MailChimp is a godsend to many growing businesses. It allows incredibly simple composition and sending of marketing emails. According to MailChimp’s website “More than 9 million people and businesses use MailChimp to send 600 million emails every day.” So it clearly fills a need for growing businesses.

However, as is symbolised by the three wise monkeys above, business owners often turn a blind eye to some potentially very real benefits. The famous monkey that happily delivers company news to millions of inboxes every day is hiding some BIG secrets.

I meet a lot of businesses with a small sales teams and even smaller marketing teams. Marketing is tasked with scripting and sending their company newsletters, so they’re happy to have a tool like MailChimp at their disposal. When they’re savvy, they also recognise the benefits of integrating this with the CRM. This is all fairly standard and has been happening some years now.

Meanwhile, salespeople are on the frontline, sending emails, making calls and networking. Entering as much information as they can into the CRM. Those in the know understand the value of their CRM data the more they add to it and longer they use it.

No More Monkey Business

MailChimp has all the data on where and how your prospects and customers are viewing your emails. They’ve made it easy for your open and click-through rates to be compared with your industry’s average. This gives marketers a great idea on the success of their campaigns:

Source: http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks/

However, the real benefit lies in the granular ‘per recipient’ detail. This is where typical email marketing tools fail to help businesses achieve their true goal – making more sales.

The problem lies with the way MailChimp, and other email marketing tools, are implemented. Integrations are often one way from Sales to Marketing, designed to grow the ‘list’. Seldom do salespeople get visibility over the data that comes from email marketing. Open and Click-Through are never available on a granular basis.

For example: imagine receiving a notification within a few minutes of a key account or large potential sale opening your company newsletter.

Better yet, what if that same newsletter was opened a full two weeks after being sent by a prospect who your sales team had eased off. Experience tells me this is a great signal that a follow up will be graciously accepted. And having the ability to do so from a position of insight and power is invaluable.

Monkey See? Monkey Do…..This.

By showing your sales team statistics from email marketing both in real-time and within a historic and contextual timeline, you allow them to have more meaningful and influential conversations.

How can you make it better?

• Give your salespeople access to the data. This could be as rudimentary as allowing them to login to MailChimp and check it for themselves. You could also configure lists or tag certain recipients in MailChimp as prospects, subcategorized by certain lead source that will allow easy identification by your sales team.
• Integrate it with the sales workflow. Instead of having a one-way integration, make it two-way. That way data of who opened/clicked what email campaign gets pushed back to your CRM contact record.
• Adopt a complete system. SalesSeek provides a single contact database allowing salespeople to make notes and follow up with prospects on the same activity feed where campaigns are sent and reported. This allows real time feedback to your front line on who is opening your campaigns and when.

Many times I speak with customers and find the real-time reporting on campaign opens in SalesSeek has helped them reach out at the appropriate time to have a successful sales conversation. If you think this could help your business, do get in touch and setup a demo / free trial.