How to Leverage Your ERP to Optimise Your Email Marketing

Today’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are powerful pieces of kit. Composed of sophisticated business process management tools, the modern ERP allows organisations to manage various and wide-spread business functions from within a centralised, integrated system. Typically, ERPs cover human resources, finance, product development, manufacturing, product planning, and operations — all of which combine under a single information system to enable the proper functioning of business processes.

Most enterprises, however, also run function-specific applications alongside, yet separate from, their ERP — customer relationship management (CRM) tools, for example, email marketing automation tools, social media tools, and so on.

Broadly speaking, while ERP is used to manage the business, CRM and related marketing tools are used to manage the customer.

What this often means, however, is that organisations end up with lots and lots of data spread across different software solutions, yet no way to marry it all together — a process that is crucial for the creation of successful marketing campaigns, and email marketing campaigns in particular.

ERP data can and should be used by the marketing department to inform their campaigns — after all, while the CRM reveals which marketing efforts and assets are generating the most engagement, the ERP reveals which products are actually selling to which customers, as well as information about suppliers, inventories, and other valuable insights into business operations.

By combining the two, your marketing department can gain the visibility required to inspire intelligent and practical marketing strategies based on a true understanding of sales trends, customer needs, interests, and purchasing patterns. And this is precisely why selecting an ERP solution like metasfresh that can be integrated seamlessly with third-party email marketing solutions can be hugely beneficial to your business.

Despite the recent growth and focus on social media platforms, email marketing continues to be one of the simplest and most effective methods of marketing your business online.

According to the State of B2B Email Marketing report from SuperOffice, email marketing delivers a $40 return for every $1 spent. No wonder email marketing software is one of the top two technologies B2B organisations use to assist with their content marketing efforts.

The CMI’s research also found that 81% of B2B marketers say their most-used form of content marketing is email newsletters, while 90% say email engagement is the top metric they track to measure content performance.

Why is email such an important channel for B2B organisations? Because, by communicating directly with your contacts, you have a unique opportunity to build lasting, profitable relationships, deliver highly-targeted, fully-personalised content to the right people at the right time, and encourage commercial action. With email marketing software, messages can be tailored to customer actions so that every single communication is relevant to their interests.

Relevancy, indeed, is the marketer’s secret weapon — and this is where ERP data comes in.

A powerful ERP system like metasfresh provides a centralised solution to store all organisational data and make it available and useful for marketing. From within the ERP system, you can track the performance of each product, as well as individual customer purchase histories and buying processes. This data gives marketing the valuable insights it needs to tailor campaigns specifically for different customer segments — and even individual customers — to let them know about new products and promotions, drive traffic to particular pages on your website with newsletters, reminders, or stock notifications, and many other targeted marketing efforts via email.

When marketing can access the relevant ERP data, it becomes possible to track and analyse entire customer journeys and build campaigns that target customers at every stage. New customers that are entered into your ERP system, for example, can be sent welcome email messages that set the tone for the new relationship, contain important links, discuss the benefits of working with your company, customer support information, and promotional offerings.

Orders, returns, enquiries, call lists, conversions and conversations can also be tracked so you know precisely which campaigns and promotions are the most successful, and relevant material can be created to keep relationships alive and healthy.

Only with an ERP system that integrates seamlessly with marketing applications and tools can your team start making data-driven marketing decisions that lead to the most profitable outcomes. By connecting ERP with marketing, the result is one unified database, putting the entire organisation in sync and adding huge value to the business data your ERP contains.

metasfresh ERP is a powerful, open source, flexible and scalable ERP solution that organisations use to keep constant track of everything that’s going on within the company and connect all departments and moving parts together. Combining analytics, automation, and big data, metasfresh integrates all facets of the organisation into one, comprehensive information system, providing all teams — including marketing — with real-time visibility into the inner workings of business operations.

We’ve developed metasfresh to be entirely integration friendly. For example, you can connect metasfresh to an email newsletter service provider such as CleverReach, allowing you to manage your marketing campaigns from within metasfresh where all key customer data resides. Campaigns are automatically synchronised with your contact data in both directions between metasfresh and CleverReach, meaning there’s no need whatsoever to manually maintain your mailing lists, and you can easily design professional newsletters for your customers.

In metasfresh, you can also see the “retention status” of each of your customers — i.e. new customer, returning customer, premium customer, etc. — and thereby tailor personalised campaigns for each.

It’s also possible to create phone call lists with metasfresh. This means you can schedule calls with key contacts far in advance, and keep track of pending calls with contacts at all times. In addition, when you are calling a customer to tell them about an offer and they accept it, you can directly open the order recording window — prepopulated with the customer’s information — so you can quickly enter the order and process it.

Today, customers expect every interaction they have with a company to be efficient and informed by data pertaining to who they are and their unique needs and preferences. metasfresh ERP provides you with the platform and the functional tools to deliver on these expectations every time.

Talk to us here at metasfresh. Since 2006 we have been developing our metasfresh ERP software non-stop with open source components and under the open source licenses GPLv2 and GPLv3. Our mission is to enable each and every company to access a powerful ERP system with the aim of fuelling corporate growth. Get in touch today for more information and insights.