April 1, 2009

Cubic Compass today announced today the release of a new ground breaking technology for creating and managing interactive websites. Dubbed "Neural-Interactive Content Creation", or NIC², this patent-pending technology allows content creators to interact with an i-Dialogue Content Management System (CMS) via a neurological interface that instantly converts thought patterns into web content, dialogue script, and workflow rules.

"The pace of change in today's environment is just too fast for simple tactile interaction with a web CMS", said Cubic Compass Founder Mike Leach. "Today's websites and portals must respond at the speed of thought".

Beta test user Samuel Anders (pictured below) successfully utilized NIC² technology to provision, develop, and launch a fully functional website and customer portal in 17 seconds. "I consider myself a 'power user' of technology, so I was eager to plug-in to NIC² and translate my ideas into a working solution. The results were simply amazing."

The following tasks are just a small example of what can be accomplished in milliseconds using NIC²:

• Provision new landing pages
• Change passwords
• Grant permissions to portal users
• Publish a press release
• Add/modify workflow rules
• Update style sheet
  

NIC² is licensed per user and requires a lengthy pre-qualification questionnaire and note from a Doctor before use.

(Actual results may not be identical to those experienced by Mr Anders. NIC² is not FDA approved and is currently not legal in many countries. Please contact sales for more information)

It's amazing how much ROI (definition:return on investment) can be achieved from the skillful placement of a single web page in the funnel of a campaign.

Elena, WebMaster at Configuresoft, shares this experience with using a piece of CampaignResponder script in an event registration campaign (and only 3 weeks after the feature was released!).

"The campaign was a success. Since the Campaign Response script allowed us to provide customers with a one-click registration (without filling out a form), we received twice the number of registrations than usual (over 350) and had to order an additional dial-in line for the webinar (that's a good thing though). And since I didn't have to mark those registrations manually in SalesForce, it saved me 6-7 hours on just one campaign! This feature is the best thing since sliced bread! Thank you so much!"

That really is a remarkable increase in response through a bit of script. Well done Elena!

I'm assuming she created links in an email campaign in the format:
<a href="http://www.domain.com/event-response.aspx?cid={!Campaign.Id}&lead={!Lead.Id}&status=Attending">Yes, I will attend</a>
<a href="http://www.domain.com/event-response.aspx?cid={!Campaign.Id}&lead={!Lead.Id}&status=NotAttending">No, I cannot attend at this time</a>

You can create links like this using any email application on the AppExchange... it's not specific to i-Dialogue.

Assuming the use of i-Dialogue enterprise edition at $1,195 per month, let's look at a more detailed ROI calculation.

Cost Assumptions:
i-Dialogue Subscription: $1,195 per month
Marketing Effort: $50 hr
4 campaigns per month

Savings:
6-7 hours saved per campaign = $300-$350
4 campaigns per month (saving 24-28 hrs month) = $1,200 - $1,400 savings per month

That return on investment alone covers the cost of an i-Dialogue subscription. But Elena doubled the number of webinar attendees by providing a one-click registration.

If you look at ROI as amortizing the i-Dialogue hosting costs over the number of webinar lead registrations, you get the following:

Webinar Cost Per Lead (Before):
175 attendees per weekly webinar
700 attendees per month
Spread the $1,195 cost out over 700 attendees = $1.70 per attendee.

Webinar Cost Per Lead (After):
350 attendees per webinar
4 webinars per month
1,400 attendees per month

Doubling the number of webinar registrations to 1,400 (meanwhile saving ~25 hours per month), results in a cost per lead of $0.85 per lead and increase in productivity.

That extra 25 hours can go towards creating more webinar content, or creating follow-up email cultivation campaigns to attendees.

Add in PPC, email marketing, and other acquisition costs and this scenario is still well below $5 per lead. Would you spend $5 per lead on marketing automation to sell your product or service?

No matter how you calculate ROI, marketing automation can really pay off when utilized correctly.

I found it interesting that Entellium, a CRM software company, is abandoning its browser based CRM application in favor of it's rich client CRM application.

This is one of several recent events that signals (to me) that a larger "Software + Services" (S+S) inflection point is now underway.

Looking at Gen Y office workers as a leading indicator, I'm often amazed at how many actually *prefer* to use rich Windows applications. The browser is just an alternative interface, much like a mobile phone.

eMarketing is a never ending battle and compromise between "reach" vs "rich", with maximum "reach" and lowest common denominator channels winning out, so I don't see this trend significantly impacting the custom interaction front lines. A website and simple HTML emails will always be guaranteed to reach a wide audience.

But I think productivity and development tools will most certainly be revived in a S+S context. Even Salesforce.com, known primarily as a web-based application, has converted me to their S+S development model of using Eclipse (a rich Windows application) to communicate with Salesforce via webservices, and I would expect the deployment of an Adobe Air-based Salesforce application to be announced in the near future to keep them relevant with this trend.

"Multi-client" may become the new buzzword that replaces "multi-tenant" in SaaS circles.

From Entrepreneur.com "The Hottest Marketing Trends for 2008".

1. Engage the customer. The move toward alternative advertising versus some of the more traditional methods coincides with the emergence of technologies that enable a one-on-one dialogue with customers. For example, follow the trend of social media by posting your products on sites that encourage customer or peer reviews. Social media add an element of impartiality and are increasingly looked to as reliable sources of information.

Read the entire article online.

i-Dialogue customer iGrafx recently localized their interactive online resource center with German content.

Salesforce.com CRM is easily configured to capture customers language preference. Just add a custom field to Lead and Contact named something like "Preferred Language" and map the field to i-Dialogue's "Language" field.

Whenever a customer clicks on the language bar at the top of an i-Dialogue page, or submits a localized web form, the customer's language selection is automatically updated in Salesforce.

iGrafx has also localized their email auto-responders to German for a truly relevant and localized dialogue. Future plans are in the works for Italian and Spanish sites too.

New in i-Dialogue v 6.4.7 is a feature called "Actionable Events".

Actionable Events (AEs) are web interactions that automatically trigger follow-up tasks in Salesforce. For example, a web lead may subscribe to a newsletter and passively monitor emails for several months. Then one day the Lead responds to a newsletter by clicking on a link to a white paper and does some serious research on the web site.

The next day a Sales rep calls the Lead and asks them if they can answer any questions regarding a particular product. The customer will think the sales reps timing is perfect and relevant.

This scenario is accomplished by editing an i-Dialogue portal object in Salesforce and selecting the "All Download Events Are Actionable" checkbox and defining the trigger count and default Task fields.

i-Dialogue will auto-create and dynamically assign tasks for each Lead or Contacts based on OwnerId.

2 new i-Dialogue worksheets are available to help Marketers define their online marketing campaigns.

The Drip Campaign Worksheet helps to define a series of email auto-responders over a finite campaign duration, such as a 30 day download trial period.

For example, "Day 0" is defined as the day when a Lead first registers to download a white paper. On Day 3, you might automatically send a follow-up email with a personalized introduction. On Day 10 you might send a purchase offer or coupon, and so on.

The Tiered Collateral Worksheet is useful for defining what you're willing to give in exchange for self-identification information.

For example, you may provide access to a white paper in exchange for a verifiable email address, but require a first name and phone number for an online test drive or product demo.

These worksheets compliment each other in that auto-responder email messages may contain a personalized call-to-action that offers increasingly more marketing collateral in exchange for more personal self-identification, such as in a Rogers and Peppers 1-to-1 style of marketing campaign.

The convergence of email, content management, web forms, and CRM in a single solution like i-Dialogue can provide great power, but "with great power comes great responsibility", and one of those responsibilities is CAN-SPAM compliance.

You'll notice that every email sent from an i-Dialogue portal includes an opt out link and your organizations address in the footer by default. This is to ensure that your customers always have the option to "opt-out" of future email communications and even contact your physical address in writing or by phone to make this request (you have to honor any channel).

Great thought has gone into making it convenient for your customers to opt out... but there are controls in place to ensure this feature does not get abused.

For example, when viral marketing activity occurs, customers are usually forwarding their emails to their friends and family. What happens if one of these people click on the opt out link?

Not to worry. i-Dialogue has some basic protective measures to ensure only the original email recipient can opt out.

The final key to CAN-SPAM compliance is data integrity. When a lead or customer opts-in or out via the portal, this bit of information (and it is quite literally a "bit" ) makes it back to Salesforce.com and updates the related "Email Opt Out" field within the hour.

Most, if not all, email marketing vendors on the AppExchange will respect and adhere to the setting of this field, further validating the tremendous value of making Salesforce.com data the master record for all your Leads and Contacts.

Here's a tip to help email designers visualize what different groups of people will see once a personalized email campaign is launched.

Problem: You've created an elegant email template with some Dialogue merge fields that will be replaced at launch time with targeted content (either based on CRM contact properties, segment rules, role, or whatever). But that nagging feeling persists in the back of your mind saying "I wonder what existing customers will see when they receive this personalized email? Will the call to action be relevant? What will our top client's Executives see?".

Solution: Create several mock user profiles, called personas, then launch a test campaign (the emails will be individually created and personalized but not actually sent) then review the email content rendered for each persona.

Here's a screenshot (below) of an email campaign whose template has already been defined. Several personas have already been created for Executive, Existing Customer, Technical Decision Maker, and so on.

Click on 'Launch Test Campaign' and the email service will immediately process the emails (and again.... will not actually send them).


Once the test rendering is complete, you'll receive an email. You can now click each Persona's View link (I've prefixed my personas with 'aa_' to ensure they always appear at the top) to see how the segmentation rules populated the merge fields for each individual user.



You can also drill down and view emails that would be sent to individual users. This enables an iterative process whereby an email template is updated, a test launch is executed, and the resulting content is reviewed and refined.

Once you're happy with the results, simply launch the actual campaign. The production launch will execute with exactly the same behavior as the test launch.

Several companies rely primarily on customers downloading a software product (or white paper), evaluating it, and then making a purchase decision.

Collecting an email address at the time of registration allows customers to recieve monthly newsletters, but what's really needed are precise, automated email follow-ups at specific milestones within the evaluation process.

The following image shows a basic 30 day evaluation process and some potential key milestones.



Notice that the customer does not have to wait until the next monthly or quarterly email newsletter to be exposed to your marketing message.

Product evaluation campaigns can be as simple or as sophisticated as needed. 3 general types of lifecyle campaigns include:

1) Immediate auto responder with timed follow-ups.
In this scenario, a prospect visits your site and completes a download request form (to reduce abandonment rates this should be kept to a minimum, such as email, first name, and last name).

They immediately receive download instructions via email and are free to install and evaluate the product.

Then, at defined intervals, the prospect automatically recieves follow-up emails with more information about the product and "call to action" link to purchase the product (note that these emails do not assume much of dialogue context, such as have already spoken with someone on a phone).

2) "Smart" Email Follow-Ups.
This type of campaign is the same as the above mentioned campaign, except that each email makes a "smart" determination as to what the customer needs based on what is known about the customer.

Examples include a role-based call to action (Economic vs. Technical justification for product) or a custom follow-up to an online KB article search.

3) Product Integration.
The holy grail of product evaluation automation is having the product actually tell i-Dialogue when certain evaluation miletones have been achieved and sending emails in response to these milestones. Emails can be sent to the prospect or inside/outside sales reps.

For example, if 20% of all prospects don't even install the product, the nature of the email messages should continually remind them that online installation and configuration support is available. Conversely, if a prospect *has* installed the product, then the tone of follow-up emails should provide some information that leads towards a purchasing decision.


Evaluation campaigns do not neccessarilly need to be driving towards a purchase milestone. They can be in response to white paper downloads that are cultivating a lead for a phone follow-up, test driving a car, or visiting a casino.

There are myriad options and opportunities here. The key is that these mini-campaigns are not synchronously tied to your larger campaigns. They are initiated and matured based on asynchronous factors and milestones.