It might sound surprising, but in the age of all digital developing very fast, email is still playing the key role in attracting consumers and encourages them to make various transactions on millions of websites that use it as a communication channel to their clients. Email marketing has been around since the 90’s and since then a lot of things have changed, but one thing stayed – email campaigns deliver the biggest ROI to businesses, if designed correctly and targeted carefully.

Powerful channel

As MarketingSherpa Survey revealed, there is a very strong preference for email compared with all other communication channels. The national survey conducted in the US in January 2015 showed that 72% of adults have a strong preference for companies who communicate with them via emails, with only 17 % preferring social media and in-person communication. What does it mean for business owners? We will try to lay out some interesting facts in this post to direct you to the what’s happening in the email marketing world.

Targeted and personalised

In the recent years, it’s become vital to communicate with clients in the form of dialogue, rather than a monologue. For this, emails need to be very targeted and personal. So you won’t be sending an email to female users based on what your male clients like. It’s especially relevant for a gaming sector. As the Guardian game audience article points out, the female audience has expanded rapidly recently making almost a half of the world players, and there is a need to adjust a lot of marketing campaigns to this growing trend.

Email Union with Social Media

With the social media taking over many traditional forms of communication, it’s especially interesting to see how email campaigns will manage to integrate the social part as a means to a more effective spread of information and merge these 2 channels into an even more powerful tool. Emails tend to become more and more personalised, but they still lack personal feedback from users. Social media are capable of interacting with the public at a greater level and provide this essential feedback to companies.  People like to receive promotional offers via emails, and if it’s combined with entertaining content and various engaging contests on social media, it can provide your gaming clients with even more ways to be entertained, and increase their participation and their lifetime value for your brand. So the next step will be integration of these 2 powerful channels which is already happening for many online gaming brands.

Prediction Intelligence Analytics

One more important trend that is worth noting is predictive intelligence analytics – tool that allows you to target your clients based on what they do on your website. Behavioural analytics is the future of email marketing. Paired with the relevant content which can enable you to create more tailored and personalised 1 to 1 messages, your email marketing campaigns will result in more conversions, e.g more profit for your company and happy clients who won’t unsubscribe from irrelevant communication. The way predictive analytics tools work is based on observation and processing the data with exquisite statistical and mathematical models which can help to decide which content in your email can be the most interesting and perform the best.

Even though there is quite a lot going on in digital marketing, personalisation and catering for unique users’ experience and needs will be at the forefront of most future marketing campaigns.

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CRM Marketing System choice

You may have asked yourself before ‘what CRM marketing system my business should use?’, and we are quite confident that when you entered this search term online, you were bombarded with so many options and maybe even got lost in a plethora of information available to you. That’s why it’s important to structure all these data and make the right decision when choosing the correct CRM marketing system you need for your business. There are a lot of big email CRM players on the international market, and they can specialise in small business CRM software or large enterprise solutions that are aimed at millions of users. As a small or medium-sized company, you might want to save your limited money resources and have a system that is easy enough to understand and is not too costly. If you are new to the email CRM market and want to try and test it for your gaming business, it’s better to start with something simple enough, so you don’t need to spend months and months on integrating it with your database and website. There are some questions to ask yourself when choosing the right gaming email CRM marketing software. First, how many users do you have now and what are how often are you planning to target these users via email messages? Do you want to track their activities and gather important conversion information by running reports?

Personal solutions

If you grow exponentially during the next few years, will your CRM email provider be able to satisfy your needs and offer you personalised solutions? Remember, that sometimes it requires quite a lot of time to transfer your customers’ and content data into a new email CRM database. So you need to make sure you get the best solution from the provider you choose, and they can scale and meet your expanding expectations. Also, it’s important to ask yourself if you are going to use automation processes and set up email triggers that to make your everyday life easier. n response to a subscriber action. Triggered messages are created based on users’ behaviour. In this case, you will need to have an API connection between your internal database or website and the CRM marketing system you choose for managing your email campaigns. This can add up to the cost of software you choose, but you’ll be able to rid yourself of a lot of workload and manual processes.

CRM Software Niche

Another key feature to look for is a niche that a particular CRM provider works in. In some cases, they are designed specifically for a certain industry. So, if you work in gaming, you need to look for companies that have a portfolio of clients from this industry. If you don’t a budget for CRM software or you are not sure which CRM software is right, but want to see how it works and try some features, you have an option of free trials some CRM software providers have for businesses. Some of them will even offer a full-featured version, but for a limited number of users. A lot of email CRM software providers have personalised plans based on the number of users and features you would like to have in your CRM database. To summarise the things you need to consider when choosing the email CRM software, we have highlighted the main questions to have in mind:

• Is the software easy to use for you and your employees?
• Is the CRM software customisable?
• Are there any limitations to this software and does it allow to scale?
• How easy is it to integrate with the systems that you already have?
• What features does this software offer (e.g advanced segmentation, automation, reports)?
• What is the level of security and can you access the system via any device?
• Is there a customer support available and what type and level of support the company offers?

The post How to choose the right email CRM marketing system for a small business appeared first on Allsopp Media.