Summer Marketing Ideas Webinar

I was invited to co-present on VerticalResponse's Sizzling Summer Webinar Series earlier this summer. It's mostly relevant for small businesses focused on consumers in industries like retail, spa/salons, restaurant and hospitality, e-commerce, etc, however there are some good B2B ideas in there as well. The webinar features ideas on how to acquire new customers and boost the loyalty of existing ones through the use of tried and testing marketing techniques like email and postcard marketing, online surveys, word of mouth marketing, and more. Enjoy!

Video: VerticalResponse's Spring Marketing Conference

As I mentioned in my last post, I was invited to speak at VerticalResponse's Spring Marketing Conference back in April on the topic of Getting Started with VerticalResponse for Appexchange. The VerticalResponse for Appexchange product enables salesforce.com's customers to integrate email and postcard marketing, as well as online surveys with their salesforce.com account. The event was a huge success with over 300 people getting together to share ideas, exchange best practices, and really learn more about how they can get the most from an email marketing solution. Here's a clip of my presentation with Alex Scalisi, Director of Sales for VerticalResponse, on the importance of using an email service provider to ensure high deliverability and to maximize financial outcomes.

Speaking at VerticalResponse's Spring Marketing Conference, SF April 23

I'll be speaking at VerticalResponse's Spring Marketing Conference 2008 in San Francisco on April 23rd. Early Bird pricing ends Monday ($99) and the event is filling up. If you're wondering why the heck you should attend, here are a few reasons:

1. There will be a ton of email and direct marketing experts there to share ideas, pratical tips, and best practices.
2. You'll get to hear me blather on about how you can get started with VR for salesforce.com, to track email marketing from within your CRM app. Sweet.
3. They're going to announce a cool new product.
4. Network like a fool with 200 or so business folks. You’ll also meet the VerticalResponse team - good times.
5. You need a day away from the office.
6. In celebration of Small Business Week you'll be fed breakfast, lunch, and a few cocktails on VerticalResponse. Need I say more?!?!

Salesforce Ideas for the Rest of Us

One of the really cool new features that salesforce.com has made available with their Spring '08 release, is Salesforce Ideas. They launched salesforce ideas to their customers last year, and have been using it to drive development priorities ever since.

Now salesforce's customers can leverage that same functionality for their own employees, customers and partners. Post features or products that you're thinking about building and let the market dictate the prioirity level for each of them.

It's only available to Enterprise customers and above, since you'll need to enable the customer portal and/or partner portal to allow your constituents to log in and vote. But it's another great reason for Professional users to consider an upgrade.

I think the plan is to eventually allow non-customers and partners, i.e. the general public, to use it but I still think it's a cool feature.

Salesforce User Group Meeting - Bay Area

UPDATE - SLIDES POSTED - CLICK ON PRESENTATION HYPERLINK!

Today marked the first ever Salesforce.com Bay Area User Group meeting to take place in the morning, and it was a big success. Hosted by VerticalResponse, in their SF office, it drew a crowd of 40+ users from a broad range of industries (both commercial and non-profit) and edition users (group, professional, and enterprise).

Following an introduction by Jason Stewart, the Bay Area User Group leader, I kicked off the morning with a presentation on creating web-to-lead forms and auto-responder emails.





On behalf of our host, Alex Scalisi took the floor and touted the benefits of working with an email service provider like VerticalResponse to drive increased deliverability and ease of use. Jason was followed by Andrea Wildt, Sr. Product Mgr Salesforce Marketing, from salesforce.com, who demonstrated how to create advanced workflows for marketing. For instance, triggering an HTML email offering a total cost of ownership whitepaper one week after a lead is archived due to a lack of budget. Pretty powerful stuff.



There were lively debates over the virtues of HTML vs. plain text emails, with a focus on deliverability and trackability implications. The issue of designing emails for Blackberry users arose as well with the key takeaway being less image and text at the top of the email are key.

There was a lot of interaction and with only one sponsor presentation, it allowed for a lot more audience participation. Overall, it was a great event!

The Unsubscribe Mystery Resolved!

Have you ever had someone respond to an email marketing piece asking you to remove them from your list and complaining that they'd asked to opt-out numerous times, only to look them up in salesforce.com and find out that their opt-out box is ticked?

Well you're not alone. This was happening to me periodically with one of my clients and I couldn't figure it out. So of course the first thing I did was check my report criteria to see if opt-out was equal to false (which of course it was). Then after a lot of research, it finally hit me.

The person, who was a contact in salesforce, had been converted from a lead which meant that they were showing up on my lead report, and my contact report. Even though you can't get to or edit a converted lead, it still appears when you run a lead report! The lead hadn't been opted out, so the report was still picking them up. So if you're sending an email blast to a lead and a contact report, you could run into this issue.

The good news is that there is a super easy fix. Thanks to my buddy Jeremy over at VerticalResponse who pointed out that you can simply set your lead report criteria so that you're only getting unconverted leads. It's as simple as Converted is equal to False. Et voila!

Lead source vs. lead action - the saga continues

When we last left our hero, she was talking about the importance of tracking the true source of leads. Often I find that B2B marketers confuse the "how you found me" with the "what did you do once you did," resulting in lead source values such as GoogleAdwords and Webinar. Now I don't know about you, but generally I don't randomly show up for a Webinar unless I:

1) Saw a banner ad
2) Received an email or printed invitation
3) Cruised someone's website and found the listing
4) Received some kind of information from a friend or colleague

So it seems to be that a Webinar attendees true lead source would be one of the above. OK, now let's move onto the "what they did when they found you" aspect, or what I like to call Lead Action.

Lead action is a handy field which I use to track what someone did once they came in contact. That can be a Webinar Registration, Whitepaper Download, Contact Request, ROI Calculator, or even a Quote Request. If you're using salesforce.com for campaign and lead management, you can easily create a custom field on the leads tab to track this.

You can either make this a field that isn't to be over-ridden with new data, or make it a multi-select field so that each time they do something new, you can update that field. This would enable you to run reports to see of leads with converted information, which lead actions had they completed which could be very useful when determining which types of demand generation offers to go with for your next marketing campaign.