It is a fact that 80% of customers still prefer being contacted by email amidst all the other communications channels available. Email marketing generates 38 times revenue for every dollar spent, across industry, B2B, B2C, products & services. Email has amazing reach: augmented by amazing templates targeted at different buying stages, is easy to track, can be made personal with minimum efforts and is timely.
On the other hand, a robust CRM will prioritize, manage details of communication and insights of prospective, existing, and former customers throughout their journey lifecycle. Powerful CRMs leverage Artificial Intelligence to even predict probability and time of buying/ upgrading/ renewing.
CRM Email Marketing platform amalgamates these 2 powerful platforms to create the most efficient, effective, pervasive, and best ROI approaches for acquiring more profitable and happy customers.
This platform:
- Continuously moves the customers and prospects and most importantly the ideal ones to the next favorable stages of buying
- Minimizes churn and helps in retention
- Proactively tests new campaigns, product launches as A/B split testing
- Provides insights into what is working and what is not and most importantly on the timing
Organizations adopt either hybrid or integrated approaches for the CRM Email Marketing tool. CRM Leaders such as Salesforce, Adobe, HubSpot, ORACLE, Zoho, and Microsoft have a backwards integrated Email Marketing platform.
CRM is the biggest software market in the world and is expected to touch around 80 Billion USD by 2025. Salesforce is the clear CRM market leader with close to 20% market share. Pardot, Salesforce’s powerful marketing automation solution helps their customers create higher quality leads and pipeline, move the customers to the next stage in their cycle and facilitate sales to close more deals. It is indeed a true bridge between marketing and sales and this article will give us insights into the tips and tricks for easily transforming standard templates into Pardot email templates and create the magic!
EMAIL FUNDAMENTALS
Let us quickly revisit the fundamentals of Email, without which all this is futile. The email must slay the barriers: automated spam filters and low customer attention span and get opened, read through, catch attention, and propel the customer towards the Call to Action.
We all know the standard DOs such as compelling subject line, personalized emails corresponding to timing and stage in buying cycle, responsive across mobile, and set from a reliable reputed email server. We are also familiar with the DON’Ts such as no spam trigger words or attachments.
Email Marketing tools such as Pardot leverage email templates to turn around email campaigns quickly, while managing personalization, consistency, timing, and the right appealing content all together.
TIPS FOR TRANSFORMATION INTO PARDOT TEMPLATES
We will not focus too much on the commands, coding, and other technical tips and tricks such as template import, section locking down, Pardot image library etc. but rather a common- sense fundamental approach on what works and what to avoid. This is over and above the dos and don’ts mentioned in the preceding section.
We must be conscious of the kind of technical prowess the team has and try to map it with the variety, consistency, and viewability of the email formats. Now let us examine the Ayes and Nays!
RECOMMENDATIONS
- Irrespective of the team’s technical strengths, we should always Leverage Pardot’s best practices: such as default templates & landing pages, preview test, Subject HML Variable Tags, AddThis plug-in for forwards, Personalized signatures, and Scheduling.
- Simplicity is the key.
- Maintain consistency and responsiveness across mobiles to the maximum extent possible.
- Define and Balance the Fixed and Flexible constituents of the template : We lockdown sections that must not change : for example overall branding, disclaimers and on the other hand we can use the Pardot’s HTML configurable elements for the changing sections. These elements can of course be edited, duplicated, removed, and shifted around as per the strategy.
- Furthermore, we can use other HTML elements that enable the developers to have the flexibility to edit only image or text.
- Have a compelling subject line.
- Be careful with embedded Audio-Visual content: MS Outlook is still very much in use and a lot of this gets flagged off as harmful or Spam
- Include clear call-to-action and Feedback sections
- Take template backups and keep a track of versions
- A/B as well as render tests especially across devices and the dreaded Spam!
PERFORMANCE MEASURES
Lastly, it is very important to continuously monitor the Performance Metrics (PM) of the CRM Email marketing programs such as click-through rate, open rate, bounce rate, unsubscribes, conversion rate, email forwarding rate, spam complaints and so on.
If you fail to achieve the desired results, go back into the template redesign, fine-tune, and get into the re-testing phase followed by tracking down the metrics.
AUTHOR BIO
Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, that specializes in crafting Email Newsletter Design Templates, PSD to Email conversion, and Mailchimp Templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog.
