VerticalResponse for AppExchange Blog

How To: More Tips for Sharing Between Accounts

If you’re familiar with the way VerticalResponse for AppExchange  accounts work, then you know that each user in your Salesforce Organization 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 set up 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. So, what can be shared?

Share Credits by Linking Accounts
Paying for email within VerticalResponse is based on a credit system in which one credit is equal to one sent email 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 keeps 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 VR users in your Salesforce Org, you could designate one account as the credit purchasing account (to ensure the highest discount on credits) - and then ALL accounts will get immediate access to purchased credits.

To set up credit sharing within your own Salesforce Organization, contact appexchange@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.

Share Email Templates via Salesforce 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.  While templates are saved here for use in Salesforce, they can also be accessed by VerticalResponse to use in our system. 

Our new email editors make it a snap to import any of these Salesforce templates and start using them immediately, so this is a great way to share emails and templates with other people in your Org. 

Check out this other great article about making templates work for you - enjoy! 

How to Read Your B2B Customers & Close Deals

Selling to businesses requires you to read your customers and prospects to make the most out of a deal.  Once you can recognize habits and buying patterns, it's a good idea to make track this your CRM product like Salesforce. This way you'll be able to capitalize on a sale in a timely fashion.

Here are some great tactics to use as offers and articles when you do your next Salesforce email marketing campaigns.

1. Excess Budget at Year End - Many departments in larger companies are allocated a specific budget. What happens if they don't use all of the budget? The mighty CFO could look at spending company-wide and if a specific department doesn't use it all this year, they might lose some for next year. So these savvy spenders may look to your company to allocate some of this spend to.

2. Looking for End of Quarter Deals - Many companies already know that there is a sprint for you to make your revenue numbers each quarter. These smart people could wait till September 27th to tell you they're ready to make a purchase. Capitalize on it! Give them a deal and get those sales in the door, you'll make up for it with your other customers that aren't looking for those quarter end deals.

3. End-of-Tax-Year Savings - As with budgets, many companies live and die by the tax quarter or year.  Small businesses may be motivated to rack up business-related expenses before the end of the year to write them off in the next tax season. Because tax regulations can vary, be sure to include a brief disclaimer that they consult with their tax professional. However, if you sell anything to businesses that can be used over the course of the next year, you can persuade your customers to act now with a "stock up" sale.

4. Looking Good To A Boss - Some of your customers and prospects are looking to look good in front of their bosses if they're not the business owner or C-level themselves. The obvious fuel to give them is the fact that you can save them money by cutting them a deal. But you might be able to pile some other things onto the sale that make them look even better and won't take a lot out of your company's pockets. If you sell software or hardware, why not offer some free support? If your product is a good one, your customers will rarely need to use it anyway.

5. Learn From Others - In some cases your prospects are looking to learn from your other customers so they can set benchmarks. It might be a great idea to get another customer on a webinar, then invite your prospects to it. Outline the problem the customer had and how a solution like yours solved it.  Another way to do this would be offering a white paper outlining the same.

So make sure you take note of how your prospects and customers like to purchase, then market accordingly. Are you having any luck with these ideas? Please share!

Create and Publish an Archive of Your Emails

We recently created an archive page for our basic consumer newsletter and it was so easy that we want to share with you how to make one of your own! Here is what you'll need:

• A hosted version of your VR Newsletter (same as you'd use to social share, and if you're social sharing, props to you!)
• A Delicious.com or other social bookmarking account
• A Google Feedburner account

Step 1:
After you've launched you VR newsletter click on the hosted version link of the email:


and bookmark the hosted version of your newsletter using your Delicious account.
Tag it with a unique tag like "NLArchive":

Step 2:
Take the feed for that tag by clicking on the "RSS feed for these Bookmarks" link on the bottom of the page, and copying the URL from the location bar:

Step 3:
Go to Google Feedburner and "Burn" that feed. Once your feed is burned, click the "publicize" tab in your Feedburner account and activate "BuzzBoost": 

Step 4: Take the HTML output provided by the Feedburner BuzzBoost feature and paste it on your website (your website developer can help you do this). You're Done - Success!

Step 5: Repeat step 1 for future newsletters, and all of your tagged newsletters (be sure to use the same tag each time) will populate on your page.

Step 6: Promote your new archive page on your website, social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), blog site, etc. Check out our VR Buzz Weekly Email Newsletter Archives page for an example of what your end result can look like.

Help! My Images Are Too Close to My Text!

Have you ever received an email or sent one out yourself that looked like this?

Notice how the text is right next to the image?  It looks a bit cramped and can be hard to read for your recipients. We have a work-around you can use to give your images more space and are happy announce this feature will be added shortly in our Canvas editor making it really easy to implement. The current work-around requires a bit of HTML knowledge, but with just a few steps you can give your images the space they deserve and make it easier on your readers.

 Follow these steps and you’ll be good to go:

1. Add your image to your Canvas email using the Image icon in the tool bar.

2.  Click on the tab that says HTML Code to get to the HTML code of your email.

3. Find your image in the code - my trick is to set up the Find feature in my browser (Click on Edit then Find from the browser menu) then search for some text near the image or the alt text or name of the image. In my example I searched for “chunkifying” to get to the correct part of the code.  This is the HTML code for my tomato image:
<img align="left" alt="Click to learn more about tomatoes" border="0" src="https://e8bad6dc67-custmedia.vresp.com/186c79e6e9/1001132226.jpg" style="width: 200px; height: 145px;" title=" Click to learn more about tomatoes" />

4. Add padding around the sides of the image by inserting these two tags to the image code:
hspace="10" vspace="10"
This will add 10 pixels of horizontal space and also 10 pixels of vertical space. This can be changed for your needs. If, for example, you only need to add horizontal space just use the hspace= tag and any number of pixels that you like.   Add the new code to the end of the image code, right before the  />  
By adding these new tags my image code will now look like this:
<img align="left" alt="Click to learn more about tomatoes" border="0" src="https://e8bad6dc67-custmedia.vresp.com/186c79e6e9/1001132226.jpg" style="width: 200px; height: 145px;" title="Click to learn more about tomatoes" hspace="10" vspace="10"/>

5. Click back to the Graphical Editor tab to see how your image looks with the spacing.

Our Canvas tool will change where these tags go, so don’t worry if you look again and its been moved. Here is how my image looks with the space added:




Just by adding 10 pixels of padding I’ve made it easier for my recipients to read all the great information in my email. Keep your eyes peeled as this feature is being added to the Canvas email creation editor soon!

Sharing Stats Across Your Org with the VR Stats Tab:Update Early, Update Often

One User Account, Data Access for Everyone

VerticalResponse for AppExchange is a powerful tool for creating, sending and measuring email marketing campaigns from your organization.  While creating and sending emails with VerticalResponse should be managed from one salesforce.com user account, any of the information that results from your mailings can be easily shared across your entire organization.  Your Salesforce users can then leverage that information to create reports, to generate call-down lists or to follow up with recipients of your campaign to close more sales.

The VR Stats Tab: Update Early, Update Often

Once you've created and sent a VerticalResponse email campaign from your account, you can watch the results roll in on the "VR Statistics" tab in your salesforce view:

Review open and click results in real-time after your emails are sent, then watch them grow.  You can even see purchase conversions if you have activated Click-to-Conversion Tracking in your VR account.  Once your results are tracking, update your stats to everyone in your organization by selecting the mailing you wish to update in the checkbox, and clicking the "Update Statistics" button:


If you have other users in your org who rely on this information regularly, be sure to update these stats often. Here at VR, as Salesforce users ourselves, we routinely update the stats of our new email campaigns several times a week, if not daily. As time goes on and the results slow, we update them on-demand as we know our team members need them for their
reports.

Share Data, Share Insights, Share the Advantage

Once these email stats are pushed back up to your salesforce accounts they become available in your organization's 'VR Email History' reports, or can be used as part of a custom lead or contact report that any of your users can generate.  Any user in your organization who has installed the VR for AppExchange package should now have these custom reports pre-loaded in their report folders.  See the example at right for how to access packaged reports.

Once these reports get your data, they include individual contact information for email recipients, as well email behavior information such as bounces, unsubscribes, opens and clicks for each user.
 
Some great examples of how to use this data include:

• Follow up with bounced prospects to make sure their contact information is still current
• Send more detailed information to prospects based on which links they clicked
• Create a follow-up call list of all recipients who opened and clicked on your emails to accelerate your closed sales.

See More About Working with Stats in VR for AppExchange