• Highlevel Overview
• Understanding the Difficult Part
• Conclusion

Highlevel Overview

It has been proven that of all the marketing activities a company can engage in, email campaigns bring the highest return on investment in the shortest amount of time. Salesforce allows a company to track leads with the goal of converting those leads to customers. Vertical Response Classic has the ability to integrate with a Salesforce Sales Campaign so that the success of an email campaign can easily be tracked and verified with real metrics. Additionally, you can even integrate Salesforce SMS into your current messaging platform for better workflow and implementing efforts for customer conversion.

In order to run a Salesforce Vertical Response Classic email campaign effectively the following setup tasks are recommended:

• Create a custom field in the Lead object to hold your email campaign name
• Route the leads generated from your sales campaign to their own Salesforce queue
• Make the leads read only so they cannot be altered between the time they are created and the proposed email campaign

Understanding the Difficult Part

Well naturally, the first step for any company would be to use a Salesforce integration tool to incorporate the software into their workflow. It goes without saying that only then can any benefits of the same be enjoyed. After integration, there are many ways to get a lead into Salesforce. An easy way to achieve that goal is to use the web to leads form generator in Salesforce and embed that on your website. A more difficult but powerful approach is to use python beatbox. Remember that if you are going to use the salesforce api to do the following:

• Setup a salesforce sandbox and test there first!
• Obtain a security token both in the sandbox and the production Salesforce areas

When creating the lead be sure to populate the custom field you created for your Email Campaign Field. It is then possible to create an assignment rule to automatically change the owner of the generated lead to a queue of your choice. One of the problems that can arise when using Salesforce, is the lack of a full time Salesforce administrator or fully trained sales people. It is imperative that the lead not be moved from your original queue or altered prior to your email campaign execution. There is a very simple way to prevent your valuable email campaign lead from being altered. All that is necessary is to add a validation rule that prevents an Email Campaign Lead from being altered. The actual validation rules is:

  PRIORVALUE( Email_Campaign_Name__c) == "your_campaign_name"

Here is a screenshot of how I did it:

Conclusion

Using Vertical Response Classic in Salesforce to create effective email campaigns that prove return on investment through solid metrics does not have to be hard. Simply adding a custom field to the Salesforce lead object to hold your email campaign name, creation of an email campaign queue, an automatic assignment rule to move the lead to the email campaign queue, and a simple validation rule are all that is necessary! Once you have set this up, just go into Vertical Response and build your email campaign list by searching for leads with the email campaign name in the custom field you created to hold it.