Salesforce Marketing Blog
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Salesforce Sites Event Registration Pages (Summer 09 part 3)
Jun 30, 2009Salesforce just launched Force.com Sites and it's free for all Enterprise and Unlimited Edition subscribers! Here's a great intro to Force.com Sites, including some possibilities for driving value to your organization leveraging it's power:
My favorite application of Sites is creating landing pages that directly update responses in Salesforce campaigns. Some advantages of using Sites for response capture on landing pages:
- Fewer duplicate leads
- Cleaner response data
- Secure, hosted, and scalable
Sites minimizes dupe leads by updating the campaign member record directly instead of creating a duplicate lead that has to be merged back to the original lead or contact. Sites is a clean, hassle-free way to create webforms because any picklist option you add in Salesforce is immediately available on the web form. This means if you add an option to a "Product Interest" custom field on campaign member in Salesforce, this product can immediately appear on the Sites pages your prospects and customers see, minimizing maintenance and creating a simple way to keep data clean. Finally, Sites is battle tested against security threats and huge traffic spikes so you can rest easy your customers will have a consistent experience.
Now we'll get into the meat: how to leverage Sites for event registration pages and set up your first page. Using examples from the last post, you can set up workflow rules to email anyone added to a campaign. By the end of this post, you'll know how to include smart links in those emails to drive prospects to your campaign member Sites Event pages, and automatically update responses from those pages such as this example:
http://jdk470.force.com/?id=00v3000000JIrl6AAD
To get there, we'll explore the 3 key pieces to your first site page:
1) Set up your email links to include campaign member Id's in the URL
2) Set up Force.com Sites security permissions to allow access to relevant campaign members
3) Set up your Visualforce page to tie to campaign members -
Batting Averages and Clickthrough Rates
Apr 5, 2007
John Gartner is obviously a fan of the book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,
as am I. Moneyball is a book by Michael M. Lewis released in 2003
about the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane, and
his team's approach to running the organization. One of the central
tenants of Moneyball, is that in the game of baseball, real statistical
analysis has shown that on base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and that avoiding an out is more important than getting a hit. In his article, Do Your Metrics Measure Up,
John analogizes a batting average in baseball, to a clickthrough ratio
for marketers. This begs the question, which metrics are most
important to your marketing organization? The Internet has fundamentally changed the way we all live an work. This has never been more true for marketers. As marketing dollars and advertising spend has shifted from Madison Avenue to Amphitheatre Parkway, marketers can measure almost every aspect of the performance of their marketing programs in real-time. One of the potential effects of this, aside from Google's repeated quarterly revenue home runs, is a potentially overwhelming amount of statistical information associated with your various marketing programs. If you get lost in a sea of stats, and lose track of what is important, it is very easy to miss your targets, which in the b2b world is likely along the lines of pipeline, revenue, and profitability.
John's article certainly shares our mindset. While clickthrough rates, quality scores, and conversion rates are key metrics to track closely, if you live in the b2b world, be careful not to get so bogged down in the myriad of metrics that you lose sight of your original goals:
Driving new leads, pipeline, revenue, and profitability for your organization.
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Optimizing for Web Replay with Adobe/Breeze
Mar 9, 2007We 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:
- The Windows Media format assumes that the viewer has installed the Windows Media Player
- Windows Media forces a viewer to wait for the presentation to start playing. buffering...buffering...buffering.
- 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
Mar 9, 2007We 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
Mar 6, 2007Companies 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. -
Marketing in the Google Era, Part 1
Feb 28, 2007Thank you for the overwhelming attendance and feedback from yesterdays Marketing in the Google Era webinar. Here you will find the details from yesterdays presentation.
Marketing in the Google Era: Webinar Slides (Adobe PDF, 5.5MB)
Marketing in the Google Era: Webinar Recording (Abobe Breeze Presenter, Streaming)
Also, many of you have asked us for the 7 techniques reviewed in the webinar, the bookmark set and blogroll that was listed at the end of the presentation.
Bookmark Set: http://del.icio.us/kswensrud
Blogroll: http://www.bloglines.com/public/kswensrudSpread the word:
Bookmark in del.icio.us 
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Traditional Media Drives Web traffic
Feb 16, 2007In the Era of Trackable media, one red hot advertising trend is using traditional forms of media to drive new web traffic. From TV spots, to magazine ads, to newspaper columns, to direct mailers, to freeway billboards, marketers are trying to push consumers from traditional media onto the Internet.
If you dont normally think about this kind of stuff, try being conscious of it for the next 24 hours. You will notice that a clear shift that is upon us.
On the Internet, marketers can design a more targeted, relevant, interactive, and longer lasting experience (the famous example: Burger King's subservient chicken). Most importantly, marketers can measure every detail of a website visit. Every impression, every click, and every clickstream is logged, recorded and replayed. Free services such as Google analytics will tell you who is on your site, when they arrived, where they came from, what they clicked on, how long they stayed, and hundreds of other metrics that allow a marketer to dissect patterns and measure interest and behavior.
Simply put, what happens on the Web is trackable.
Think back a few weeks to the Super Bowl, the most significant day of the year in television advertising. Countless numbers of TV spots were used by marketers to drive viewers from TV to the web.
Naturally, it makes sense for companies like GoDaddy.com to drive web traffic, their site is a domain selling storefront, so new web traffic = new customers. (OK, GoDaddy may not be the best example, they have a history of using half-naked cheerleaders and tangling with TV censorship in an effort to drive web traffic.)
Take another example, this year Doritos ran a Crash the Superbowl program, creating an interactive microsite that allowed consumers to design a superbowl ad by uploading video. The final super bowl ads were picked out of the thousands of submissions:
And guess what consumers wanted to do after they watched the winning ads? They went to work on Monday and spent half the day on the Doritos website watching the ads that missed the cut.
USA today reports that in 2006, only one company, Blockbuster, noticably asked viewers to come to its website. This year, nearly all super bowl ads were designed to engage web behavior, both before and after the commercial aired on TV. The idea is simple, hook the visitor on TV and drive them onto the web where the consumer can have a longer lasting and interactive experience.
Even in cases such as the controversial Snickers ad/website, the content itself backfired, but the desire to drive web traffic was clear.
People are living significant portions of their life online, both at work and at home. As the web encroaches on traditional media, marketers need to rethink the bridge between online and traditional programs, and how they plan to enhance offline campaigns with online content.
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The Era of Trackable Media
Feb 16, 2007Imagine this scenario: Manufacturing wants to build a new facility that’s designed to increase capacity and decrease defects. In order to execute the project, they need $10M from management. Management (of course) asks manufacturing for an ROI model for the project.
Manufacturing’s response: We don’t have an ROI model, but we can promise you’ll like the way it’ll look.
Hard to believe? Well, it happens just about every day across corporate America, but not in manufacturing. It happens in marketing. Every day, marketers spend millions on advertising investments with uncertain (and worse, largely unmeasured) return.
They don’t do this by choice. They do it because advertising was forced by circumstance to develop the now time honored habit of investing serious dollars in untrackable media. Print ads with no response component. Big TV spend. David Ogilvy popularized John Wanamaker’s astute observation that:
Mr. Wanamaker, Mr. Ogilvy, meet the largest trackable advertising system ever invented, the Web. Now you can know. And not only can you know what worked, you can know which investments drove the highest response rates and which others drove the highest quality return. You can tune your advertising investments to your business needs.
The era of trackable media is here...Major ad budgets are shifting online, and Google's acquisition of YouTube starts to make sense.
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The Web is a Marketing Platform
Feb 11, 2007The Web is a marketers paradise. A community of connected individuals talking, reading, publishing, collaborating, syndicating, discovering, and sharing information around the world and around the clock. A community where every individual participates by contritbuting content, tags, links, descriptions, comments, bookmarks, and opinions.
So when we came across this video on You Tube last week, we figured there was no better way to kick off the new Salesforce Marketing blog:
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
The video is itself informative, describing the changes that are at the very heart of the web and the internet marketing revolution. Even more interesting is the manner in which this information is disseminated. The format is video, published for free on You Tube. Over the course of 10 days, the community has viewed the video 806,077 times, posted 2749 comments, and republished the video or the link on countless other websites and blogs (such as this one) that resyndicate the content via RSS.
To take it a step further, search engines crawl the web and index its content and links. As of the date of this post, the video ranks #4 out of 164,000,000 search results for the term "web 2.0 video" ...and it all happened in a matter of days
It really makes you think. If your prospects and your customers are online, how are you reaching them? How are you disseminating your message and interacting with your community?
The Salesforce Marketing blog is designed to help marketers answer this question and discover new ways to take advantage of the web as a marketing platform. Stay tuned.
- The Salesforce Marketing Team
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