19

Nov

E-mail Marketing: Salesforce and VerticalResponse

Posted by: Carolyn Young

We discussed our initial experiences with configuring Responsys with Salesforce a few months ago, but since Responsys is no longer listed in Salesforce’s AppExchange we thought you might be interested in another service we currently use.

We recently began using VerticalResponse for AppExchange (for Salesforce) to keep in touch with periodic e-mails to some Salesforce Contacts and Leads. We were already using VerticalResponse to for e-mail marketing on behalf of a few clients, so the decision to integrate it with Salesforce for internal use made sense.

Setting up VerticalResponse within Salesforce was a breeze compared to Responsys. It took a matter of minutes, and we were ready to send out e-mails to our Salesforce Leads and Contacts in short time.

However, like any software product, there are pros and cons:

Pros:

• Their reporting capabilities for e-mail marketing are more extensive than what Salesforce offers by itself
• You can create more professional and visually appealing e-mails than the Salesforce e-mail templates allow
• The support department is pretty quick to respond and they offer a Live Chat feature (my personal preference)

Cons:

• The formatting of the e-mails can be a little tricky if you are not an HTML expert, but we have found that to be the case with many of the e-mail marketing tools we use
• E-mail statistics have to be manually synched to update the status on Lead and/or Contact pages
• Interface runs fairly slowly within Salesforce
• Switching your contact e-mail in Salesforce can result in the “hiding” of past e-mail statistics associated with the other e-mail (statistics are specific to an e-mail address). This is probably more of a ‘note’ than a ‘con’ depending on how you want to use the system.

The best reason to try out VerticalResponse for AppExchange is that it is free to install and they usually have a promotion offering 500 free emails when you sign up. We will continue to use it until we are confident there is a better alternative for e-mail marketing within Salesforce. Let us know if you think there is a superior solution, we are always interested in hearing about your experiences too.