5 Benefits of Email Marketing and CRM Integration for Nonprofits
Nowadays, numerous nonprofit organizations feel the squeeze to keep their supporters engaged and lean heavily on email marketing to do so. After all, email marketing is undeniably one of the best tools to use when thanking donors, attracting more supporters, and spreading your mission to a broader audience.
The problem is, nonprofit organizations so widely use email marketing that unless you have genuinely buttoned up your email marketing strategy, your emails are likely to get lost in the overloaded inboxes of your supporters.
So, how do you button up your email marketing strategy?
It takes the right approach, powerful software tools, and a good amount of practice to make your emails stand out from the inbox clutter. At the bare minimum, your CRM data should be informing your email marketing strategies to get the maximum benefit of your email efforts. And to do that, email marketing and CRM data need to be integrated.
In this post, I will give you the top five benefits of email marketing and CRM integration for nonprofits.
Let’s start with the basics – what is email integration?
Email integration refers to using systems, tools, and software together for effective email marketing, streamlining day-to-day tasks, and allowing the free flow of data between different technologies – most specifically, your email system and your main CRM database.
With a lack of time and resources that nonprofits typically face, integrating your email marketing solution and your CRM could be the silver bullet to elevating your donor engagement strategy, staying connected with supporters, and raising awareness of your mission.
5 Benefits of Email Marketing and CRM Integration
1. Eliminate Duplicate Data Entry and Errors
Whenever you’re managing disconnected applications, the results of manual information transfer from one to another often lead to duplicate data entry and errors. But integrating your email marketing solution with your CRM improves the accuracy of your data. Also, it eliminates all that tedious data entry, letting your teams focus on driving your mission forward rather than processing data.
2. Gain Better Visibility and Faster Response Time
Let’s say your development team uses Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®, and your marketing team uses HubSpot. When these two systems are “talking” to one another, you can deliver timely, personalized, and effective supporter experiences.
You can use all of the information that lives in the development database to personalize email messages to your donors. And all that email activity – what readers open, click on, subscribe to – will further build each supporter’s unique profile in the database. Without integration, you could be missing opportunities to send thoughtful and timely messages, instead of sending impersonal emails, or worse, an incorrect message.
3. Keep Your Lists and Data in Sync at All Times
Integrating your CRM and email marketing data ensures information is always in sync across the two platforms. Without integration, you’re likely spending valuable time flipping between different data sets. Maintaining multiple lists can easily be time-consuming and frustrating. Additionally, you may be missing data or have mismatched data. But when your systems are working together, your data is consistent across the board, making it easier for your team to manage, analyze, and update.
4. Use Advanced Audience Segmentation
Segmenting your database has become a fundamental part of email marketing efforts. Integrating your CRM and email marketing solution allows a broader set of users to see real-time results from marketing campaigns and gain a deeper understanding of your supporters’ behaviors, so that you can leverage advanced audience segmentation.
Fingers crossed, you wouldn’t send the same email communication to every single person in your database. For example, an email targeting volunteers may not be relevant to your donors, and your volunteers most likely don’t want to receive solicitation emails regularly. However, using pertinent information from your CRM, your organization can build more targeted and appealing outreach strategies. Then you can send over those segmented groups to your email system for execution.
5. Improve Personalization with Valuable Insights
Integrating your CRM with your email marketing platform will give you an abundance of new data. In turn, this gives you valuable insights that you can use to elevate your donor engagement and personalize your email marketing outreach.
Your supporters are interested in feeling appreciated and unique. And personalization in nonprofit email marketing is one of the most important facets. When you personalize your messaging, your supporters feel more appreciated.
Of course, personalization goes a lot further than including their name in a subject line. With integrated systems, you’ll know more about your supporters and their engagement habits, and be able to even more effectively personalize your messaging.
How can Omatic help you?
Through the Omatic email marketing integration, you can automatically integrate key email activity data from your supporters into your development CRM database quickly, accurately, and conveniently.
Omatic also provides the ‘round trip’, making sure changed email addresses and other relevant updates from your CRM are in sync with your email system.
