SharpSpring Mail and Email Marketing
An overview of SharpSpring’s email marketing and mail features so you are making the most of its email marketing capabilities.
As a SharpSpring partner, we help organisations in the pharmaceutical and related sectors build awareness and generate and nurture new leads via the SharpSpring marketing automation platform.
SharpSpring’s system makes intelligent marketing and sales follow-up possible via its software that integrates seamlessly with websites, CRM, social media and email. SharpSpring’s email marketing and mail features will be the focus of this article.
For an overview of the system’s full marketing features, see here.
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9 SHARPSPRING MAIL AND EMAIL MARKETING FEATURES
SharpSpring excels via its various mail and email marketing features - this article will provide an overview of those specific features.
1. SMART MAIL
Once a SharpSpring user has connected a mailbox to the system, such as Outlook or Gmail, the user can send our personalised emails, just like using any other mail client. Sending out personalised emails in this manner allows for the tracking of email opens and clicks (that can trigger automations such as further email marketing jobs from within the system) as well as send such emails at speed by selecting pre-written templates. Smart Mail can also be scheduled so that multiple emails can be queued to send - all of which will show on the SharpSpring Life of the Lead and Membership tabs in the CRM. For sales and business development teams, this is quite effective and will allow for a more personalised approach in the future based on your knowledge of the emails which you have already sent a contact.
2. EMAIL TEMPLATES AND QUICK DESIGNER
Like most email marketing solutions, SharpSpring offers the ability to drop your email marketing content into pre-designed templates, or start with pre-built layouts ready for your branding where you can edit as you see fit. The range of templates are certainly useful, however, I feel that the quick designer (editor) is so easy to use that you can start from scratch with confidence or from a pre-designed branded header and footer. The drag and drop feature allows you to choose simple content layouts where you can drop emails and text in with ease, and then edit the elements and add other elements so that you are happy with the final layout. Customisable HTML templates can also be configured within the system where you can switch to HTML view to edit an email without leaving the page, should you feel comfortable doing so. The designer offers other useful features such as Litmus Testing (where you can test and preview your emails on various apps, email providers and devices) and the ability to look at/selects emails within your revision history.
3. EMAIL LISTS AND SEGMENTATION
Once contacts are added to the CRM, they can then be added to lists either manually or via an automated process for email marketing. Lists will form the basis of most email marketing campaigns; the more lists you will have, the more segmented your audience will become. Static lists can be created where mass emails can be sent to lists (e-blasts) in the form of newsletters and other one-size-fits-all messages. Rules-based lists can also be created that are populated based on the actions of the contacts within the system. If a contact has clicked on a number of email links and is now considered a warm lead, the contact can be automatically added to a new list (as well as removed from an old list) so that further targeted email marketing can be scheduled. Of course, lists can be created for other purposes within SharpSpring, but this is a feature mainly reserved for email marketing and to trigger automations and drip email campaigns.
4. DRIP EMAIL CAMPAIGNS AND VISUAL WORKFLOWS
A key feature of any marketing automation system is the ability to automate email marketing tasks, and SharpSpring does not fall short in this department. Visual Automation Workflows allow you to create the digital journey for a potential client for beginning to end. Here you can set up different paths you may take when sending follow up emails and the number of options available to you when building workflows is substantial. The system allows the creation of behaviour-based workflows to engage a contact at critical points in their unique buying process. So, setting up email marketing automation for common customer pathways and responding to specific interests and actions by individual users via processes that take away the manual work of sending emails would be the obvious drip campaigns we’d see within a B2B context.
5. BEHAVIOURAL TRIGGERED EMAILS
SharpSpring - as they will say themselves - goes beyond the capability of traditional email marketing automation platforms. The system will provide the complete picture on information on a visitor’s activity after they click through from an email and will know every page visit, form fill-out, webinar sign-up and whitepaper download from the email campaigns you send. This allows for email marketing tasks to be triggered from virtually any sort of trigger on your website. Confirmation messages, event alerts, shopping cart abandonment notices, or a quick personal note are just some of the triggers and filters you need to automatically send personalised and timely messages as some of the most common. A visit to a certain website page can trigger an email send could be the difference for the contact converting and not converting into a customer or client. You can also go a step further and use dynamic features and smart tags to automate the process of customising your message.
6. SCHEDULED EVENTS AND EMAIL JOBS
Two very simple features of the SharpSpring system that I personally use more often than I’d have thought is Scheduled Events and Email Jobs. Scheduled Events provides an overview of all the scheduled automation events due to be sent out by the system - both manual jobs and automated events. The Lists tab shows the bulk email events that are due to send soon, and the Contacts tab displays all of the individual events (that include other non-email events) scheduled to go out in chronological order - events can be paused or cancelled from here if needed. You’ll be surprised at how this overview can influence such campaigns; tweaking emails and send times with the view of making such email more relevant happens often. Similarly, Email Jobs reviews the email jobs previously completed, again with a Lists and Contacts tab. The Contacts tab is particularly helpful as it offers the admin an overview of the last email jobs as well as the engagement with that email from that contact.
7. EMAIL ANALYTICS
SharpSpring allows users to track email success all the way to bottom-line ROI. It allows you to follow general stats such as clicks, opens, bounces and deliveries to optimise your messaging and know which links in your emails are working and which are not. Compare how different email templates and messages perform and track your email marketing efforts over time as you select multiple emails for more in-depth analysis. I’d say that SharpSpring email reporting features are not quite as detailed as some of the other inbound/marketing automation providers on the market, but the reporting is certainly adequate enough to run most email marketing campaigns that you’ll need to run, especially within the B2B sectors Orientation Marketing operates within.
8. TRACKING ATTACHMENTS AND LINKS
The system also allows users to include up to 5MB of attachments within emails to support the message if needs be. Which would be the traditional method of sending documents over email. However, should you wish to send PDFs of certain marketing materials via email, you can do so via the Media Center and track individual clicks for each media, for each contact. Case studies, whitepapers and marketing sheets are some of the most common documents for us which are stored on the SharpSpring Cloud CDN (content delivery network) for easy access from any device. Again, interactions with media as such will show up on the Life of the Lead, which can also be set as a trigger for workflows and further emails.
9. EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS AND SAVED REPORTS
Finally, we turn to internal email notifications - emails the system sends to users and admins of the SharpSpring system. We highlighted this basic feature on our run-through of the CRM features of SharpSpring, simply because it can inform sales and marketing teams of the actions of leads in real-time, to help form future email actions and tasks for leads and internal teams. You can also quickly create a Reminder from any page in the CRM platform and attach Reminders to opportunities and contacts, that can also be emailed via notifications so that you never forget to follow up. Combine Reminders, Social Notes with email notifications than can prompt you on such tasks, as well as other lead-related activity, then your system becomes a marketing tool that can intelligently help you make more sales and foster better relationships. To achieve this, you need to be kept in the loop with what is going on with your leads, emails and website… email notifications are there to help.
