In my experience the first step in extending Salesforce beyond it’s native Salesforce Automation (SFA) functionality is to being using Salesforce to drive outbound messaging initiatives. (Unless you do direct mail, this is essentially a fancy way of saying email marketing). Below is a quick overview of the options available to a Salesforce user when investigating the tools to accomplish your marketing needs. Note, the below is heavily simplified!
Native salesforce email
This is the simplest and cheapest way to begin your email efforts, but it has many limitations. Salesforce limits you to 1000 emails a day, meaning your list needs to be very small. It also does not provide link tracking, meaning you can’t track simple metrics like click through rate, or who clicked on what.
The most meaningful use case for native salesforce email is to support simple triggered and transactional emails, or emails that need to pull complex data from your object model. These emails will let you send thank you emails for signing up on a web form, automated follow-ups from sales, reminder emails for renewals, etc. These triggered emails can also be programed using Visualforce, meaning Apex controllers can pull data from across your data model to populate an email. No matter what marketing automation program we recommend, we often need to use these emails for a clients complex email requirements.
Integrated email service provider
The most common way of extending Salesforce is through the use of a 3rd party email service provider (ESP). There are a growing number of these tools, and most support simple integrations which pull the contact table, or integrate through the campaign member record. Note: when using these 3rd party tools, make sure your Salesforce data usage doesn’t explode.
I almost always recommend ExactTarget for this kind of mass email. ExactTarget has a much deeper integration with Salesforce than any other ESP. Specifically, ExactTarget integrates with Salesforce reports, and allows filtering by the campaign member status field. It also supports the exclusion of contacts contained in a report. These tools allow you to make very detailed segments.
‘Drip marketing’
If you want to go one step beyond the process of defining a list and sending out an email, you’ll need to look into tools that support more advanced marketing automation, commonly known as drip marketing. Standard uses cases are a new lead welcome program, a defined lead nurturing campaign, triggering an email based on the link a contact clicks on, etc. If your volume is higher than 1000 emails a day, or require email link tracking, you’ll need to look into a more advanced version of ExactTarget, or a marketing automation system like Eloqua, Genus, Marketto, Pardot, and others.
Integrated marketing automation
Last on the list is a fully integrated marketing automation system. These powerful applications support many different marketing tools that go far beyond email. Tools like Eloqua, Marketto, and others offer marketers: deep and customizable integration with Salesforce, landing pages, email, web analytics integration, lead scoring, complex marketing automation programs, social media, campaign ROI tracking, etc. These tools require significant buy-in from the marketing team as they can be pricey and complex to implement.
Great article Andrew! My organization, Groundwire, is an Exact Target reseller so I certainly agree that it is “the” enterprise solution for high-functioning organizations with significant email marketing needs. Many of the nonprofits that I work with, however, don’t require many of the robust features that ExactTarget provides, but are interested in drip email. To get drip features from ExactTarget, you’re looking at paying more than $10K per year, give or take a few thousand and depending on whether or not your organization is eligible for a nonprofit discounted rate.
We’ve found a viable alternative that fits between ExactTarget’s core and advanced features, and offers a slick drip email interface that doesn’t take a consultant to configure. The platform is PredictiveResponse: http://www.predictiveresponse.com/
Lastly, Groundwire conducted a fairly comprehensive review of email marketing solutions with an eye towards Salesforce integration. You can find that report here: http://groundwire.org/resources/articles/email-service-provider-comparison-report-2010
It’s my hope that Salesforce’s native email capabilities vastly improve. I think it’s ridiculous that Salesforce forces you to rely on ISVs for blasting more than 1000 people, and doesn’t track metrics.
Thanks Dave for the link to the report, very interesting. I don’t think Salesforce will be improving it’s email service. Salesforce is not in the business of email marketing, deliverability management, etc. It also provides Salesforce an ecosystem of 3rd party vendors, and I don’t they they are going to stomp on these partners.
I agree that the advanced features of ExactTarget can be excessive for NFP’s. However I’ve installed it into 2 NFP’s simply because of the report based integration. This keeps the Salesforce data much, much cleaner, and allows you to use the power of Salesforce reports. I just keep making the case for the slight increase in cost, because it saves tones of time done the road. (people hate moving lists around, including contacts into a campaign is still manual and often harder then people suspect, etc.)