Salesforce Marketing Blog - March 2007

• Optimizing for Web Replay with Adobe/Breeze

  Kraig Swensrud Mar 9, 2007

  We recently posted a replay of our Marketing in the Google Era webinar to this blog.  We've now re-recorded the content in Adobe/Breeze/Flash format for rapid consumption and improved audio quality.

  Marketing in the Google Era: Webinar Recording (Abobe/Breeze)

  A Note to Marketers: The Adobe/Breeze format is great for easy consumption and replay of web presentations. The format loads quickly, works well in all major browsers, and allows the user to navigate easily between different sections of the presentation.  Another example, Google uses the Adobe/Breeze format their interactive training website.

  Our initial replay of this webinar was posted in Windows Media format, which has real and tangible drawbacks for distributing webinar-style content on the web:

  1. The Windows Media format assumes that the viewer has installed the Windows Media Player
  2. Windows Media forces a viewer to wait for the presentation to start playing. buffering...buffering...buffering. 
  3. Once playing, a viewer might want to  navigate to another spot in the presentation, but the standard Windows Media format does not provide a table of contents.  So perhaps the user clicks, and then again, buffering...buffering...buffering. 

  The real question is, how long before a visitor gets frustrated? On the web its about lowering barriers to adoption, and if your content is not easy to consume, it will not be consumed.

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• Associating Web Leads to a Campaign

  Kraig Swensrud Mar 9, 2007

  We recently decsribed the process of setting up web-to-lead forms on your website.  In addition, it is also quite simple to auto-associate inbound leads to a Campaign.  Every Campaign record in Salesforce has a unique ID, which can be found by looking at the Camapign detail record:

  

  Once you have the Campaign ID, simply insert an additional "hidden" field in your web-to-lead form that passes the campaign ID along with the form submission.

  

  Republish your enhanced form to your website and Salesforce will take care of the rest!  Every new lead submission from this form will be automatically associated to your Campaign.

  Additionally, we recommend creating unique landing pages for every marketing program.  This will allow you to optimize conversion rate by custom tailoring a landing pages to the offer(s) you present in your targeted email, advertising, events, or other.  Every landing page can contain unique Campaign ID field and auto-associate new leads to the appropriate Campaign.

  You can learn more about Salesforce's lead management features, and how Salesforce CRM Software as a Service can keep your sales lead processes optimized for sales growth.

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• Capturing Leads from Your Website

  Kraig Swensrud Mar 6, 2007

  Companies often contact us with basic questions about website name/lead capture forms.  To our surprise, many Salesforce customers are unaware of the standard web-to-lead functionality that comes out-of-the-box with every salesforce account. 

  There are a few simple steps to get started with website lead capture:

  (1) Enable Web-to-Lead functionality
  Enabling web-to-lead is a simple step that should take only a few sceonds.  Log into Salesforce and navigate to the setup area for web-to-lead (Setup > Customize > Leads > Web-to-Lead).  From here click on the hyperlink to enable web-to-lead for your organization.  You will be required to assign a default user as the lead creator for new inbound leads.

  

  (2) Create a Web-to-Lead form
  Salesforce does not host web pages for customers, but we do our best to make the process of creating a web-to-lead form as simple as possible.  From the web-to-lead setup area, you can get started by selecting the hyperlink labeled Generate the HTML.  You will be asked to select the Lead fields that you want to capture on your website, and specify a return URL.  The return URL is a web page where you direct visitors after they have filled out your web-to-lead form.  This is often a "thank you" page, a "download whitepaper" page, or something similar.

  

  (3) Cut and Paste the HTML
  Salesforce will generate a working HTML page that contains the web-to-lead form you generated.  It's not very beautiful, but it works!  From here, you can copy and paste the HTML and load it onto your site, or send it over to your web designer to apply your corporate stylesheet.  Here is a sample web-to-lead appearance after applying a corporate stylesheet:

   

  (4) Get Smart with Landing Pages
  A landing page is simply a web-to-lead page that is highly tailored to a specific offer. As a best practice, instead of driving users from programs to your homepage, we recommend that you create for every marketing program you run.  In addition, you can include Salesforce Campaign IDs in your web-to-lead forms and automatically associate inbound leads with email, search, telemarketing, or other programs.

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