VerticalResponse for AppExchange Blog

How Many Leads Does Your Email Convert?

A VR friend (and power user) Tricia Reilly of Bluebird Marketing recently posted a blog "Measure the true impact of your campaigns". She explains how using Custom Report Type (Summer ’07 feature allowing data from up to 4 custom objects) to create a report containing Contacts/Leads with Campaigns and Opportunity. This is a great way for marketers to identify members of a Campaign that are associated with an Opportunity. Better yet, if they eventually become a "won opportunity".

Now, this got me thinking... how can we create our own Custom Report with VR Email History to gauge the effectiveness of email campaigns? VR Email History already tracks openers and clickers but now we want to take a step further and find out who opened and/or clicked a VR email and converted from a Lead to a Contact, then a Contact to an Opp and …well you get the idea.

Easy enough, here's how to get started and track VR Email History through Lead Conversion:

• Go to your Reports tab and find the "VR Email History Leads" reports. Click on "Leads: Full VR Email History" report.
• Let's change the criteria for the report by clicking on the Customize button.
• You should find yourself in "Step: 2 Select the information to summarize". If you would like to change the fields shown on the Report, go ahead and click on Next. However, if you don't need to change the fields to display, use the "Jump to Step" dropdown and pick "Select Criteria".
• Under Standard Filters area, you do not need to change any of the selected items on the dropdown menus. However, if you want your report to be targeted on specific mail dates, enter a Start Date and an End Date.
• Next you'll need to enter the following criteria under Advance Filters.

Row 1: Opened Equals True
Row 2: Lead: Converted Equals True
Row 3: Clicked Equals True
Row 4: Lead: Converted Equals True

• Click on Advance Options and enter the following (1 AND 2) OR (3 AND 4). What this means is that your report will consist of Leads who "Opened and Converted" OR who "Clicked and Converted".
• Click on Run Report

You should now have a report containing openers/clickers of a VR email who eventually converted to a Contact. You may want to save this custom report. So, go ahead and click on the Save As button, and the report will be saved without overwriting the original "Leads: Full VR Email History" report you started with. Last, don’t forget to add the description so you understand how to interpret the data in the future.

Got any other ideas on measuring the impact of your email campaigns? Share 'em by posting it here.
--Chris

Converting Leads with Email Marketing

For those of you who might be selling large-ticket products or services in a multi-step fashion, we thought it would be helpful to talk to you about how to measure and predict your success metrics.

The first thing you'll need to do is attempt to define what success means to you. This doesn't have to be daunting and your metric doesn’t necessarily have to be about how much you “profit” from your email, it could be how much you “learn” from your results.

In general it’s a good idea for you to decide what your definition of success is up front, then compare your results to your metrics after you’ve mailed. Keep this in the forefront of your mind: it’s really about continual measurement and refinement to hit success.

The Corporate Sale

If you are selling your product into a large corporation and you have a longer multi-step sales process, your email marketing metric for success may depend on what lead conversion means to you.  One way to do this is to “back into it” from the total number you need to convert.

If this is the first time you’ve emailed this campaign, your “unknown” is going to be your conversion rate, meaning "what percent of your recipients are going to do what you want them to?" So your best bet might be to test before you roll-out to gauge where your conversion rate might fall. If you know you know you need to drive 500 conversions and your test shows that your conversion rate is 1.25%, then you’re going to have to email to 40,000 addresses to reach your goal.

Finally, you’ll have to assess how much you’ve sold to see if your revenue equaled, made more than, or made less than what you spent on the entire campaign.

Sending Targeted Follow-ups

Congratulations, your mass email was a success!  That's just the first step however and now it's time to send a targeted follow-up to folks who took an action on your initial mailing.  With VerticalResponse for AppExchange you can see who opened and clicked, who bounced and unsubscribed, and also find the people who took no action at all (i.e. non-responders).

For today's post let's go over the steps of sending a targeted follow-up email to people that clicked a link within your previously sent mass email.  The first thing we need to do is find our list of "clickers." There are 2 ways to locate these records and we'll break down both options below.

Running a custom report from the VR Email History object:

In this scenario we'll find the "clickers" by viewing the mass email stats for a previously sent email and then append that data to a new Salesforce.com Campaign.  We can then import that new target audience as a brand new mailing list and launch our follow-up email.

1. Create a Salesforce.com Campaign and set it to "Active".
2. Go to your Reports tab and find the "VR Email History" reports.  Choose either the Lead report or the Contact report for "Clickers."
3. Dive into the report results by clicking the checkbox next to the name of your mass email and then click the "Drill Down" button at the bottom of the page. (Note: you can also select multiple mass emails if you wanted to generate a new list of clickers across different mailings).
   
   You will now see all the recipients who clicked a link for the mass email(s) you've selected.
4. Click the "Add to Campaign" button and select the Salesforce.com Campaign you've created and all Leads or Contacts in the report will be added to the Campaign.
5. Now that your Salesforce.com Campaign contains your "clickers", simply go into the VR Email tab and click on New Email List.
6. Select the option to "Send emails to members associated with an existing salesforce.com Campaign" and choose your Salesforce.com Campaign from the dropdown menu.
7. Follow the steps to build your list and you're done.

You now have a mailing list of clickers for your follow-up mass email!

Creating a "Quick List"

For users who do not have the Salesforce.com Campaigns module enabled in their org, here's another way to build your targeted follow-up list.

1. Go to VR Statistics, find a previously sent mass email.
2. Click on the "Actions" link on the right-hand side of the screen and select "Download List".
3. Under "What would you like to do with this data?", select "Create & upload a new list called:" and give the new list a name.
4. For "Response Type Filter", select Clickers.
5. Choose the fields you want to include in your list and click Submit.

You've just created a list of clickers from your sent email!

I'll regularly post tips and ideas here on optimizing your use of VerticalResponse for AppExchange. So, please let me know if there are topics you'd like me to cover.