Things that work well in Zoho CRM: Email Campaigns

Email campaigns. Check. Every CRM has this as a checkbox on their feature list. Whether it is integrated as part of the system, as is the case with NetSuite & Oasis, or acheived through a partner integration, ala Salesforce and Campaigner, no CRM system is complete without it. Doing it well and making it easy, however is another story. Having been a marketer for longer than I care to admit, suffice it to say I have had plenty of experience with email campaigns…(not to date myself, but can you say mailmerge & Eudora?)

Ah but I digress. After struggling in this area with our previous CRM system, I was psyched to be able to quickly and easily generate targeted, personalized email campaigns. (and better yet, teach my team to do this as well!)

Zoho works like other CRM systems in terms of splitting up leads, accounts, and contacts. It is very easy to create email templates in either plain text or HTML, and use these templates for emailing out to leads or contacts. The text editor is simple and straightforward, and to add your own HTML creative you simply cut and paste. Adding wild cards for personalization is suprisingly easy, and acheived by simply choosing fields (in plain english!) from a drop down list and copying and pasting into your template.

By making the templates available to everyone who uses the system my team can personalize their messages and add wild cards for their signatures – leveraging content that is available for everyone to use yet giving the messages their own personal flair. Again, not a new concept but deceptively simple in Zoho.

Once the template is created you then go to either the Leads or Contacts database (depending on your desired targets) and select the Mass Email feature (this is easily located at the bottom of the main page of the Leads and Contacts databases.

This takes you to the Mass Email page, and is the area where you will select your email template and records to send it to. To select your template just choose one from the drop down menu. Then click on the “Select Records” tab to choose your recipients.

This is the area where Zoho really shines. While this is undoubtably the most important aspect of any direct response effort (selecting the actual targets for communication) – many systems fall short when it comes to being able to quickly get to the right target list. In fact, this basic ability was completely lacking in our last system without having to directly create a SQL database query. Not impossible, but for a marketing team not the most practical approach.

In Zoho there are a few basic ways to search for and select your email recipients. The first way is to use the “Custom Views Criteria.” This will use any of Zoho’s standard or user-created Custom Views to select the recipients. You can create custom views into your data based upon certain criteria (such as geography, timeframe, etc.) or you can choose your recipients based on Zoho’s out-of-the-box views such as “My Leads” or “Today’s Leads.”

From this view you can choose to send to all or manually select which contacts you want to receive the email. This feature alone is extremely valuable, especially in the case of not having a complete up-to-date, clean list, which can often happen right after a trade show, webinar, or some other event. This basically gives you a quick and easy way to opt out people that you do not want to receive the email, or weed out duplicates without having to clean the entire database. This is a great feature that has alowed us to continue to communicate effectively without having to go through an arduous database cleanup exercise.

The other method to select your recipients is to utilize the “Manual Criteria” feature. This allows you to select criteria from a number of fields to get to the right list. Say uou wanted to send a thank you note to all prospective customers who visited you at a recent regional trade show. You could search for all records with the lead source “trade show” and narrow it down to the specific show, account owner, territory, etc.

Again, not rocket science, it just works. And not only does it work, it’s simple enough that my entire team is now empowered to be more effective in their outbound communications. Once the target list is specified they can quickly choose from that list who should receive the email and who should not.

Overall for us it has never been easier to generate targeted, personalized, and effective email communications. While we will always continue to send out general HTML-based messages that highlight news and offers for a mass audience, we are now able to more effectively communicate with our customers, partners, and prospects. There are many more features in Zoho that my team is utilizing and in future posts will discuss more about how our entire process is improving the more that we continue to use the system.

This post was originally written by D-Tools VP marketing, Tim Bigones

Comments

26 Replies to Things that work well in Zoho CRM: Email Campaigns

  1. ZohoCRM
    I want to set criteria in Email creating time In email report .
    Criteria is that . In my Zoho Account Many many No of lead , When ever i mailed any lead . and saw email report it show previously subject and created time but I want single lead Contain only one with latest subject and email created time . Is it possible or not please suggest as soon as possible its urgent.
    Please mail me how i can do like this @alok.ranjan@goodtest.com Thanks

  2. ZohoCRM
    I want to set criteria in Email creating time In email report .
    Criteria is that . In my Zoho Account Many many No of lead , When ever i mailed any lead . and saw email report it show previously subject and created time but I want single lead Contain only one with latest subject and email created time . Is it possible or not please suggest as soon as possible its urgent.
    Please mail me how i can do like this @alok.ranjan@goodtest.com Thanks

  3. We need to have the exact same manual criteria options in Mass Update as we do in Mass Email so we can accurately update custom fields that tell us when an email was sent, and description.Thanks,
    -Paul

  4. We need to have the exact same manual criteria options in Mass Update as we do in Mass Email so we can accurately update custom fields that tell us when an email was sent, and description.Thanks,
    -Paul

  5. Hi,
    I have just signed up to Professional Edition, and managed to send my first 200 emails yesterday, however today (24 hrs later) I cannot seem to send another batch. The message that comes up saysMesasge Sendign Failed .. reached maximum limitPlease let me know what to doThanks

  6. Hi,
    I have just signed up to Professional Edition, and managed to send my first 200 emails yesterday, however today (24 hrs later) I cannot seem to send another batch. The message that comes up saysMesasge Sendign Failed .. reached maximum limitPlease let me know what to doThanks

  7. Hi !
    I would like to send a mass email reminder to all the contact inscribed in a campaign wich has answered "yes". In the manual crieria, I can filter with "campaign name" but in addition, I would like to filter by campaign status. Is that possible ?
    Thanks for help
    Emeline

  8. Hi !
    I would like to send a mass email reminder to all the contact inscribed in a campaign wich has answered "yes". In the manual crieria, I can filter with "campaign name" but in addition, I would like to filter by campaign status. Is that possible ?
    Thanks for help
    Emeline

  9. Peter or other Zoho support,
    I have the same problem as Frank above. When trying to important Act! 6.0 contacts into ZohoCRM, the first name gets duplicated. Please send me the same instructions you sent to Frank, and anything else helpful for migrations from Act!.

  10. Peter or other Zoho support,
    I have the same problem as Frank above. When trying to important Act! 6.0 contacts into ZohoCRM, the first name gets duplicated. Please send me the same instructions you sent to Frank, and anything else helpful for migrations from Act!.

  11. I am a little stumped on some things in the Zoho CRM. Thanks to Gopal I now realize that you can include a manual criteria to filter contacts based upon their associated account. This should be available when creating a contact view, so there is no need to repeatedly enter the criteria each time, assuming you send email based on account information often as we do at our company.The Contact>Account "relationship" should be standardized throughout the application as most often we refer to an account before a contact.

  12. I am a little stumped on some things in the Zoho CRM. Thanks to Gopal I now realize that you can include a manual criteria to filter contacts based upon their associated account. This should be available when creating a contact view, so there is no need to repeatedly enter the criteria each time, assuming you send email based on account information often as we do at our company.The Contact>Account "relationship" should be standardized throughout the application as most often we refer to an account before a contact.

  13. Zoho CRMI am migrating ACT! records over to Zoho CRM for a client. ACT! uses a join field (X_CDBJOIN), which I have mapped to Zoho's "Contact ID" field. When I map ACT's first name field to Zoho's "First Name," I get a duplicate Contact view below on the Zoho "Contact Information" screen:Contact Name: Matthew Matthew DoeWhen I remove first name I only get the last name, "Doe" with no first name at all on the "Contact Information" screen.Any suggestions?

  14. Zoho CRMI am migrating ACT! records over to Zoho CRM for a client. ACT! uses a join field (X_CDBJOIN), which I have mapped to Zoho's "Contact ID" field. When I map ACT's first name field to Zoho's "First Name," I get a duplicate Contact view below on the Zoho "Contact Information" screen:Contact Name: Matthew Matthew DoeWhen I remove first name I only get the last name, "Doe" with no first name at all on the "Contact Information" screen.Any suggestions?

  15. Dear Adam Stone,I am happy to inform that we have implemented filtering of contacts by Accounts in our recent update. In Zoho CRM, yYou can find this option in Contacts > Contact Tools > Mass Mail Contacts > Manual Criteria.Please give a try and let us know your suggestions and comments.Regards,
    Gopal

  16. Dear Adam Stone,I am happy to inform that we have implemented filtering of contacts by Accounts in our recent update. In Zoho CRM, yYou can find this option in Contacts > Contact Tools > Mass Mail Contacts > Manual Criteria.Please give a try and let us know your suggestions and comments.Regards,
    Gopal

  17. Catherine, That is an issue with Zoho CRM and also thre is no ability to mass email contacts of a specific account type. This makes it impossible to send emails to "Prospects" in the system. However, the Zoho CRM team is aware of these limits and if I am confident they will be solved in the next release.

  18. Catherine, That is an issue with Zoho CRM and also thre is no ability to mass email contacts of a specific account type. This makes it impossible to send emails to "Prospects" in the system. However, the Zoho CRM team is aware of these limits and if I am confident they will be solved in the next release.

  19. I do agree with the ease-of-use of ZohoCRM to manage mass e-mailing. I have just noticed one missing feature : we cannot attach all contacts targeted through an e-mailing campaign to a ZohoCRM campaign and that would be great to keep that information in the Campaign table, to better analyze response level of a campaign !

  20. I do agree with the ease-of-use of ZohoCRM to manage mass e-mailing. I have just noticed one missing feature : we cannot attach all contacts targeted through an e-mailing campaign to a ZohoCRM campaign and that would be great to keep that information in the Campaign table, to better analyze response level of a campaign !

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