Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Customer data is the most valuable asset in your organization. Your sales, marketing, and service teams all rely on the insights you hold about your customers to deliver the right experiences at the right time, all the way from lead generation to long-term customer retention.
Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date customer database is essential for delivering personalized interactions at scale. Without it, there’s no way for your team to remember everything they need to know about thousands of leads and customers.
But which customer data do you actually need to collect for each department, how should you store it, and what’s the correct way to use it?

Here’s our guide to customer data that will walk you through everything you need to know.
Customer Data for Different Departments
Customer Data for Marketing
Marketing is where it all begins for your customer data. You’re creating content and lead magnets that draw attention to your brand, using forms and other lead gen tools — like live chat — to convert those visitors to contacts, and nurturing those contacts to (hopefully) becoming sales-ready leads. Here’s the customer data to collect for your marketing team
1. Name, Email, Business Name
Marketing is usually the department that brings in the highest proportion of new leads, which means the pressure is on to make that information valuable for the rest of the customer lifecycle.
This starts with basic contact data that should be smoothly organized in your CRM as well as synced two ways with other key apps such as your email marketing platform. This keeps all customer information up-to-date everywhere, ready for anyone in any department to locate the latest insights.
2. Website Engagement
At the early stages of a new lead’s time with your business, it’s important to make sure your website analytics enable you to understand how they are interacting with your business and how you can best deliver the experiences they’re looking for.
If you’re an e-commerce business owner, for example, you could use website activity to recommend other similar products each person might like via email or retargeting ads on social media.
3. Segmentation Data
Information that enables you to segment a contact into the right groups and lists is one of the most valuable types of data to collect early on. This can include data such as team size, industry, and role.
Not only can this data enable the most personalized messaging and automation, but it also helps you calculate lead score.
4. Subscription Preferences
In the very first form that a lead fills out on your website, make sure there’s a clear checkbox for them to opt into marketing communications. This is a crucial part of data protection regulations, but it also enables you to send the most relevant content if you offer a range of options to subscribe to.
5. Lead Scoring
Lead qualification data such as lead scoring is one of the most impactful ways for marketers to help out their sales colleagues. With automated lead scoring in place, points are awarded for positive interactions and behavior and deducted for negative indicators. It’s the fastest way to instantly assess how likely a prospect is to buy your product, and ideally starts as soon as a visitor converts to a lead.
Examples of Lead Score Boosters:

High engagement, such as webinar signups and content downloads
High amount of time spent on your website
Visiting high-value pages, such as pricing pages, demo pages, and feature pages
Identification as decision-maker
High-value market or industry
Adequate budget
Team size matches personas
Annual revenue matches personas

Examples of Lead Score Deductors:

Very low engagement with website pages
Not the decision-maker
Market or industry you struggle to serve
Inadequate budget
Team size doesn’t match personas
Annual revenue doesn’t match personas

Customer Data for Sales
Salespeople create and strengthen the bridge for interested leads to become happy customers, guiding each prospect to the right product or service. Whether your team works with an account-based approach for high-value deals or a more automated strategy that’s effective at scale, customer data is crucial.
Here’s the data that’s most important for your sales team to collect.
1. Deal Information
For each closed deal, make sure you create a clear record of all information associated with it as soon as possible. This includes data such as billing amount and frequency, which you can easily sync from your CRM with your accounting app. It also helps to make sure there’s an easily accessible copy of the latest version of the contract in your CRM.
2. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Calculating a customer’s lifetime value is a really useful metric to forecast long-term revenue. You can measure this by multiplying their purchase value by purchase frequency over your average customer lifespan. With a CRM that has calculation properties, you can keep this updated automatically for your active customers.
3. Information About Decision-Makers
Your salespeople get an unmatched view of how each client’s company functions. This includes who is involved in the decision-making process.
As this same group of people will likely be involved in future onboarding sessions and upgrading discussions, make sure to store relevant information in your CRM. This helps avoid the awkward scenario of them remembering you while you look anxiously at a blank contact record, or passing the deal to a colleague who has even less background information.
4. Granular, Verified Segmentation Data
As a sales team gets to know a prospect better, it’s a great opportunity to verify their contact record. Check that their industry, company size, and other key metrics are correct, and make sure to instantly sync this data to other apps such as email marketing and automation tools that use segmentation.
5. Closed Won and Closed Lost Data
One of the most important metrics for salespeople to collect is why they successfully close a deal or not. Ask for standardized answers to store in your CRM and use this to optimize your product, messaging and targeting, and sales process.
Customer Data for Customer Service
Customer data collection doesn’t finish when a deal is closed. Throughout a customer’s time with your company, you can optimize and update their contact record to create the most accurate view of how your company can best serve them. Here’s the best customer data to collect for your service team
1. Customer Happiness Metrics
Metrics such as NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) are incredibly useful for any organization to reduce churn and optimize customer experience with a stronger product, strategy, and team. These metrics give you a snapshot of how a customer feels about your company at any point in time, and with repeated surveys at set intervals, you can monitor how that sentiment changes.
Many customer happiness metrics are extremely quick to collect. As one of the most popular examples, NPS simply asks: “On a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?”
2. Support Ticket Data
An insightful way to gauge both individual and overall customer happiness is with your support ticket data. This includes general metrics such as ticket volume, topic, and time to resolution, but it’s also worth automating data properties for each customer record, such as:

Last ticket submitted
Number of tickets submitted

With automation in your service team, you can create instant triggers that let your team know if satisfaction scores drop below a certain threshold or a certain amount of tickets are submitted within a given timeframe. Your team can then reach out to check how the customer is doing and reduce their likelihood of churn.
3. Churn Risk
By combining metrics such as customer satisfaction and support ticket data, you can create a tailored formula for calculating churn risk. With a calculation property in your CRM, you can then automatically measure this and keep an up-to-date and intelligent view of customers that are at the highest risk of churn.
4. Customer Churn Reason
It’s unfortunate, but it happens: you can’t keep every customer forever. If a customer does have to say goodbye, try to understand and record what’s behind it in your CRM. Keep these answers standardized (such as “too expensive” or “problems with the product”) so you can easily create actionable reports instead of sifting through unstructured data.
5. Customer Happiness Reason
On the other hand, if a customer loves your company, learn why! Create a standardized set of satisfaction reasons that you can ask your customers with high NPS scores to choose from.
Collecting, maintaining, and utilizing customer data is a job you’re never finished with. But when you have relevant, accurate, and up-to-date customer data, you make everything else easier and more impactful for sales, marketing, service, and beyond.
To maintain the highest quality data in every app and enable your departments to seamlessly collaborate on insights, two-way contact data synchronization between your apps. From your CRM to your email marketing software and support platform, bring your apps together for the smoothest data-driven operations in your organization.

Some of the most commonly used apps at any business are contact management apps like Google, iCloud, and Outlook. These apps are a valuable way to keep your address book accessible on any device and synced with your email, calendar, and cloud storage.
However, when it comes to making sure they play nicely with your other business apps… it’s not always simple.

Let’s say you collect contacts in Outlook, but want to move subscribed customers into Mailchimp, and send them your weekly newsletter. To solve this in the past, you might have manually exported and imported CSV files between your apps before sending each email.
But that can be a real headache. There’s a much better solution, and it involveszero manual updates and spreadsheets: integrating your contact apps and email marketing tool with a native integration solution.
This is the most effective and straightforward way to keep your email marketing lists and contacts apps connected with your latest data. And it requires no code or advanced tech know-how.
To show you the ropes, let’s outline how to sync your data and put your Google, iCloud, and Outlook contacts to work in your email marketing app.
Search for a complete sync solution.
Some email marketing providers offernative integrations with Google Contacts, iCloud, and Outlook, but be aware of their limitations. Often it’s only a one-way sync, meaning that changes in app A are synced into app B, but not the other way around. Or, you can’t customize the sync to include the exact fields you need to map.
Instead of wrestling with CSVs and native integrations, yourbest bet is to use complete data sync to control the way your data flows between apps. After plugging in your apps, you can choose all the different ways you want them to talk to each other.
For instance, you might use Operations Hub to sync contacts labeled ‘Customers’ in Google Contacts with HubSpot or sync all your address books with your CRM to generate a complete overview for your salespeople.
How to Organize Your Lists and Sequences With Automatic Segmentation
Some people organize their contacts into completely different clouds, especially if they want to keep personal contacts and business separate. That’s totally fine and it can be a great way to keep things simple.
But if your contacts for different purposes overlap, you can also automatically segment them to keep things tidy.
You do this by organizing contacts with labels or tags in your address book, and matching these up with labels, groups, or lists in your email marketing app in your sync.
Let’s look closer at an example. I have a group of contacts in Google Contacts with the label ‘business.’ To make sure that these contacts (and only these) get synced into HubSpot, I can set up the following sync rules:

Now when I go to send a message to that group, all of the right recipients will be there. That means more time actually sending emails and less time worrying about which contacts should receive them.
How to Sync Subscription Status Between Apps
If you’re using multiple apps to contact your email marketing list, knowing who actually wants to hear from you can be a real headache. You don’t want to risk contacting people who have unsubscribed in another app, nor ignore contacts who do want to be contacted.
Your answer to this issubscription management, and it’s made possible when you connect your apps.
As you sync your contact data, you can enable each contact to travel between apps with a ‘subscribed’ or ‘unsubscribed’ tag. When the time comes to send your next email, all of the right people will be in (or out of) the list.
How to Enrich Data in Your Email Marketing App
It’s not just subscription status that you can sync between apps. You might want to sync other fields, too.
Let’s look at syncing contacts from Outlook with HubSpot, which you could use to send marketing emails. To ensure the right info is synced with each contact, you can check the field mapping to make sure everything lines up.

If a field isn’t included in the list by default, custom fields give you more freedom. As an example custom field, you could map the ‘Department’ field in Outlook with a HubSpot property for the same data. For custom fields to map correctly, they need to be compatible across both apps.
Getting the Most From Data Sync
So, that’s how to easily sync your address books in Outlook, iCloud, or Google Contacts with your email marketing app. After setting up your sync, you can rest easy and send top-converting emails knowing that your lists are in tip-top shape.
Once syncing your email marketing app with your contact address books, you can then also decide which other apps to sync — such as your CRM or customer support software. Remember, the best software stack is an integrated one.

 

Claims about the new Apples’ feature, Mail Privacy Protection, forever changing the landscape of email marketing, are overstatements. Of course, this is a change, but in reality, where the tech giants’ customers demand more privacy, this change was to be expected. It is just yet another indicator of a trend. And there is more than one way to deal with this problem, ensuring effective, personalized email marketing.

 

What happened in the email marketing world. Again

 

Apple Mail Privacy Protection, an update first announced on June 7th, is now a fact. After the introduction of the App Tracking Transparency update, which has caused a major disruption in the Mobile App Advertising environment, the company did it again. 

 

This time they caused an upset in the email marketing world by introducing Mail Privacy Protection. The new feature will seriously diminish the use of tracking pixels and mask users’ IP addresses. 

 

As Apple stated “Mail Privacy Protection hides your IP address, so senders can’t link it to your other online activity or determine your location. And it prevents senders from seeing if and when you’ve opened their email.”

 

So basically, the consumers now have much more control over tracking. They can block it if they want to and this will make it very difficult to figure whether an email was actually opened or is still waiting in the consumer’s mailbox. 

 

As of October 2021, the feature is available for the Mail app on iOS 15 and iPadOS 15. For the Macbooks the change will come with macOS Monterey.

 

Before we look into details, let’s assess how many Apple users will probably decide to give a new feature a go.

 

How many users will adopt Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection

 

Litmus expects that a third of the iPhones will have iOS 15 within the first week, 50% within the first month, 75% within the first two months, and finally, 90% of iPhone users will have iOS 15 on their devices within six months from the release. For iPadOS they predict a similar adoption rate.

 

And since it is highly unlikely that the user will consciously choose to remain unprotected, the Mail Privacy Protection adoption rate will probably reach nearly 100% of the iOS 15 users. This forecast is strengthened by the adoption rate of the previous Apple upsetting feature, the App Tracking Transparency, which reached 96% in the United States according to Flurry Analytics. 

 

How mail privacy protection works

 

Now, when an Apple user opens up Apple Mail, they will get a message, prompting them to protect mail activity or don’t protect mail activity. Neither of these options is pre-selected. IT looks like this:

 

source

 

It means that the users would have to consciously choose “Don’t protect mail activity”. This is highly unlikely since nobody is eager to say: no, I don’t want my data to be protected.

 

When the option to protect mail activity is chosen, from now on, all the emails will get to the users only through the Apple proxy server, where all the content, including tracking pixels, will be pre-loaded.

 

When a user starts Apple Mail, the download of the email from the host to their device begins. At indeterminate intervals, Apple will download all the images included in an email and create their copy on the Apple Privacy Cache. The proxy server with an IP address matching the general region of the user will then trigger a download. Apple will request the images contained in the email from the provider. These images will include tracking pixels.

 

If the user opens the email a request to download and display the images will be triggered. But the request won’t come from the user’s host, they will come from the Apple cache instead.

 

So the users’ IP, as well as real opens and time of opens, will remain unknown, as long as they are connected to Apple Mail.

 

What will it affect

 

 Opens, time stamps, forwarding

 

Opens from the consumers using Apple will probably go through the roof. All the addresses, personal and corporate, from any provider, will be subject to inflation.

 

Due to the way Mail Privacy Protection works, time stamps also won’t be reliable anymore. And since the feature blocks tracking, tracking information about forwarding an email will not be available.

 

Device identification

 

The type of device that the user was reading an email will not be revealed. In the short term, it means at least that the number of unknown devices or an increase of this number will indicate that the consumer is an Apple mail user.

 

Location information

 

Detailed information about the consumer location will not be available due to the use of proxy servers with an IP address matching only the general region of the user. The marketers may yet still extract somewhat useful data from it. For example, information about the country will provide some answers in the field of legal compliance.

 

 Live content

 

Live content appears when an email is opened. Since time stamps are not a relevant source of information anymore, information like live sports scores may be old news on time of actual open for Apple users. Location-based content will also suffer.

 

6 ways to deal with Mail Privacy Protection

 

Adjust email analytics

 

The most impactful change will be probably caused by the overinflation of opens. They will no longer provide relevant information. Until now, they were prized by the marketers for being a very frequent signal of customer engagement. Brands focused more on engagement than conversions will especially feel this change. 

 

To clear a view, prepare an audience of non-Apple clients. They will serve you as a proxy to assess overall opens performance in the areas where this indicator is really vital

 

In other areas, it would be wise to adjust the range of performance metrics. Closer investigation of unsubscribes and spam complaints could prove useful. Going beyond email and paying closer attention to offline purchases, website visits, or account logins, will provide the company with very accurate statistics of customer engagement.

 

Lack of forwarding tracking information will probably not affect you as much, though some campaign ideas may suffer from it.

 

Make changes in inactivity management and engagement-based segmentation

 

Open rates are a crucial indicator for the algorithms used by email providers to track spam. In order to keep out of the spam box, you must keep your engagement rates high. Your usual re-engagement and re-permissions campaigns filtering not engaged users will fail in this new situation, as well as differentiating the campaigns based on opens and clicks. Not engaged clients will be a part of an overinflated open balloon. Users that are never active, or inactive for a long time will, however, be still possible to pinpoint. They should remain an audience for such campaigns. 

 

After you assess the new engagement calculation, match the current engagement model based on opens with this new model. This way you can pinpoint the new threshold for re-engagement and re-permissions campaigns. 

 

Using broader engagement metrics like aforementioned offline purchases, website visits, and account logins will not let you assess deliverability directly, however, they will still be more frequent signals than clicks alone. Deliverability will probably decrease a little bit because inactivity management will be more complicated. You should consider hiring a deliverability specialist to monitor this indicator in the long term.

 

Prepare for false signals using Send Time Optimization

 

Send Time Optimization (STO) used to determine the best time to send an email, based on previous consumer behavior, will generate false signals due to false opens in the short term. They will probably generate a signal within a couple of hours, days at least, from the delivery time. If you are not currently using STO, it would be wise to hold with it until the STO providers will have enough data to enhance the algorithms, so they can calculate new best send times based on clicks and other behavior.

 

Change the criteria for Subject Line Optimization

 

It never was especially wise to focus on the opens to choose a winner of the A/B test. The opens are weakly connected to conversions anyway, they were, however, the most frequent signal for the optimization to be based on. 

 

The less frequent signal, but one bit closer to conversions, are clicks. 

 

Collect location preferences

 

Besides the legal compliance, proxy servers will provide you with little information about location preferences, and within borders of an entity as large as a small country the probability of a bad guess is tremendous. A proactive attitude, like asking new customers to select their favorite location during the onboarding or using the location of their first purchase to pinpoint them will prove rewarding.

 

Reassess Live Content in email

 

If you are using live content, there is little you can do for the Apple users that will open an email later than a couple of hours after delivery. Since Apple does not provide the possibilities to experience live content anymore, it would be wise to take a look at ROI it generates, and assess if it is still worth the effort.

 

Are there any pros of this new situation?

 

One beneficial effect of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection that immediately comes to mind is the end of opens as the universal indicator for everything. This will drive the marketers to use deeper, less frequent signals, like clicks and conversions, more directly connected with the company’s success. 

 

Others could be a turn to be even more customer-centric, provide the customers with more personalized content, and engage them with the brand stronger. 

 

New Apple’s feature is actually nothing new, it is a part of a trend to secure users’ data. An answer from the tech companies for their clients’ needs. We just have to adapt one more time. 

 

If you want to make the content you create more personalized and engaging, Request a SALESmanago demo and learn the vast possibilities of hyperpersonalized, omnichannel communication.

We all know how flooded the average email inbox is today. And, while email marketing remains one of the most effective tools in the marketing toolbox, millions of emails go by unnoticed, unopened, and unread every day.
So, how can you avoid such a sad fate for your emails? And, what can you do to increase email engagement and get those coveted clicks on your CTA buttons?
Read on for ten actions that will increase your email engagement and save your emails from ending up in the trash folder.

10 Ways to Improve Email Engagement
1. Always send a welcome email.
The first email you send to a customer is usually a welcome email. The average open rate for a welcome email is 50%, which makes it much more effective than regular newsletters.
If we bear in mind that 76% of people expect a welcome email immediately after subscribing to your list, it’s clear that this email is an important one, so be sure to make the most of it.
Really Good Emails shares a great collection of welcome emails (and every other category you can think of) to inspire your strategy, including this excellent example from Postable. It delivers the discount code subscribers are waiting for, includes a beautiful graphic, and keeps things super simple.

2. Optimize your subject lines.
47% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. So yes, getting the subject line right is crucial.
But what makes a good subject line?
The best way to succeed is to leverage natural human tendencies such as:

Curiosity
FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)
Humor

This is a typical FOMO subject line, where GetResponse is making it clear to its audience that they risk missing out on a whopping 40% off.
3. Don’t neglect the preheader text.
The preheader text, or preview text, is the snippet of text that follows the email subject line when a reader views your email in the inbox. It’s shown beside the subject line and sender name.
These examples from beauty marketplace, Cult Beauty, offer a preview of the brands and discounts it offers to encourage clicks:

This snippet is valuable real estate and it can even make or break your email’s performance. Studies show that brands using the preview text effectively increase their open rates by a margin of up to 30%.
4. Prioritize your CTAs.
The way you write and design your CTAs, or calls to action, has a significant impact on email engagement and click-through rates. Since readers are so used to being prompted to do this and do that, creativity is crucial to avoid being filtered out.
Experiment with everything from copy and design to placement and frequency to discover what kind of CTAs and buttons yield the best results with your particular target audience.
This message from email marketing software, Emma, keeps it short and sweet with a CTA that spurs the reader’s curiosity with the clever and straightforward copy “See how.”

5. Write casual, fun copy.
Write as you talk. Nobody appreciates large, dull, jargon-heavy chunks of texts. Make it easy, fun, and rewarding to read your emails. And, be ultra-clear about what next step you want the reader to take.
Use active, positive language and keep sentences short and concise. And, if appropriate, use humor; people like to smile.
This email copy from Uber is creative, on-brand, and to the point:

6. Leverage your transactional emails.
After welcome emails, transactional emails have among the highest open rates of all email marketing messages. And yet, they rarely contain more information than that of the actual transaction. That means an opportunity for you.
By giving your transactional emails some extra love and attention, you will wow your customers in a way that many companies miss out on.
7. Conduct A/B testing.
If you’re sending emails, you should be doing A/B testing. You can test every element of your emails, from subject lines and preview tests to copy, images, design, and CTAs.
The more you test, the better you will get to know your target audience. And the better you know your audience, the more you will be able to engage them with your emails.
8. Make sure your email is mobile responsive.
Most people open emails on their mobile device. This means that if your emails aren’t mobile responsive, a large portion of them will be going to waste.
Always make sure that your design has as good or better UX on mobile as on desktop.
9. Personalize your emails for each recipient.
Customers get frustrated with brands that fail to create personalized experiences. This is why tailoring your email marketing to the recipient is crucial.
An email that is not personalized risks doing more harm than good. In one marketing study, 82% of marketing specialists witnessed a substantial increase in opening rates when they leveraged the power of personalization.

Eventbrite sends these personalized emails with reports on how successful is users’ events have been during the past year. This type of personalized content can also be a great way to encourage social sharing and engagement within a team, multiplying the effect of your emails.
10. Segment your email marketing.
Segmenting your email list enables you to get the right message to the right buyer persona at the right time in their buyer journey. And, that is crucial for increasing conversions.
To send segmented emails that are more likely to convert, first integrate your email and marketing software with your CRM and other sources of customer data.
This gives you a 360-degree view of your contacts everywhere, including your email marketing platform. It’s then easier than ever to send highly personalized emails based on your contacts’ groups, memberships, and other properties.
Better Data Means Better Email Engagement
Email communication is one of the most effective ways that you can reach out to customers and prospects. But keeping your emailing lists up-to-date and personalizing your content can be challenging.
That’s where integration steps in: sync the contact databases across your app stack, so you’re always working with fully enriched, up-to-date, and relevant data.
With your CRM and email tool in sync, you can automatically send recent subscribers and leads to your email tool. You can also sync extra data for better segmentation of your marketing and nurturing campaigns — plus easily personalized outreach in every email.
At the same time, you can merge marketing qualified leads (MQLs) back to your CRM with updated data for sales to work with — all without overwriting existing data.

Maintaining a contact database with high data integrity is essential for any organization. You need your data to be reliable, accurate, and complete, otherwise, you risk frustrating your customers with the wrong information, being unable to deliver personalized services, and losing faith in your reporting.
One of the biggest threats to data integrity is having duplicate contacts in your database.
In many cases, duplicate contacts are caused by human error. One team member might spell a contact’s name wrong, causing it to be added twice. It can also be caused by a contact filling in a form with a different email address or phone number.
In short: duplicate contacts can be a real pain. No business wants to have to deal with them, but the good news is that you don’t have to. Here’s what you need to know to get rid of duplicate contact data for good.

The Best Apps to Remove Duplicate Contacts
Some apps offer built-in deduplication features to locate and banish pesky duplicates by merging or deleting them.
For instance, HubSpot has a handy deduplication tool that uses AI to finds duplicate contacts and companies in the CRM. Google Contacts and iCloud also have useful built-in dedupe functions. It’s always a good idea to start with your apps’ functionality and clean up your data at the source.
However, many apps don’t have built-in dedupe functions, or they’re limited in quality. For most organizations, it’s valuable to choose a dedicated app for data quality and cleansing that works across multiple apps.
To avoid wasting time, money, and energy trying to fix duplicate contacts and their repercussions across your organization, here are five of the best apps to help you fix and avoid duplicates.
1. Dedupely

For: HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive
Dedupely helps remove duplicates from three of the most popular CRM platforms: HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. It’s a really easy platform to navigate, and offers several filters to flag possible duplicates for first name, last name, email, company, and more. It also finds duplicates by exact, fuzzy, and similar matching to detect issues that other systems would miss.

2. DemandTools from Validity

For: Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce
DemandTools is a CRM data quality suite that helps organizations optimize their data in Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM.
It includes maintenance tools, cleaning tools, and discovery tools for comparing external data against the CRM and bulk email verification.

3. RingLead

For: Salesforce, Pardot, Eloqua, and Marketo
RingLead is a powerful data quality solution to cleanse data, stop dirty data at the source, enrich contact records with fresh information, and route leads to the right person at the right time.
It offers one-click integrations with Salesforce, Pardot, Eloqua, and Marketo.

4. Openrise

For: selected marketing and sales automation apps, collaboration tools, data services and infrastructure platforms
Openrise’s data orchestration platform automates key processes including data cleansing and enrichment, deduplication, lead routing, and attribution to make your campaigns more successful.
It integrates with many popular marketing and sales automation apps plus collaboration tools like G Suite, data services including Cleabit, and infrastructure platforms such as MySQL.

5. Contacts+

For: Google Contacts, iCloud, and Outlook
Struggling to manage different contacts in your Google, iCloud, and Outlook apps? Contacts+ is a helpful app that centralizes and syncs contacts between Google Contacts, iCloud, and Outlook so you always have the latest info on the app and device you’re using.
Not only is it a great way to sync your address books, but it also has sophisticated dedupe algorithms to pick up on duplicate contacts even when they’re not obvious to you or other apps.

Preventing Duplicates When Syncing Data
The tools we talked about here are amazing additions to your tech stack when it comes to managing your contact databases and keeping them organized. But another important step in contact management is syncing your contact data in two ways.
Operations Hub is a two-way contact data syncing tool that also has valuable advantages for preventing and merging duplicate contacts.
When you create a sync between your apps, say Google Contacts and HubSpot, you can choose which app has the authoritative data that should be chosen if there’s a conflict. This creates a “single source of truth” in your data: one of the benchmarks of a healthy database.
Operations Hub also defines contacts by their email address, which is a good way to avoid duplicates. And, for example, if in one app you have a contact called ‘Bill’ and another has a contact named ‘William’ — both of which are attached to the same email address — the tool will merge and enrich both contact records.

Email campaign reporting can be a pain, but it’s pivotal to your email marketing success. Here’s why it’s so important, and how to get it right.
Email marketing continues to be one of the most cost-effective and powerful online marketing tools for communicating directly with prospects and existing customers.
According to a study by the Data & Marketing Association, the value of email marketing continues to rise:

ROI from email marketing is roughly $57 for every dollar spent; an increase of $13 dollars since the previous study.
The Lifetime Value (LTV) of each individual in an email marketing database has risen by 33% year over year.
Email marketing has an impact on important business development drivers. The primary objectives of email campaigns are sales (62%), engagement (50%), brand awareness (47%), and building loyalty (45%).

To get to this level of ROI, email marketers need to pay attention to how their audience is responding to their campaigns.
Often the emphasis is on getting the emails sent rather than on reporting and analysis. But without time for analysis, it’s nearly impossible to improve your results.
In this post, we’ll walk through, why reporting is critical, the components of a great report, and tools you can use to make your reporting life easier.
Measuring results leads to better results
Like any digital marketing tactic, the goal is to get better results using insights from available data. If you’re looking to improve your email campaign results, analyzing campaigns and taking action is a must.
Examples of key email metrics you should be monitoring are:

Open Rate: Percentage of email recipients who opened an email campaign. The main factors that affect open rates are the strength of the subject line and the relevancy of the topic.

Click-Through Rate: Percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link in your email. Directing readers to a landing page can lead to desired conversions — like a download, purchase, or request for a demo.

Unsubscribe Rate. Percentage of email recipients who unsubscribe from your email list. A high unsubscribe rate could come from a poorly targeted list, or talking about topics that readers aren’t interested in. In either case, campaigns with high unsubscribe rates give great insight into what your audience does or doesn’t want to read.

Bounce Rate. The percentage of emails sent that could not be delivered. You should monitor and maintain your bounce rate to keep a high-quality subscriber list.

For a full list of metrics to track in your email marketing, make sure to check out 17 Email Marketing Metrics Every Marketer Needs to Know.
By paying close attention to these metrics, marketers will have a better idea of their audience’s preferences and interests. It is only with this understanding that we can make adjustments to improve results.
For example, if open rates are low, use A/B testing of subject lines to determine what topics resonate with the target audience. If you want to improve click-through rates, try different calls to action or make the CTA’s more prominent within the email.
Analyze, refine, improve, repeat
As an email marketer, it’s your job to analyze campaigns and make data-based adjustments to improve results. When putting your campaign reports together, make sure to keep these tips in mind.
Use comprehensive data. Campaign reports should include all vital metrics so you can get a clear, complete, and timely picture of campaign performance.
Make reports well-formatted, and easy to navigate. Reports should be well-organized so campaign data is easy to access and understand.
Add insights to your reports. You should have the ability to add recommendations within the report based on insights from the data. This is important for giving stakeholders a bigger picture without asking them to analyze all the data themselves.
Generate reports automatically. The typical lifecycle for an email campaign is around three days after send. After that, it’s time to gather results.
It’s helpful to find a tool that automatically generates reports to coincide with this cycle. This will make sure campaign data is getting to the right stakeholders, at the right time, rather than cobbling something together.
Make distribution easy. Typically, there are multiple stakeholders who need to see campaign results (salespeople, marketing executives, clients, etc). If you can, find a tool that allows you to distribute reports automatically in PDF or web page formats.
Review other campaigns for context. Looking back at one campaign is helpful, but comparing it to similar recent campaigns can give you a clearer picture of your overall performance.
Tools that get the job done
Most email service providers do an excellent job of managing campaigns and capturing data. But generating and distributing reports on that data can be a pain, especially when you want to share those reports with other stakeholders.
Tools like CM Reports, though, solve this problem with ease. Developed by Core Online Marketing, CM Reports integrates with Campaign Monitor to help both agencies and marketing teams automatically generate and distribute detailed reports that include insights and recommendations.

This kind of tool saves email marketers a significant amount of time, and ensures that all stakeholders have transparent access to campaign performance details.
To learn more about CM Reports and start a free trial, head here.
Wrap up
Without taking the time to report on your email campaigns, success will be hard to find. Yes, it sounds tedious, especially for time-strapped marketers, but the value is well worth it.
By knowing what you’re measuring, building easy-to-read reports, and using the right tools, you’ll have your email program on the path to success.
The post Why Email Campaign Reporting Is Important (And How to Do It) appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

I’ve been looking to expand my skillset more towards marketing automation and MOPs, so I’ve been browsing job listings to see what potential hard skills I can pick up. One of the most common requirements is listed as a ‘Salesforce certification’ and I’m wondering which one could they be referring to? Or alternatively, which one would be more beneficial to have to enter the area? I’ve narrowed it down to be either the Salesforce Admin one or the SF Marketing Cloud certification, but which is the most likely/industry standard?
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