At ONE/Northwest we’ve been looking into Vertical Response (VR) as an emailing solution that is integrated with Salesforce.com. We’ve just completed our first implementations, and I wanted to share what we’ve learned about how VR behaves with Salesforce. I’m going to try to lay out what I know in as concise terms as possible. Some of this is already known to many of you, but it was surprisingly hard for me to get my head around. When I get something wrong please comment on this post and I’ll update as necessary!

First, VR for Salesforce.com is best thought of as an individual Salesforce user’s personal application for sending mass emails rather than a shared solution for an organization. Here’s why I say that:

1. Each Salesforce.com user has their own VR account, and it is impossible for those accounts to share lists
2. If one person starts a send, someone else can’t complete it
3. If one person sends an email, they are the ones who will need to pull the stats back to Salesforce
4. If a subscriber opts out, they are globally opted out of emails in Salesforce

Now that I’ve said that, let me say that VR accounts can share some important info:

1. By creating your email Templates as Email Templates in Salesforce.com, they are available to all Salesforce/VR users.
2. Salesforce Campaigns can be used to represent each send, and the stats get pulled back to them, so those are visible to all Salesforce/VR users. They can even be used for segmentation of future sends.
3. You can pool send credits ($) between any number of users, you just have to email VR and tell them which users.

So, in short, VR for Salesforce is a strange hybrid between a shared blast emailing system and a personal blast emailing system.

How are things different when you use Salesforce as your database of email subscribers?

1. You do everything related to email sends inside Salesforce
2. The idea of a ’subscriber’ kind of goes away, really, as each send is a new ‘list’
3. The list of current newsletter subscribers is better maintained as a Salesforce Report (or Reports) with the correct criteria, rather than a living list in VR
4. When you want to do a send, you create a new Campaign, and then dump the Report contents into that Campaign
5. The Campaign is the record of a send, not a living list of subscribers, but since Salesforce.com reports can pull from Campaigns, you could use a previous send Campaign to power a new send
6. You can use Salesforce email templates for your sends
7. You can pull opens, clicks, and bounce data back into the Campaign

I think that VR for Salesforce can be a great option for groups, but I would want to be very clear about how it works. Personally, I think the massive plusses of using Salesforce reports as your segmentation wizard and recording each send and the click data in Salesforce Campaigns override the limitations outlined above. But in the end, of course, that’s each group’s decision.

Reasons a client might not want Vertical Response:

1. They need subscribers to opt in or out of many communication vehicles
2. They need to have sends in a central place that multiple people can work on at once or in sequence
3. They want to have the send coming from an address like something@mail.myorg.org rather than sometime like something@mail.vresp.com, without having to pay the $500 one-time fee to get it

I hope that clarifies things rather than makes things more confused. Like I said, it’s been hard to get to a real understanding of how VR works in conjunction with Salesforce, not that the VR folks haven’t been responsive. It’s just that there is a lot of functionality in VR and in this integration, and many of our assumptions of how tools like this work turned out to be false because of the strange hybrid nature of the tool

Again, if I’ve gotten anything wrong, please comment and I’ll update the post!