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.

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!