In my experience the first step in extending Salesforce beyond it’s native Salesforce Automation (SFA) functionality is to being using Salesforce to drive outbound messaging initiatives. (Unless you do direct mail, this is essentially a fancy way of saying email marketing). Below is a quick overview of the options available to a Salesforce user when investigating the tools to accomplish your marketing needs. Note, the below is heavily simplified!
Native salesforce email
This is the simplest and cheapest way to begin your email efforts, but it has many limitations. Salesforce limits you to 1000 emails a day, meaning your list needs to be very small. It also does not provide link tracking, meaning you can’t track simple metrics like click through rate, or who clicked on what.
The most meaningful use case for native salesforce email is to support simple triggered and transactional emails, or emails that need to pull complex data from your object model. These emails will let you send thank you emails for signing up on a web form, automated follow-ups from sales, reminder emails for renewals, etc. These triggered emails can also be programed using Visualforce, meaning Apex controllers can pull data from across your data model to populate an email. No matter what marketing automation program we recommend, we often need to use these emails for a clients complex email requirements.
Integrated email service provider
The most common way of extending Salesforce is through the use of a 3rd party email service provider (ESP). There are a growing number of these tools, and most support simple integrations which pull the contact table, or integrate through the campaign member record. Note: when using these 3rd party tools, make sure your Salesforce data usage doesn’t explode.
I almost always recommend ExactTarget for this kind of mass email. ExactTarget has a much deeper integration with Salesforce than any other ESP. Specifically, ExactTarget integrates with Salesforce reports, and allows filtering by the campaign member status field. It also supports the exclusion of contacts contained in a report. These tools allow you to make very detailed segments.
‘Drip marketing’
If you want to go one step beyond the process of defining a list and sending out an email, you’ll need to look into tools that support more advanced marketing automation, commonly known as drip marketing. Standard uses cases are a new lead welcome program, a defined lead nurturing campaign, triggering an email based on the link a contact clicks on, etc. If your volume is higher than 1000 emails a day, or require email link tracking, you’ll need to look into a more advanced version of ExactTarget, or a marketing automation system like Eloqua, Genus, Marketto, Pardot, and others.
Integrated marketing automation
Last on the list is a fully integrated marketing automation system. These powerful applications support many different marketing tools that go far beyond email. Tools like Eloqua, Marketto, and others offer marketers: deep and customizable integration with Salesforce, landing pages, email, web analytics integration, lead scoring, complex marketing automation programs, social media, campaign ROI tracking, etc. These tools require significant buy-in from the marketing team as they can be pricey and complex to implement.
