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.

You’ve seen posts in the past about our Salesforce.com integration and most recently, one of our lead product developers discussed how we improved the integration. I want to start by sharing with you how we chose to integrate, why we think it makes the most sense and how to set it up.

How we decided to integrate

It’s no big secret that integrating with Salesforce.com is smart. With nearly 70,000 customers of which many are sales and marketing users, connecting the powerful CRM with email marketing makes sense. The days of cumbersome exports/imports are really a thing of the past. Smart applications take advantage of APIs to pass data back and forth and reduce a lot of the manual labor. With that said, different email service providers have chosen to integrate in different ways.

When we looked at integrating, we thought about it from many angles. We saw some companies essentially build a UI (user interface) inside of Salesforce.com’s UI. We saw mild-to-wild when it came to how other email service providers thought the two systems should work together. We thrive on not just following the pack, so the question was up to us in terms of what our approach should be.

Simple is better

At the end of the day, we always look to our customers, our prospects and the marketplace for feedback. (It also didn’t hurt that we use Salesforce.com to manage our customer data.) What did a marketer really want? To launch a campaign from within the Salesforce interface itself? Did we really need to essentially redesign an app experience inside of Salesforce.com when we already supported an intuitive email marketing application in SendLabs?

We talked to marketers and administrators. We asked about their historical experience and about their workflow. We asked them to boil it down to a simple question: what would make your life easier? The answer was simple (it usually is):

• We’d like the ability to import a list with custom subscriber data into a new list in SendLabs.
• We’d like to send a campaign (as usual, through SendLabs). Any kind of campaign: simple one-off, split-test, triggered, one with dynamic content. Any campaign.
• We’d like campaign data (opens, clicks, bounces, unsubs, etc.) to go back to the lead or contact record so our sales and account teams can see how they interacted with a campaign at a glance.

In the end, the needs are straight forward for most users and the quickest path to anything is a simple, straight-line.

How it works – Setup and use Salesforce for SendLabs in 2 minutes.

1. Log into your SL account and click ‘My Account’ in the top right.
2. Click the Salesforce.com tab inside My Account.
3. Enter your Salesforce username/password and security token and save. If you don’t know this information, ask your administrator for help.

SendLabs is now connected to your Salesforce.com account! Here’s how you use it.

1. Create a new lead or contact report inside of Salesforce that you wish to use to send a campaign to. Make sure you save it under Personal Custom Reports inside of Salesforce.
2. Inside of SendLabs, choose Contacts > Import and choose ‘Import From My Salesforce Account’ as source. You’ll then see a list of reports (Salesforce’s term for lists or segments you save to access). Choose and then proceed with the list import process as normal.
3. Send your campaign as normal.
4. All campaign stats – when a subscriber clicks, opens an email, bounces, unsubscribes, etc. will still be available in your SendLabs campaign reports – but will also send each activity to the individual lead or contact level.

That’s it.

Pretty straight-forward, right? If you have more questions or get stuck, check out the Help Center inside your account for even more detail. In addition, you can watch a video tutorial at anytime inside your account showing you each step. Of course, you can always connect with us with any other thoughts or questions.

Enjoy,

Team SendLabs

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.