Responsys Offers Salesforce.com Integration
Responsys continues its string of joint offerings with complementary application providers.
Responsys will unveil a new solution tomorrow that will integrate its E-mail marketing platform with on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) provider salesforce.com.
Responsys Interact Connector for salesforce.com, built on the sforce integration platform, will allow email marketers to manage, track and respond to online marketing campaigns within salesforce.com’s CRM application. More than 100 ISVs have used sforce to integrate and extend salesforce.com to create custom CRM solutions.
“This is another extension of our vision of ‘lifecycle messaging,’ which really goes beyond email marketing to get the right message to the right person at the right time,” said Responsys CMO Scott Olrich. “In the past, marketers would send out a blast email campaign to 10,000 leads. We want to shift the idea to using email to support and pull prospects along the sales process.”
The joint Responsys salesforce.com offering simplifies the process of creating and managing email campaigns. Using both the sforce API and Responsys’ own API, a marketer can set up and run campaigns directly in the salesforce.com application.
“Sending out campaigns that are generic and broad are just not what the sales force wants. You have to understand what stage each customer is at in the buying process. Unfortunately, most of the time marketers send out the exact same message to all prospects, not taking into consideration that they’re all at different stages,” Olrich said.
Marketers can set any combination of triggers to include a prospect or customer in an email campaign. Ultimately, the offering will be enabled with business rules to automatically generate an email message based on a prospect’s status in the salesforce.com CRM application, such as when a salesperson marks them as moving from a prospect to an opportunity, or becoming more likely to close on a deal, Olrich said.
Data is also passed back from Responsys to salesforce.com, so all information generated and gathered by the Responsys email application is automatically updated in salesforce.com’s CRM application. A salesperson can use their salesforce.com CRM application to see an up-to-date view of which email campaigns a prospect has received, opened, or unsubscribed from.
“The application is allowing marketers to message prospects and customers at the exact right time to help salespeople drive customers to close,” Olrich said.
The companies plan to market and promote the joint solution to their combined worldwide customer base. Four customers, including Silicon Graphics and Gomez Inc., have already signed on.
Responsys has been very active lately in partnering with developers of complementary applications, like CRM and Web analytics. Recent integrated offerings have been announced with Coremetrics, FireClick, and WebSideStory.
