free content like ebooks, videos, or podcasts
Promotional marketing emails aim to sell customers products and services. For example, popular promotional emails include:
Offer emails present customers with a discount or announce upcoming promotions
Milestone emails offer customers a special deal in celebration of a milestone (like their email list anniversary)
New product or service emails introduce customers to new products
Abandoned cart emails are sales-nurturing emails that you send 24 to 72 hours after the recipient has abandoned their cart to inspire them to complete their purchase
Many marketers use a mixture of informative and promotional marketing emails in their email campaigns and many emails have both promotional and informative aspects.
For example, many newsletter emails include a CTA (call-to-action) button that takes customers to the company store.
benefits of email marketing
Marketers have used email marketing to drive sales since 1978 when Gary Thuerk sent the first marketing email to customers on behalf of Digital Equipment Corp. Although he only directed his email to 400 people, the email generated $13 million in sales for the company’s new product.
While not every email campaign generates that sort of revenue, there are many benefits of email marketing. Here are thirteen of them.
- Low campaign cost
Historically, marketing has cost businesses a pretty penny in billboards, television advertisements and glossy posters. Email marketing is not so costly, as you only need a computer, a little time and an email marketing system to send out an email campaign.
Thus, the average email marketing cost ranges from $9 to $1,000 a month for a mid-size business.
As its cost is so low, the revenue email marketing generates translates into a high-profit margin.
- Reach an engaged audience
Some forms of marketing (like social media and billboard ads) are directed at groups of potential customers that aren’t familiar with your brand. Email marketing isn’t one of these channels, as people must sign-up through your website to join your mailing list.
Thus, as your email marketing recipients have agreed to receive your email marketing, they are a highly engaged audience with a vested interest in your brand, products, or services.
How does this benefit you?
It’s easier to convert an engaged audience into customers, as they wouldn’t join your mailing list if they weren’t already motivated leads.
Email marketing is also highly effective because it leverages a platform people already engage with.
According to Statistica, an estimated 4.1 billion people use email globally. Consumers also want to get marketing emails, as at least 40% of United States consumers want emails at least monthly from their favorite companies.
This makes marketing emails an excellent marketing investment because they engage with ready buyers through a platform they want to receive promotional content on.
- Create personalized campaigns
Imagine this: you open your inbox, and you immediately see an email from Company A that reads, “hey you. We’ve launched a new black tea.” Simultaneously, you receive a marketing email from Company B that reads, “hey (your name), we’ve launched a new black tea.”
Are you more likely to buy from Company A or Company B?
According to a study from Lifecycle Marketing that analyzed over 7 billion emails, people are 50% more likely to open an email with a personalized email subject line. Non-personalized emails had an average open rate of 14.1%, while emails that included a name had an average open rate of 21.2%.
And email marketing is perfect for personalization. You can address your marketing emails to your customers by name, creating a personal connection and making your customers feel valued as individuals.
Long-term, this connection creates loyalty. Nurturing loyalty in your audience is crucial for the growth of your company, as increasing your customer retention by 5% could increase your profits by 25% or more.
- Create and nurture leads
In our State of Sales 2020 – 2021 report, we found that 51% of our respondents listed generating leads and prospects as the biggest challenge for salespeople.
Naturally, it’s important to look for other lead generation methods, including email marketing.
Email marketing generates high-quality leads for your brand, as you can entice leads onto your mailing list by offering them a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is something you give a lead in exchange for joining your email list. There are many forms of content you can use as a lead magnet, including:
An ebook
Free products
A free trial (if you sell software or a subscription-based service)
White papers
Free consultations or advice
Discounts and promotions
Email marketing also allows you to appeal to leads using different techniques by segmenting them into different demographics or groups. Segmentation is the practice of separating your email list into quadrants and sending specific emails to each.
For example, you can segment your email list into three groups of customers in Canada, the United States and Mexico, and then target each group with location-specific pitches.
As segmentation helps you nurture leads with a personal approach, you are more likely to sell to each lead as you create a deeper relationship with them.
- Drive revenue with calls-to-action
Email marketing isn’t just about lead generation and nurturing, it’s also an excellent platform for closing sales, too.
The best way to close sales through emails is through a CTA (call-to-action). A CTA directs your audience to take the first step towards finalizing their purchase. CTA’s are the “peak” or “climax” of the email, as the rest of your content builds towards them.
For example, if you were writing an anniversary email, you might start with a greeting: “hey (name), happy anniversary!”
Then, you would follow this up with an offer: “We just wanted to say “thank you” and give you 10% off your next order.”
Then you would use the CTA: “click here to redeem your 10% discount voucher.”
While you can include CTAs in other forms of marketing, emails are a particularly intimate setting for closing sales, as you have an established relationship with your recipient.
Thus, 59% of marketers say that email is the biggest source of ROI for their company, and 4 out of 5 marketers would give up their social media strategy over their email marketing strategy if they were forced to choose between them.
Marketing and sales have two key roles in your business: attracting more customers and developing the customers you already have. The ultimate goal of both is to bring in more revenue.
Sales and marketing work their magic when you combine them, but to do this successfully you first need to understand what makes them different.
In this guide, we’ll cover what is sales marketing, dive into the difference between sales and marketing and explore how to leverage sales and marketing alignment to land new customers, improve the customer experience and boost revenue.
What is sales and marketing?
Let’s define sales and marketing before we get into their specific activities, tools, responsibilities and their integration.
What is sales?
Sales refers to activities that lead to convincing a prospect to buy a product or a service from you. A sales rep usually communicates with prospects one-on-one over email, phone, or in person.
To get a ‘yes’ from a prospect during the sales cycle, sales reps regularly:
Ask their prospects relevant questions
Tackle prospects’ objections
Schedule meetings, demos and follow-ups
Sales professionals are also often responsible for upselling and cross-selling the company’s products and solutions to existing customers.
What is marketing?
Marketing consists of strategies and processes that generate prospects for the sales team and customers for the business as a whole. Marketers help their business reach new people, turn them into high-quality leads and drive demand for products or services. They also communicate with customers to make them aware of the latest products and features, both to promote these updates and to act as guides.
The marketing department has a key role in supporting sales by reaching many target customers at once. To do so, marketers focus on:
Market and audience research so they can understand what target customers are doing to solve their challenges and pain points
Lead generation strategies across a range of channels
Long-term efforts to build a recognizable brand and raise awareness of it
Sales and marketing play important roles for each other and for the business, but the way they do it is different. That’s what we’re diving into next.
What is the difference between sales and marketing?
What makes sales and marketing different? Let’s look into specifics: goals, processes, roles, day-to-day tasks and tools.
Sales and marketing goals
Measurable goals are essential to making both marketing and sales teams successful. Here’s what goals mean for each department.
In sales, the ultimate goal is to drive revenue. Everything sales reps do, as well as many of their performance quotas, is tied to the bottom line. Here are some ways to format your revenue goals:
Total revenue per quarter/year
Revenue per year/quarter per sales rep
Average purchase value, or the average amount earned per transaction
Customer lifetime value (LTV), or the total revenue you can expect from a customer account
High-achieving sales teams go beyond revenue goals. First, they break up those goals into sales activities they need to take to achieve them, such as making cold calls, following up over email, sending proposals and more. Then, as part of their sales strategy, they set daily and weekly sales goals for each of those activities.
This is called activity-based selling and it gives sales teams control over their impact on a company’s bottom line.
In marketing, the aim is to provide sales with the best leads possible, to encourage people to become customers or to retain existing customers. Unlike sales, this is rarely done in direct communication with leads and customers.
Their goals can be sorted into awareness, engagement, conversion and retention. Here are examples of indicators marketing professionals can use to measure success.
Awareness: Website traffic, social media reach, video views, podcast listens, press mentions
Engagement: Social media shares, likes and comments, website visit length, pageviews per visit
Conversion: Free resource downloads, webinar signups, contact form completions, newsletter signups, purchases (for products/services that can be purchased without an interaction with a sales rep)
Retention: Engagement and conversions from existing customers, customer reviews
Processes, sales pipelines and marketing funnels
Pipelines are a great way to visualize your process. Getting quality leads and prospects into your pipeline and moving them efficiently through each stage is the key to driving revenue and hitting targets.
A sales pipeline is an organized, visual way of tracking multiple potential buyers through the stages of your sales process. Most companies will have some version of these stages in their sales pipeline:
Prospecting
Qualifying
Contacting
Building relationships
Closing
Following up with leads that went cold
A sales pipeline is a useful tool when it comes to activity-based selling. Each stage defines a set of activities a rep needs to take to move a prospect to the next stage.
As a result, reps follow a sales process: a step-by-step formula that outlines all the activities they need to do to close a deal. This typically includes finding and qualifying prospects, reaching out, giving a presentation, closing the deal and, sometimes, retaining the customer.
If you don’t have a sales process just yet, this flowchart can help you get started:
A marketing or sales funnel is the full journey a prospect goes through as they discover your brand.
Before a prospect is aware of potential solutions and products that will help them with their challenge, they’re in a stage where they feel pain of some kind, an issue in their life or work, and they’re looking for information – not products or services (yet) – to help them fix it.
With this in mind, your funnel can be divided into:
Awareness or pain-aware prospects (top of funnel, or TOFU)
Consideration or solution-aware prospects (middle of funnel, or MOFU)
Decision or product-aware prospects (bottom of funnel, or BOFU)
Prospects that enter your funnel are looking for different answers in different stages of the funnel.
Let’s use an example of a company that sells customer support software. Their prospects could have these questions and search for these terms as they progress through the funnel:
Awareness. “Customer support industry benchmarks”
Consideration. “How to provide good customer support over the phone?”
Decision. “Does [provider 1] provide better support software features than [provider 2]?”
The ultimate goal of marketing and sales teams is to give the prospect what they need and nurture the customer relationship to move to the next stage of their purchase journey.
Marketing and sales funnels can be connected. For example, the final stage of a marketing funnel could be passing the lead onto the sales team as an MQL (marketing-qualified lead, as opposed to a SQL, sales-qualified lead).
Can Pipedrive be used for marketing?
Pipedrive started out as a sales CRM and its core functionality is still built up around its pipeline functionality. However, in recent years, Pipedrive has made a number of acquisitions which indicates that Pipedrive’s leadership realizes the importance of closing the gap between sales and marketing.
As an example, since acquiring the marketing automation tool Mailigen, Pipedrive has started the process of integrating the tool into Pipedrive, calling it Campaigns by Pipedrive.
We’re big fans of connecting sales and marketing, regardless of whether you decide to use an all-in-one suite, pick and mix “best-of-breed” tools (or both!). In this article, we look at some of the best tools for marketing that is in sync with Pipedrive. The main focus will be on best-in-class 3rd party marketing automation tools that integrate seamlessly with Pipedrive.
We’ve done the hard work of reviewing many possible options, so it’s easier for you to decide on your stack.
Before we jump in, let’s take a step back and ask: what exactly is this “marketing automation” that we’re looking for?
There are three core marketing functions that most companies look to automate:
- Email marketing – sending out marketing newsletters, drip campaigns and other event-triggered emails.
- On-site marketing / lead generation – forms, chat, web visitor tracking, and the like.
- Marketing reporting – tying it all together and seeing what generated sales/revenue, without having to manually recreate charts and graphs every time.
Conclusion
Pipedrive is an all-in-one sales management tool that helps to manage sales, leads and CRM in one place. Pipedrive is a great email marketing software for business owners and entrepreneurs because of its real-time customer management, lead generation and automation capabilities that help you nurture your leads and convert them into sales.
Even the best email marketing software can’t help you if your customer database is poorly maintained. In most businesses, CRM and sales data are managed separately, and unfortunately two different systems rarely sync seamlessly. And a CRM doesn’t necessarily contain enough information to help you create great targeted emails. Pipedrive CRM and Email Marketing work together to help you target your newsletters more effectively.