Utilizing all of your data

Email marketing continues to be a great way to reach out to prospects and customers and many companies utilize multiple mail streams. Companies often have the following systems sending mail:

1. Welcome Messages for new subscribers
2. Transactional Messages such as password resets or receipts from purchases
3. Drip programs from a marketing automation system
4. Direct to customers via CRM

Depending on your company, you may have all of their email services routed through a single MTA to send out the mail so that the email data (bounce backs and unsubscribes) are centrally managed. This certainly sounds like a nice utopia for those who are able to achieve it but most likely, you have multiple services sending outbound mail.
A common issue with using multiple mail streams is that a user will sign up and receive a welcome letter, perhaps even make a purchase, then the user will change their email address. A sales associate may send the user an email reaching out to them and the message goes back to the CRM as a bounce. Then the marketing department may do a re-engagement campaign to market to past customers, and the user then bounces again. If you provide an online service, your application server may even identify users who have not logged in for 90 days and send them a message letting them know they still have an account.
As time goes on, the data on each of these mail streams becomes inaccurate. If the CRM knows the user no longer works at the company then it doesn’t make sense to include that user in the marketing efforts. ESPs are adding improvements to their systems so they can access the data from your other mail streams. MailChimp recently released their new list import workflow that allows integration to many online services such as Salesforce, Zoho, and Zendesk.
As a marketer, you want as much data as possible and you want your data to be as up-to-date as possible. If your ESP supports integration to other services you use, you should set the connection so that you gain the insight from those systems. If your ESP does not support integration, consider adding a weekly or monthly task to your to-do list to download the bounce/unsubscribe data from your various systems and share that data between all of your mail streams.