Triggered Emails, often called Drip Campaigns or Autoresponders, are a more personalized type of email marketing. Triggered Email Campaigns are messages that are much more personalized than email tactics because they are started by a specific event initiated by the web visitor.While a usual email marketing campaign includes a single message that is sent to a group at the same time. With triggered emailing, prospects receive a different message at a different time based on the actions they took on your website. This makes the emails more personal, relevant and more timely.With a little more planning and research, Triggered Email Campaigns help you to stay in touch with your website prospects and lead them down the sales funnel. Continue Reading…

A really great example from the NBA’s Phoenix Suns (via Eloqua’s All About Revenue blog) on how using unique and deep personalization in your email marketing can drive incredible results. The Suns like any other business are looking to drive revenue from email marketing and similar to many other businesses know that their best chance at success is with previous customers, in this case former season ticket holders.  In order to make a truly personal and unique connection to their former consumers the Suns marketing team took a look at all the information available to them about these previous customers in their CRM system and tried to mine it for the most personal connection they could make. With that goal in mind they landed on a piece of information available to them about every former season ticket holder that was also completely personal to the particular customer, the date of their first season ticket purchase.  Continue Reading…

Social CRM (CRM and Social networks mashed together) is now being offered by many different companies each with their own version of what they really consider it to be. While companies like Hearsay and Lithitum are building some terrific pieces of Social CRM, for Social and CRM to truly reach their married potential there needs to be a deeper level of integration between social and existing enterprise CRM systems.

I make the jump directly to the enterprise because while small businesses may be able to nimbly move between CRM systems until they land on the correct SASS solution, enterprise companies have legacy systems with possibly millions of customer records. There is no desire, nor ability to move to a platform built for small business. Thus they are left with silos of information and can not have a full view of their customers. How then can companies begin to integrate social with their current CRM systems?

I believe that the absolute vital first step in integrating social and enterprise CRM, the lynchpin if you will, is contact profile matching. Continue Reading…