Extending Campaign Support in Salesforce
So, you’re a Salesforce.com user, and you have come to appreciate the power of the app for managing your prospective and existing customers. Have you used it for marketing yet? Salesforce.com allows you to create campaigns that target specific leads and contacts. You can also create email templates and send mass emails to all the members of a campaign. On first glance, this level of support might seem to be sufficient for most businesses, but let’s look at the limitations.
For one, Salesforce limits you to 1,000 external emails per day. And the number of addresses you can specify in a single mass email may hit a lower limit than that, depending on which edition of Salesforce you are using:
| Edition | Limit |
| Professional | 250 |
| Enterprise | 500 |
| Unlimited | 1,000 |
Salesforce imposes these limits because they don’t want you using mass emails for marketing. According to their Campaigns FAQ, their mass email is designed for “small-scale sales and support mailings, not for marketing purposes.” They recommend the use of third-party services for sending mass emails for marketing campaigns.
Whether or not you feel you can work within these limits, third-party services offer a lot of other features that can help you target your campaigns more precisely and track their effectiveness. Do a search on the AppExchange, and you’ll find all kinds of marketing apps already integrated with Salesforce.com.
ExactTarget (http://email.exacttarget.com/) is just one of these.
ExactTarget provides a marketing communication platform that enables users to develop campaign messages and send them to recipients specified in Salesforce.com campaigns or reports. This is essentially the same level of support that Salesforce provides, without any limit to the number of messages you can send. But look at some of the additional features ExactTarget offers:
- Send text (SMS) and voice messages as well as email
- Send messages on behalf of your sales team, franchisees, etc.
- Send messages when the target audience is most receptive to them, e.g. in response to a click on your website
- Tailor messages based on target demographics, purchase history, website activity, etc.
- Leverage content from your website in your email messages
- Preview your messages in various email clients, such as Outlook and Yahoo!
- Track campaign effectiveness via reports in Salesforce
Besides being integrated with Salesforce.com, ExactTarget is also integrated with Web analytics providers, including Google Analytics and Omniture SiteCatalyst. This is key to knowing how your prospects are interacting with your marketing content and providing them with the right messages at the right times.
There are three versions of ExactTarget on the AppExchange:
- Email Marketing – provides core features
- Distributed Organization – provides features enabling coordination in larger organizations to ensure brand compliance and message consistency
- Advanced Marketing Automation – provides features for automating multi-channel marketing campaigns
The apps themselves are free, but a paid ExactTarget subscription is required before you can install them and make them work. In addition to the annual subscription fee, a per-message fee is charged.
You will probably need IT resources for the initial setup. After that, ExactTarget, like Salesforce.com, is designed to be managed by business users.
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