I can still remember my first data related task back when I worked as Director of Marketing for a pro hockey team. The goal was to combine all of our scattered data into one nice, accessible, easy to use playpen. Sound easy? Not so much.

We had two old clunker databases, Excel docs all over the place and worse, no fully-encompassing set of standards for everything. We had to plan, architect, formalize and then enter in all of the data into one spot, drinking shots of Jack all along the way. It was nightmarish at times, but after a year’s worth of work, we got everything cleaned, imported and ready to go for the future.

The lesson here is data is king. The more information you have within a few keystrokes, the more effectively you can succeed at targeting your prospects and ultimately get them to take an action based on an email campaign.

A question I get asked frequently is about our email marketing software integrating with various CRMs (customer relation management databases). The great news is that in most cases, using our API, you can sync both your CRM and your SendLabs databases.

What are the benefits?

The main – and most obvious – reason and benefit to integration is that data can be updated in both places at once, meaning there’s no extra steps in between that could cause data loss or inconsistencies. If an email address of a customer gets updated in one spot, it gets updated in the other. The days of a middle person needing to do both are over.

Integration also allows marketing to talk with sales through the CRM. This means your salespeople can see all the vital information (opens, clicks, etc.) related to email campaigns without adding an additional login to their daily routine. Knowledge (and data) is power…give them the power of Grayskull through simple integration.

In the case of Salesforce, you can pull lists from the popular CRM into SendLabs and get the opens/clicks information sent back. This is how we roll with the big SF.

So how would you get started?

• Talk with the people that oversee your database and understand the technical specifications.
• Reach out to us (or your current ESP) with that information to see if the two databases can play nice. There are some CRMs we don’t integrate with due to age, specs, etc.
• You can get the ball rolling now by checking our (eventually) award-winning API for implementation. Honestly, most techies are off and running within the day they view this but you can reach out to us if you have questions.

Save time, help your salespeople sell your product with even more information and eliminate data loss/errors – all just by integrating your CRM with your email services provider.

What are you waiting for?

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.

So here’s the scenario: you are like one of the many companies out there with a fan page on Facebook…like you should if you have a product that helps provide engaging content in our expanding social media world. (By the way, heard of our new social sharing feature? I digress.)

You also have a thriving email marketing program and are eager to add new subscribers however you can. You think, “Hmmm…how can I get people to sign up on my fan page?” Thankfully, there’s an easy way to do it with no muss and no fuss. Lucky you!

(If you want to avoid reading and/or want to hear my hypnotic voice, here’s our video on the subject.)

• Go to your page and hit Edit Page (under your main image on the left hand side).
• Scroll down to Static FMBL under Applications. Click and ‘Add To My Page’ when the popup window gets all up in your grill.
• Go back to your page, hit ‘Edit Page’ again and look for FMBL. Click the editing icon at right and click ‘Edit’.
• Cut and paste the code from your Subscription form you’ve already created in your SendLabs account. (You did this already, right?)
• You’re all good to go. Just like that. Simply rearrange everything how you’d like and you’re good to collect email.

Now when your boss complains about your Facebook usage, tell ‘em you’re working. I’ll totally vouch for you.

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Director for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. Follow him at @joshnason and @sendlabs.

A while back, we posted an article about a new addition to the SendLabs application called Advanced Triggers. These triggers allowed SendLabs to communicate to external SOAP APIs when specific events happened. This was a huge milestone and marked the beginning of our Salesforce integration.

It was a little raw to work with and the flexibility was matched by the complications of actually setting the damn thing up. For anyone who had never previously worked with a SOAP API, the process wasn’t too far off from pulling teeth with a pair of salad tongs.

But that was all it was: “the beginning”.  Since that first integration, I’ve been hard at work over my proverbial stove cooking up the next step in Salesforce integration.

The next time you log into SendLabs, give the “My Account” button a click. At the top, we’ve added another tab called “Salesforce Settings”. If you populate these fields with your Salesforce credentials and check the checkbox to activate it, then any list that you have imported via Salesforce will report back to Salesforce when a subscriber interacts with the email.

For the moment, any time a subscriber in your list opens an email, clicks a link inside that email, unsubscribes or hard bounces, that information will get queued up and sent during one of the integration intervals. These queues run every 20 minutes and report information back to us the first time it runs into a problem.

Now before you go all, “Hey man…why the 20 minutes? Weren’t you pushing all this information live before?”, let me explain why we changed our procedure.

Each Salesforce account has an allotted number of API connections it’s allowed to make per day. Previously every time a subscriber did anything, one of these connections were used to instantly report them into Salesforce. So you can see how if you were to send an email campaign to one million subscribers, you might get close to hitting your limit for the day and potentially lose important information because of it – especially if you had more than one application utilizing Salesforce’s API.

Now we store all of your connections behind the scenes and send the information up in groups of up to two hundred at a time reducing the hundreds to thousands of connections to a modest seventy two connections a day.

Enjoy the new feature and as always: email on, dudes! For information about how to set everything up, hit up Josh (josh [at] sendlabs.com)

John Norton is a lead product developer for SendLabs, a hosted email marketing software and services company. Hit him up at Twitter: @jukebox42.

John Norton is a lead product developer for SendLabs, a New England-based email marketing software company with great customers across the street and around the globe. He's addicted to energy drinks, rock climbing, pandora and jQuery. Hit him up at Twitter: @jukebox42.