VerticalResponse for AppExchange Blog

Sharing Between Accounts Within the Same Salesforce Org

If you’re familiar with the way VerticalResponse for AppExchange accounts work, then you  know that each user in your Org with access to VerticalResponse is using their own individual account.  This means that lists, emails and data that live in one user’s account will not show up in an account belonging to another user.

There are various reasons why our accounts work this way - due to the way things are setup both within VerticalResponse and Salesforce - but ultimately this arrangement works well for some customers and causes at least occasional frustration for others.  No matter which of these two camps you’re in, you may be happy to know there are easy workarounds that allow some sharing between different users.

What can be shared?

Credits

Paying for email within VerticalResponse is based on a credit system in which one credit is equal to one recipient of a message.  These credits can be purchased in bulk and used over time as they do not expire for a year.  And if you do buy in bulk, the more you buy, the cheaper your cost per credit becomes.

By default every account has its own pool of credits.  Which means if there are multiple users in your org sending out email, that each of their accounts require separate purchases.  Considering credits get cheaper when you buy more of them, this could lead to some VR for AppExchange customers missing out on a lower rate for their purchases. 

The good news is that the credit pools for individual accounts can be linked together to share a single group of credits.  Then whenever a connected account makes a purchase, all the credits from that purchase become part of the larger, connected credit pool.  So if you have multiple users in your VR org, you could designate one account as the credit purchasing account (to ensure the highest discount on credits) - all accounts would have immediate access to purchased credits.

To setup credit sharing within your own Org, contact support@verticalresponse.com and let them know the usernames for the accounts you’d like to connect together.  Note that each account’s VerticalResponse user name can be found by going to VR Email > Account Information > Log In Information > Email Address.

Templates

Though the emails created within an individual account cannot be directly shared, you can work around this by using Salesforce’s own Template tool.  This tool can be found under Setup > Personal Setup > Email > My Templates.  Templates saved here are usually used with Salesforce’s own email tools, but you can also access them from within VerticalResponse to use in our system.  So this is a great way to share emails and templates with other people in your Org. 

We wrote a great article showing how you can put the Salesforce template tool to use in May of last year.  Check it out!

Reporting

Salesforce provides some great reporting features, and we’ve connected our own reporting to these features so you can take full advantage of the data we provide using the Salesforce tools you’re already using outside of VerticalResponse.  As has been mentioned in this blog a few times in the past, VerticalResponse pushes data from your sent emails to custom Email History Lead & Contact folders within the Reports tab, to Email History Objects on individual Lead & Contact records, to Dashboards, and to the Campaign Member Analysis Report.

I reference this here because anyone in your Org who has the appropriate permissions within Salesforce can access all this data.  So even though they can’t see the reporting directly within another user’s VerticalResponse account, they can view the results through the various avenues directly available in Salesforce.

The important thing to note here, though, is that this reporting data needs to be manually “pushed” to Salesforce through the use of the Update Statistics button found under VR Email and VR Statistics tabs.  You must select the email (or emails) whose stats you’d like to update and then click the button.  So it’s important to get in the habit of doing this on a regular basis if other people in your Org need access to the reporting data.

If you want to learn more about VerticalResponse's reporting features, visit our How To Do Everything - Statistics site.

Is there anything else within VerticalResponse you’d like to be able to share throughout your Salesforce Org?  Let us know in the comments!

A Detailed Look at Our New Reporting Features

As you may or may not have already seen, VerticalResponse released a major update to our reporting dashboard.  This update does not change our approach to pushing data back into Salesforce.  You still click the Update Statistics button found under VR Email or VR Statistics to push email statistics back to your Salesforce Reports tab and to your Lead & Contact records.

But what this update does do is bring some welcome updates to the functionality and usability of the reporting found within our own application.  Plus it's prettier than the old dashboard, and there's certainly nothing wrong with looking good.  Let’s take a look at the improvements.

New Campaign Dashboard

Improved Graphs - The new graphs display both the percentages and the total number of opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes.  And the response activity timeline graph is now interactive, allowing you to change the displayed range from six hours to up to two weeks.  The old graph showed only the first 24 hours.

Lists Ranked by Performance - If you send your email out to more than one list, we’ll rank each list according to how it performed.  You can also see the response statistics for each individual list - this data was not previously tracked.

Links Ranked by Performance - Though we’ve always tracked the number of clicks each link in your email receives, we did not previously display the links in the order of how they performed.  Now we rank them, with the top performing links appearing at the top.

Recent Email Comparisons - The dashboard displays a series of graphs comparing the performance of this email to your four other most recent messages.

Export Data - You can print the dashboard (using the provided Print link) and export it to both a PDF and Spreadsheet (CSV) file.  This is a nice way to share this data with people who are not using VerticalResponse.  

Detailed Reports

We also provide access to more detailed reports that show what’s driving the data you see on the dashboard itself.  These reports can be accessed by clicking the appropriate link under most sections of the dashboard or by simply clicking the reports link at the top of the dashboard.

All Events – This section compares the response stats for your email to your account’s lifetime average.  You can customize this view to show only the stats you’re interested in (i.e. opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, forwards, conversions and non responders).

Click-Through Performance – View the total number of clicks and click-through percentage for all links within your email.  This data can be filtered to display clicks from just the HTML version of your message, just the text version, or both, and can show total clicks vs. unique clicks.

Lists Mailed - Much like the dashboard itself, this section ranks all the lists to which you sent your email by performance.  The difference being that the dashboard only shows up to five lists while this section displays them all.

Compare Campaigns – Select any of your previously sent emails (up to 5) and evaluate their performance in, well, comparison to each other. You can select to view this data over time (i.e. first 24 hours) or view the summary totals for Opens, Clicks, Bounces and Unsubscribes.

In addition, each email you send out is archived and you can copy it to use as a template for a new email by clicking the copy link found on the left hand side of the main dashboard page.  Sent emails have always been archived and copyable, but a lot of folks don’t realize this so I thought it was worth a mention.  When you copy an email, you can find it by going to VR Email > Quickstart Menu > View Drafts.

Check out the two videos below to see the new reporting in action:

Dashboard

Detailed Reports

Have any thoughts or questions about the new reporting?  Let us know in the comments!