3 Marketing Game Killers on Salesforce.com

Little by little I'm finding the practical limits of Salesforce.com(SFDC).  For those of you that are considering or using a CRM package like SFDC and this includes Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SugarCRM, Oracle/Siebleand others, you need to consider the following limitations:

• Variable "From" line
• Dynamic content
• Template management

The variable "From" line is a killer if your company is trying to perform marketing services or other services "On Behalf" of another company.  Let's suppose that you need to send reminder notices to customers on behalf of a group of magazine publishers (let's assume 5 publishers).  You want the email to come "From" the Publisher of each magazine.  This is important when embracing personalization and 1to1 marketing principles.  Well, with SFDC, if you have a single seat Enterprise license, you have one "From" email address from which you can send.  You can create and enable multiple email templates, each with the logo, copy and signature of each publisher - but one email address.  You can also store the name of each publisher in a designated field within SFDC.  However, every email will be sent "From" a single email address.  Within the SFDC world, one way around this is to add a new seat for each publisher so that you create a user ID and an email for each one.  This quickly becomes fairly cost prohibitive if you have a large group to serve.

Second game killer for marketers - dynamic content.  Building on the previous example, assume that instead of 5 publishers you're providing services to 200 jewelry stores.  Every holiday you want to send a special offer to the customers of each store.  You need a logo, an offer, return address, personalized signature, etc for each store.  The easy answer for store production is to create one template and pull content into the template during the send process - just like you would with your personalization attributes (name, address, etc.).  Unfortunately SFDC does not support dynamic content assembly during the email send process.  You can pull fields of text and numbers into the template, similar to a merge process, but you can't do this with logo's and other graphic files - at least not straight of out the box.

Finally - this leads us to the third killer for marketers -which is managing templates.  SFDC makes it very easy to setup up a template and pull data from the leads, accounts or contact fields into these templates.  They provide a nice Header and Footer where you can drop in your logo or other graphic file.  It really is easy to use.  However, that's where it ends.  The Header and Footer are fixed and single.  This is not a variable value that you can pull from a file.  So instead of setting up one template and automatically pulling the logo or graphic from a file during the send process, like you can with text fields (Name, Address, Phone Numbers, etc.), if you want to support multiple Header styles (e.g. a different logo for each jewelry store) you must manually setup each template for each store - and keep in mind that you may still have only one "From" line from which to send your emails.

Each of the above limitations are killer barriers for marketers that are providing services to different groups or "stake holders" as some would say.   This is pretty significant for marketing agencies, outsourcing providers and publishers of magazines and newsletters with multiple titles.  It is also significant for internal marketing departments within larger companies where the marketing department supports multiple product lines, multiple brands or even separate segmentation strategies.

The good news is that each barrier can be overcome.  Sometimes it is as simple as adding a new user license.  In other cases it may simply mean manually maintaining a sizable library of templates within the SFDC document library.  Ideally though, if you need a robust solution for marketing that really overcomes these limitations, you need to extend the capabilities of SFDC through a company like ExactTarget.

ExactTarget has fully integrated their email service capabilities into SFDC and they overcome all three of these killer marketing barriers.  Dynamic content, variable "From" lines and strong functionality for marketing "on behalf of" other parties. 

If you've already jumped into the CRM game, look for ways to extend your application with outside parties and you will be much happier with the core capabilities that you've already embraced.  

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