Steve Andersen April 3, 2008 5 Comments Posted in:
Communications, Database Wonks, Everyone, System Admins, Tools-n-Apps

Understanding Vertical Response and Salesforce

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.

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Patrick Shaw April 1, 2008 No comments Posted in:
Communications, Success Stories

Starbucks and Salesforce - Listening To Your Customers

Terrific article available online (tip of the hat to my brother Frank for sending it along) about how Starbucks has launched a customer forum (powered by one of the tools NPower uses, Salesforce.com) to solicit customer feedback.

I’m excited about this for two reasons:

  1. We haven’t used Salesforce this way for any of our nonprofit customers yet. But now that we know how it is being used elsewhere - we can add this to our list of ways to leverage Salesforce to help nonprofits better meet their mission.
  2. It’s easy to forget that the people we serve can provide and seed innovation, can help us better understand the difference between how we think we’re doing and how they think we’re doing, and much, much more.

The article is worth a read, even if you don’t follow the rest of the links.