GreenRope Makes CRM and Email Marketing a Snap

In the age of Instagram contests, email newsletters and a tweeting president, no one can argue that the internet is a powerful platform. For businesses – whether small or international – social media and email marketing can drive thousands of people to stores or websites. More powerful than flyers or radio spots, the internet is a company’s biggest asset... or crippling liability, if they fail to understand CRM.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, a term that refers to how a business manages and analyzes their customer interactions. The goal of CRM is to optimize business-customer relations with the hope of eventually increasing revenue. A good CRM system can make or break a company, and no one does CRM better than GreenRope.

GreenRope is a San Diego-based CRM company that combines marketing, sales and operations management into one user-friendly platform. Depending on the plan, GreenRope starts at $149 a month, but that price tag buys users a lot: some of the features offered by GreenRope include email marketing, sales and marketing automation, lead and project management, surveys, predictive analysis, social media, websites – and that’s just the beginning. With entrepreneur Lars Helgeson at the helm, GreenRope has grown into a successful business.

Designed with their clients in mind, GreenRope takes the complex, multi-faceted world of CRM and allows all of the pieces to converge in one, strong place – and actually, that’s how GreenRope got its name. Says CEO Lars Helgeson, "Green is for revenue and sustainability, and the rope is because many strands make a rope strong. The more things you connect to the system, the stronger your business." With a laugh, Helgeson adds, "I also thought [the name GreenRope] was something people might remember."

GreenRope is memorable, but for more than their distinct name. The CRM company is the only software platform in the world that brings marketing, sales and operations management together in one place. Now international, GreenRope is used in 42 countries, with over a thousand businesses using the software across numerous industries. Some, like Cal State San Marcos, the Better Business Bureau and yes, even FINE Magazine, are local. Other companies are oceans away. "Globally, we have Elon Musk’s Hyperloop project using our system," explains Helgeson. "We work with manufacturing companies in Europe, universities in Europe... all different kinds of industries."

GreenRope is designed to help businesses run more efficiently, create more revenue and grow quickly by giving consumers access to large amounts of previously inaccessible data. GreenRope analyzes client trends and behavior, showing companies where their interests lie to increase more targeted marketing. Adds Helgeson, "The trick is to do more than just send a monthly email newsletter because everyone gets so much email that they likely won’t take action from that newsletter."

How is this done? For each email a user sends out, GreenRope analyzes what every recipient does. Do they open the email? Click on a link? What happens after they click on the link? Do they visit key pages on your website that indicate they are interested in buying from you? The software tracks their actions and lets GreenRope users develop a clear picture of their clients. Adds Helgeson, "It’s about detailed analytics but also what you do with the analytics. The real value is being able to say ‘I know this person has taken an action, and I can drive something specific that I know they want across [their screen].’"

GreenRope provides a slew of in- formation that can be used to increase customer relations – and ultimately revenue – in one location. In fact, the hardest part about using GreenRope is spending a few hours setting it up. But once the CRM system is running, it’s well worth it. According to Helgeson, "Our average customer has an increase in revenue of 75% in the first 12 months." With returns that high, GreenRope has a potential Midas-touch for any small business – it turns client leads into gold.

Much of GreenRope’s success can be attributed to the company’s found- er and CEO Lars Helgeson. Fueled by his determination and passion for efficiency, Helgeson always knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur – though his degrees certainly don’t show that. Helgeson originally earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Mechanical

Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. It wasn’t until 2000 that Helgeson earned his Masters in Business Administration from University of New Mexico – by that point, Helgeson was deep in the entrepreneurial world, though he didn’t plan on starting a CRM company. "I was experimenting with different models and different businesses that failed," Helgeson explains. "One was an art-related website. I helped a friend start a company that did medical video software... It was sort of stabbing around and trying different things."

While some of Helgeson’s early business ventures didn’t pan out, the experience taught him a lot about the online market. Take, for example, his original art-related website, which Helgeson launched in the late ‘90s. Says Helgeson, "[We wanted to] come up with a centralized place for people to sell their art, create some efficiency in the market and help artists get their names out there. As it turns out, people buy art for the emotional connection – it’s really hard to convey the emotional side of art through a computer screen." It’s a valuable lesson, one that all business-owners need to learn nowadays: online marketing and online businesses operate differently than in-person marketing.

It was in 2000 when Helgeson hit pay dirt, expanding on a burgeoning industry: email marketing. Helgeson and his team launched Cooler Email – which would eventually be absorbed into Helgeson’s GreenRope – and never looked back. The road to success wasn’t guaranteed, as there was trepidation surrounding the launch of an email marketing company. Says Helgeson, "Back in those days, email [was] free, so why would anyone pay for it? We had to take a chance, and it turned out that yes, we could sell email. We were one of the first email marketing companies. From there, our knowledge of the market and what businesses need in understanding their marketing and sales grew."

Starting an email marketing company was a gamble, but it’s one that paid off; Cooler Email became GreenRope in 2011, growing into an efficient and necessary tool for most businesses to succeed. "It was a gradual evolution over seventeen years of first doing email, and then realizing how businesses need to use the information to grow," explains Helgeson. "That’s been the fuel behind our business – it’s customer-driven. We always focus on what we can do to help make our [users’] lives easier."

Now, seventeen years later, Lars Helgeson is an expert at email marketing and CRM – so much so that he wrote CRM for Dummies (2017) about how to best optimize analytics into what he calls complete CRM. Adds Helgeson, "[You take] a complete view of your business, a complete view of your leads, a complete view of your clients, and [you] bring them into a single place [to] understand what your relationships are like."

Customer ease, efficiency and happiness – it’s that, almost altruistic, end goal in mind that has led Lars Helgeson and GreenRope to where they are today. It’s engendered loyalty from thousands of users around the world, seen the company through evolution as the times change and allowed GreenRope to stay fiercely independent. Says Helgeson, "We’ve never taken any venture funding. We own the whole company and all of the technology." And why is owning the company outright important to Helgeson? "We’re able to stay customer-focused because we don’t have the [pressure] of needing to get investors their money back. I don’t want to sacrifice the high-level of customer service."

GreenRope isn’t skimping on available services for their clients. In addition to webinars, articles and live training sessions, GreenRope offers users 24 hour access to their support team through email, as well as 7am–10pm access via phone and online chats. Any questions are quickly answered by the GreenRope team, and that’s by Helgeson’s design. "A lot of people say, ‘Oh, you can’t take business personally,’ but I do," Helgeson says. "Whether someone is happy or unhappy, I take the ups and downs very personally. I want everyone to be happy."

The stellar customer service, user-friendly design and detailed analytics make GreenRope one of the most important tools a business can have nowadays – and that certainly leads to customer happiness. Adds Helgeson, "Maybe it’s a little bit of an ego thing, but I want our customers to love us. We know that [GreenRope] works. It’s just a matter of getting the companies we work with to adopt it into their culture. When they do, it’s transformational." And of course it is – by weaving the strands of email marketing and CRM together, Helgeson has created a rope strong enough to pull a business into the green.

CRM for Dummies

How did Lars Helgeson get the idea for CRM for Dummies? "I realized before I wrote my book that [the For Dummies series] had different versions of CRM: Microsoft for Dummies, Salesforce for Dummies and more. No one had ever written a book that was straight-up CRM.

"What I found in the industry is that when you ask ten people what CRM means to them, they’ll give ten different answers. It’s partially because universities only started offering courses in CRM in past year or two. It’s such a core component to every business, but everything is all learned experientially. I figured if we could take a basic approach to how all of these components fit together, we could help a business understand what it’s supposed to do.

"The "R" in CRM is "Relationships," and you want to create a single place to understand what those relationships are and where they come from. With the concepts behind complete CRM, you can tie your business together and understand how every [aspect] of your business impacts another." 

You can learn more about GreenRope, expanding your business’s reach and CEO Lars Helgeson at GreenRope's website. 

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