Some of the most popular apps in any business are contact management apps like Google, iCloud, and Outlook. These apps are a valuable way of keeping your address book accessible on any device and syncing it with your email, calendar and cloud storage.
However, when it comes to making sure they work well with your other business apps, it’s not always easy.
For example, let’s say you’re collecting contacts in Outlook, but want to move subscribed customers to Mailchimp and send them your weekly newsletter. To solve this problem in the past, you may have manually exported and imported CSV files between your apps before sending each email.
But that can be a real headache. There’s a much better solution that doesn’t involve manual updates and spreadsheets: integrating your contact apps and email marketing tool with a native integration solution.
It’s the most effective and easiest way to connect your email marketing lists and contact apps to your latest data. And it doesn’t require any code or advanced technical know-how.
Let us show you how to sync your data and use your Google, iCloud and Outlook contacts in your email marketing app.
Look for a complete sync solution.
Some email marketing providers offer native integrations with Google Contacts, iCloud, and Outlook, but be aware of their limitations. Often it is only a one-way synchronization, i.e. changes in App A are synchronized with App B, but not the other way around. Or, you can’t customize the sync to include the exact fields you need to map.
Instead of wrestling with CSVs and native integrations, it’s best to Use full data synchronization to control how your data flows between apps. After you’ve connected your apps, you can choose the different ways you want them to communicate with each other.
For example, you can use Operations Hub to sync contacts named “Customers” in Google Contacts with HubSpot, or sync all of your address books with your CRM to give your sales reps a complete picture.
How to organize your lists and sequences with automatic segmentation
Some people organize their contacts in completely different clouds, especially when they want to keep personal and business contacts separate. That’s perfectly fine and can be a great way to keep things simple.
However, if your contacts overlap for different purposes, you can also auto-segment them to keep things organized.
You do this by organizing contacts with labels or tags in your address book and matching them with labels, groups or lists in your email marketing app in your sync.
Let’s take a closer look at an example. I have a group of contacts in Google Contacts with the Company label. To make sure these contacts (and only these) are synced with HubSpot, I can set up the following sync rules:
If I send a message to this group now, all the right recipients will be there. That means more time actually sending emails and less time asking which contacts to receive.
How to sync subscription status between apps
When you use multiple apps to contact your email marketing list, knowing who actually wants to hear from you can be a real problem. You don’t want to risk contacting people who have signed out of another app or ignoring contacts who want to be contacted.
Your answer to that is subscription management, and it becomes possible when you connect your apps.
When you sync your contact information, you can allow each contact to travel between apps with a “subscribed” or “unsubscribed” tag. When it’s time to send your next email, all the right people are on the list (or they are no more).
How to enrich data in your email marketing app
It’s not just subscription status that you can sync between apps. You may also want to synchronize other fields.
Let’s look at syncing contacts from Outlook to HubSpot, which you can use to send marketing emails. To make sure that the correct information is being synced with each contact, you can check the field mapping to make sure everything is correct.
If a field isn’t on the list by default, custom fields give you more freedom. As an example of a custom field, you could map the Department field in Outlook to a HubSpot property for the same data. For custom fields to map correctly, they must be compatible with both apps.
Get the most out of data synchronization
How to easily sync your address books in Outlook, iCloud or Google Contacts with your email marketing app. After you’ve set up your sync, you can sit back and send emails with the best conversions knowing your lists are in tip top shape.
Now that you’ve synced your email marketing app with your contact address books, you can also decide which other apps to sync – like your CRM or customer support software. Remember, the best software stack is an integrated one.
