Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Dear Kathy

If you contact me via my email address in my profile, I will send you a document with the feature details of Microsoft 4.0 enterprise sales CRM system on a pdf file. The other Microsoft flavours of CRM all share the same email features, including the poxy little one which is almost given away for free.

Microsoft CRM uses Outlook and Office to merge data; hence if an HTML template is chosen for the merge, you get personalised HTML emails. As you are familiar with the feature set of Constant Contact, you only need to match the features of Microsoft CRM to those of the email provider.

Of course, if you carry out email blasts in house, you will need to avoid getting yourself blacklisted and you will need to organise your own email tracking and response. If this is already done in another part of your company, then you probably have access to the technology needed to set up tracking pixels, auto-responders to incoming email, filing of email responses against the CRM record and the production of analytical reports.

As Microsoft use Exchange and / or Outlook for email merges, you need to be careful not to be blacklisted by your ISP as a Spammer. We use Maximizer rather than Microsoft CRM, but the principals are the same. Rather than belt out 10,000 emails via Outlook (Who the hell wants to store and retain 10,000 copies of the same letter?) we use an SMTP server to handle the emails. This has the added benefit of not bringing the CRM system and Exchange Server to a grinding halt whilst you are sending out emails or when the CRM system is auto-categorizing the responses and filing them against the correct record. SMTP server software is often freeware.

Apart from the above comparisons, there are DIY comparisons of CRM facilities on Bob Thompson’s CRM Guru Website which is now called www.customerthink.com you’ll have to plough through some detail and match the email services you are familiar with from Constant Contact.

Don’t lose sight of the fact that email service providers and CRM professionals exist to do quickly and efficiently something which you or your organisation isn’t very good at. It is therefore a waste of your time working out all the details of how to run an email campaign for yourself, getting it wrong and putting things right,, when you could have paid someone to do it for you. The same goes for configuring a CRM system to do email blasts – you can pay someone for a day or two’s work and end up with a self-sufficient system for future use with a user manual or you can spend 6 weeks piddling around with the software to become only half baked at it.

I presume from your posting that you have a real job to do in marketing rather than needing to train yourself up as a database administrator, CRM consultant or email service expert!

Best wishes


Steve Alker
Xspirt

Kathy,
Before making any decision I would suggest you visit
www.enterprisewizard.com and have a look at there CRM. I wont say much about it just that it is customizable and can be designed to meet your specific requirements.

Have a look at www.vtiger.com and www.smtp.com. They may save you some money.

Cheers,
Tarnya

Hi Kathy,

May I jump in please :))

I am personally sending out over 8Million opted in emails per month to several different targeted DB.

I have a lot of experience in HTML email sending.

Before you choose a solution, I suggest that you look at how many mails you are talking about here. If you are talking only a very small number like 50K per month, then there is no need to invest in very expensive tools such as Microsoft CRM.

You simply need to ask yourself a few important questions to establish your level of needs.

1. How many different segmentations am I managing?
2. What frequency of sending am I managing (monthly, daily, weekly,)?
3. How much detail do I need to now about the response rates? opening rates? click though rates? which links/images were clicked? Junk mail reports? unsubscribes? etc etc.
4. Are you tracking the user all the way through to an online transaction?
Do you manage multiple affiliates who need to be credited separately for the sales?
Do you need to have a dedicated IP address from which to send or or you happy to use a shared host (such as constant contact).

As with any business, there are a set of tools out there in the market from cheap to expensive. You need to understand what job you need to get done and then choose the appropriate set of tools to do it.

Please feel free to contact me for further advise if you like. I am happy to help. matthewanxa at gmail dot com