Last week we released a new feature in 5Buckets. It integrates four different applications - RegOnline, RingLead, Salesforce.com and ExactTarget. RegOnline is a event registration application. You can use RegOnline to let your customers and prospects register for your conferences or road-shows etc. Salesforce.com is of course a premier CRM application; RingLead is a product that goes along with Salesforce.com to de-duplicate Contacts or Leads before they are stored in Salesforce.com. ExactTarget is an email marketing tool.

Our customer approached us with the problem that the registrant data captured in RegOnline was silo-ed off in RegOnline. Instead they wanted to move that data to their CRM database - Salesforce.com. Additionally they wanted to use ExactTarget to send out confirmation and reminder emails. And to complicate things further, they wanted to use RingLead to de-dup information going in to Salesforce.com.

The solution is new functionality in 5Buckets under the “Triggers” feature. As soon as a registrant signs-up in RegOnline, RegOnline triggers an event in 5Buckets. 5Buckets then in turn makes an API call to RegOnline and retrieves the registration information. This information is then passed on to RingLead to add or update in Salesforce.com. Once that is complete, 5Buckets then invokes a ExactTarget API call to send a confirmation email to the registrant.

The beauty of this solution is two-fold: data is near-instantly captured in to customer’s CRM database allowing the sales team to know that their customer or prospect just signed up for an event. And secondly, data is now in a central database. Marketing can setup further communications with customer over time such as sending reminder emails or updates about events.

Last week we released the latest version of 5Buckets. This last release was centered around one major feature - integrating with Vontoo.

Vontoo is a permission based voice messaging product. Their tagline is “Say It. Send It. Track It.” Essentially you can create audio clips and have Vontoo make phone calls to your list of opt-in subscribers. Sounds a little intrusive? Initially I thought so too. Phone calls after all have a little urgency to them. So receiving marketing messages on your phone is definitely annoying.

However, there are many situations where I want to get a phone call - school delays, weather alerts come to mind first. But beyond those reminder of a webinar I signed up for or a company wide communication by the CEO also lend themselves to phone calls. Vontoo has a customer in the music industry. The band has recorded messages and phone calls go out to fans about upcoming concerts, ticket sales & CD releases. Hmm, I certainly won’t mind a recorded message from Bono or Paul McCartney. :)

5Buckets is now integrated with Vontoo. It is another “output device” much like ExactTarget is an output device for email communications. The “input device” - the placeholder for phone numbers & email addresses - can be Salesforce.com or your own SQL Server database. For example, you can create a report in Salesforce.com that lists customers that completed their one year anniversary with you. Every day, 5Buckets will pull from Salesforce.com the list of customers with anniversary today and send them a pre-recorded voice message from Vontoo thanking them for their business.

This simple scenario can be extended to include email communications. For example, 30 days before the anniversary date an email could be sent by 5Buckets reminding the same customers that their renewal is due. An email as a renewal reminder, and a personal phone call on their anniversary thanking the customer when they renew.

A project we are wrapping up here at Right On Interactive is an integration between Salesforce.com and a chat tool called “Boldchat”. You may have been to web sites where they let you chat with the sales person or a customer service representative. So, instead of emailing or calling the company, you can chat with a live person right on the company’s website. Boldchat is one such product that enables companies to provide the chat feature on their website.

We have a customer that uses Boldchat on their website; the chat is used by prospects looking for product information. We recently implemented Salesforce.com for this customer and customized their online quote request form to create an Opportunity in Salesforce.com when someone submits the form. Customer was really happy with the way the Opportunities were coming in from the online quote form (slight digression – the quote form checks if the person submitting the form is already in SFDC and creates or updates the record; additional data is captured in a custom object) that he decided that he wants the chat sessions in Boldchat to create Opportunities in SFDC too.

Boldchat is a mature product. They have a well documented API. So, the initial question of “how can we get the data out of Boldchat” was answered quickly – use the API! The next question on my mind was – “but chat sessions are quite unstructured”. Unlike an online quote form, an IM session is very loose and “all over the place”. There is no telling when or how chat visitor indicated their name, their contact information or what product they were looking for. I even looked at the some of the chat sessions and the sessions were literally all over the place. They ranged from simple questions to detailed technical discussions.

We solved the problem by using what’s called a “pre-chat survey”. The chat visitor is required to fill-out some initial information like their name & phone number and some other optional information. That gives us the basic information we need to create/update Contacts in SFDC; and the entire text of the chat session is then dropped in as an Opportunity with the LeadSource set to Boldchat.

Boldchat’s website is: www.boldchat.com and more info about Boldchat’s API is here: http://wiki.boldchat.com/api/

If you are like most ExactTarget API users, your first introduction to the ExactTarget API must have been a PDF document. A large 100+ page PDF document. A little daunting, not so much because of the complexity, but because who the heck has the time to go through a 100+ PDF document. Then someone at ExactTarget probabaly mentioned the ExactTarget Developer Community to you. The community has many useful resources - the documentation, code samples (yes!), forums, a call wizard, ET API experts that respond to your questions!

Let me point out one more piece of the Developer Community that I find very useful - an online help file. It is listed on the “Resources” page, towards the very end of the page. This is the entire REST based API in a search-able, indexed Help format!!!! You can search for a specific API call and get to it directly, no need to thumb through a 100+ PDF. :)

Full disclosure - this Help file currently has only the REST based API and the Batch API guides. The Web services API and the ET for AppExchange API are not in there (ExactTarget - please add them in asap!!).

Here’s a quick little tip about the new ExactTarget Webservices API, particularly the one that does the integration between Salesforce.com and ExactTarget. When you trigger an email send using the ETforAppEx API, make sure you specify -

a) IndividualResults = true;

b) IndividualResultsSpecified = true;

This will ensure that the send, open(s), click(s) are dumped in to Salesforce.com by ExactTarget. The manual says there is no need to explicity specify IndividualResults, and that the tracking will be dumped in to SFDC by default. But as a good practice I would strongly recommend you specify it explicitly. You really don’t want to be left guessing if that tracking information will really be sent to SFDC or not.

Send me an email (adalvi -at- rightoninteractive.com) if you want a more detailed code sample.

I am proud to announce that I have an article published in a new book titled “Email marketing by the numbers”. The book is authored by email marketing expert and well known blogger Chris Baggott. It’s really a collection of expert articles and anecdotes by various authors. Chris, an avid blogger, public speaker and email marketing expert hit upon the idea to publish a book that allowed the best email marketing minds to come together and provide insight about email marketing. The book covers various topics ranging from general email marketing concepts, deliverability to database marketing.

I lend my voice around database integration and APIs. With integration you can continue to use your current applications, but use “APIs – Application Programming Interfaces” to extend the application. Given my history around integration and custom software development space, I talk about what is integration and how it can be used within email marketing.

I just want to take a moment and tell you about a book that has come out recently that I highly recommend - “Email Marketing by the Numbers“. It is a great book by Chris Baggott and Ali Sales - both of whom I collaborated very closely with during my days in marketing department at ExactTarget. They are both extremely talented marketers to which I can personally attest.

I bought the book as soon as it came available and was delighted to find it not just a book by Chris, but a compilation of work from many talented internet marketers from around the world. Many of those talented professionals are people I worked with while at ExactTarget like Morgan Stewart, Chip House, Joel Book, and Ali Sales. Other contributors, specifically Amol Dalvi, I continue to work with in my current position at tech start up Right On Interactive.

I also want to mention Kelly Rusk with Card Communications who is an email marketing expert who contributed to the book as well - she both posts and links here and is an extremely talented internet marketer. I met her by chance when I started blogging and have been faithfully reading her posts ever since!

Besides the fact that many reputable professionals contributed to the book (my friends!) - it is also an easy read. A book on email marketing could easily put anyone to sleep (even die-hards like me) but instead it flows nicely and the examples and insight are truly inspiring.

So if you are truly interested in adding email to your marketing arsenal or just want to hone in your existing skills - you cant go wrong buying this book. Good job guys!