Marketing Automation Services, Demand Generation, and Lead Management | Allinio
We’ve scoured many reviews about the other week’s great Dreamforce event put on by Salesforce. Gary Honig (@GaryHonig) brought to our attention a great blogpost from an unlikely (from a private sector perspective) source: GovLoop, a social network for the government community to connect and share information. In this blogpost, “The Top 5 Things I Learned from the Biggest Tech Conference in the U.S.,” Mike Bernard (@Bernster) gives his take on the importance of Dreamforce.
Lead Follow-Up, a niche solution available on the Salesforce AppExchange, for the past four years, has hundreds of small business customers. We took a look at the app and think it’s a decent entrée into Marketing Automation for a number of reasons: First, it offers a 30-day trial followed by month-to-month credit card billing; second, the billing is at very attractive price points for small businesses, especially sole proprietors ($29.95 up to #69.95); third, it performs basic drip marketing and allows other triggered events; and lastly, it is no more complex than the Salesforce platform it is integrated with. Allinio recently spoke with Colin Goldberg, the President of MacMicro, which developed Lead Follow-Up…
Based "Bowl of Clouds" by Kevin Dooley
In 2000, The Marketing Consigliere configured an application for a small startup’s sales group using a cool new tool called Salesforce.com. Most sales organizations were using spreadsheets and flat databases (and a lot still are) so the idea of what was known at the time as an ASP-based offering was very unique. The startup is long gone from this earth, but Salesforce has grown to be a billion dollar company in those ten years. And now they’re “in the Cloud.” What a wonderful, huge, awesome cloud that is becoming. [Read more...]
The trend towards personalization in the B2C arena is gathering momentum. This week an interesting announcement made the trade press regarding the famous brand Brooks Brothers – They are working with direct marketing company MBS to bring a unique one-to-one solution to their customers. Using MBS’ Klondike relational database, Brooks Brothers will be able to integrate data from their call center, brick and mortar, and online efforts. By also leveraging data modeling, data mining, and web analytics, Brooks Brothers will be able to induce the morphogenesis of its current web storefront into a private “virtual closet,” which will depict all of a customer’s clothing and accessories purchased. With such a visibility into this “virtual closet,” the customer or their favorite sales associate can review the wardrobe and make recommendations on new buys.
The personalization of the brand experience with Brooks Brothers seems to be a positive step for such a revered brand, espeically since brand management generally tends to be a risk averse discipline. What could make this even more effective would be the inclusion of Personalized URLs (PURLs) for the virtual closets. In a perfect world, a PURL is an easy to remember or recognize URL that an individual will associate as “theirs” because it uniquely identifies them as the “owner” of the online destination it represents.
While some Marketing folks think that “johndoe.abccompany.com” is a PURL, technically that is incorrect – that is a subdomain. A true PURL would look like “www.abccompany.com/johndoe” and once clicked on would be able to dynamically generate content that is unique to that person, based on the combination of data fields referred to in the CRM tool that a marketer is using.
PURLs have been around a while, and while very popular with email campaigns, are bringing new life to direct print marketers. The term “variable print marketing” basically means that marketers can conduct lead generation or campaign management events with the production of direct mail pieces that are unique to each and every customer. Vendors such as PrintSf.com take this to an amazing level using XMPie‘s dynamic personalization engine. For example, a Net-Centric Marketing professional can dynamically assign variable graphics, relevant content and personalized information on both sides of a postcard – in very sensational fonts.
Now multiply that by the number of records in your CRM platform (In PrintSf.com’s case, they are an AppExchange partner with Salesforce.com), and you see that the possibilities are limitless. With a call-to-action that requires visiting a dynamically generated PURL on each piece, the Marketer can now know exactly who is responding to a particular campaign and what they are doing on the landing page, which also can be personalized and optimized using tools from such popular vendors as Hubspot and Lyris.
The personalization of communications between brands and their customers will hopefully be creating more stronger relationships in the future. You will be seeing more of this and if you haven’t received a direct marketing piece with your name in a PURL, you probably will in 2009.
The past few weeks have been so hectic the Marketing Consigliere has let his blogging slip but he is still able to keep his personal goal of blogging about marketing and technology every month for an entire year .
His latest absence from the blogosphere is this: He is working with a turnaround management team at a VC-backed startup in the space that he has been blogging about, so he is extremely happy but busy.
OnDialog is in the SaaS space and offers Marketers the ability to create custom landing pages, microsites, and personalized URLs (PURLs) that increase probability of conversion and customer loyalty.
Integrated with Salesforce and SugarCRM, the OnDialog “LP” product is a tool for Net-Centric Marketing that should be in every Marketer’s toolkit, but perhaps the Marketing Consigliere is a bit biased.
He had the pleasure to travel to the west coast to go on sales calls with one of their reps. Since the company is a member of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, he was totally psyched when he visited their Bay Area incubator. Being the Friday afternoon of the Memorial Day weekend, it was quite empty, but one stalwart soul was still working and all he can say is that the app is so cool he can see why.
Greg Goldfarb of Ribbit demonstrated his baby – an AppExchange tool that takes phone call voice messages and routes them into Salesforce. These audio and voice-to-text files can then be assigned to contacts in the application
It is an extremely helpful tool that takes “offline” data and includes in a network centric marketing world. Greg, keep on building this great C4ISR Marketing app for Sales pros!
