Zendesk CRM with email marketing to boost customer retention

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and email marketing are both huge. By 2023, there will be an estimated 4.3 billion email users worldwide, while CRM has become the single largest software solution used by businesses. But there is something even bigger and potentially more powerful than both CRM and email marketing. And that’s CRM with email marketing.

CRM is one of those workplace acronyms that everyone uses and nobody questions. Put simply, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, which is a way to organise and optimise your communication with customers and potential customers.

It’s best to think of CRM as a software solution—a platform for storing customer data and enabling a business to automate and streamline communication.

Traditionally, CRM systems were the domain of the marketing department. But today, CRM solutions such as Zendesk Sell work right across a business to power not only marketing and sales, but also customer service and even recruitment and business development initiatives.

The best CRM solutions also provide a single, consistent view of a customer’s relationship history and integrate different comms channels to provide a comprehensive, clear overview in one place for the entire business to use.

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses email to promote your business’s products or services to people who have shared their email address with you. It can also play a pivotal role in teaching folks about your brand or keeping them engaged between purchases.

A single home for customer data

Combining a CRM solution with your email marketing platform gives you a single, centralised storage hub for all of your customer data, which can then be accessed by anyone across the business—from business development and customer service to marketing and sales. A CRM solution like Zendesk Sell will store customer contact information, phone call history, and purchase activity as well as any notes you may hold, which can help reveal patterns and key findings about your customers.

Seamless link between customer insight and customer communication

If your customer data is stored separately from marketing channels, it can be difficult to convert your customer insights into actionable tasks, like personalised communication or segmentation. It also increases the risk of losing valuable data. A CRM solution with email marketing built in ensures that insight and marketing work hand in hand.

Clear picture of your customer

With your customer data in one place, it’s easier to see who your audience is and what they want from you. You can track all of your customer interactions and see which strategies work, which ones don’t, and areas where your business can grow and evolve.

Targeted, personalised campaigns

The more your CRM solution can automatically identify, organise, and store individual customer interests and preferences, the easier your move to personalisation—the marketing ideal.

Easy to create, responsive emails

A CRM solution such as Zendesk Sell provides email templates that are easy to use and responsive across every device—mobile, tablet, or PC. This is crucial for campaign consistency and for providing an engaging customer experience.

Zendesk Sell is a CRM solution that improves your understanding of customers’ needs, and enables you to deliver more relevant information, products, and services.

You can integrate your current email system with Zendesk Sell, sync your email data with your leads and contacts, and enjoy all the benefits of CRM with email marketing.

At the heart of Zendesk Sell is the Communication Centre, where you can view and manage emails but also customer telephone calls and text messages. You can sort emails by different criteria such as specific deals to create new email lists and personalised messages.

What’s more, Zendesk Sell provides email templates so you can quickly create new emails with dedicated messaging, improving productivity, while the Reach feature allows you to control who can send emails and when they are sent to your contacts.

CoinJar is one of the longest-running cryptocurrency exchanges. With headquarters in Melbourne but operating globally, CoinJar has experienced rapid growth thanks in part to their switch to Zendesk Sell and an upturn in customer retention.

In the fast-moving, ever-evolving world of cryptocurrency, responding to customers’ needs in a timely manner is all-important. Using Zendesk tags to filter and differentiate which currencies customers are currently trading and to better understand their interests, CoinJar successfully increased lead conversion rates.

“Sell makes it easier for us to target existing customers and prospects with events, new products, and purpose-driven email marketing. That allows us to be very strategic in deciding who to contact and how to approach them,” explains Charles Goodman, Client Manager UK at CoinJar.

Luxury retailer Liberty London included its customer satisfaction score as part of the company KPIs. They monitor and record the quality of customer interactions and the average time it takes to answer telephone calls, resolve issues, and close tickets.

Since working with Zendesk, Liberty’s CSAT score has increased by 9 per cent year on year. Impressively, average first query reply times are down 73 per cent, while the average time it takes to resolve a ticket is down 11 per cent.

Ian Hunt is Director of Customer Services at Liberty. When Ian was asked how Zendesk helped make a difference to customer service, his reply was categoric. “The Liberty customer service team is quick to respond, pleasant to deal with and accurate in the answers it gives. All of these are assisted by the Zendesk solution.”

The post-pandemic consumer is increasingly self-reliant and more comfortable embracing complexity.

Amid much global instability, consumers are allowing themselves to be inconsistent. In fact, two thirds say they’re happy making contradictory decisions.

Businesses that fail to recognise this behaviour and continue to see customers as walking wallets will lose ground and the lifetime value of their customers.

Using CRM with email marketing to continually recognise and respond to individual customer behaviour, needs, and wants is not only desirable, but vital.