Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Dear Paul

I’ve got 15 years experience in the CRM and related application field and I feel that you are in danger of falling into one of the most common traps of having too little information to supply you with a solution whilst erecting a barrier on the false premise that the cost of purchase and the cost of set-up is critical. It is not and the costs of operating, getting it right for the second time and the costs of maintenance for poorly specified systems usually obliterate their purchase costs within a few months. On the other hand, getting it right, by attention to detail and ruthlessly asking your potential suppliers enough pertinent questions can repay your investment many times over.

I have to question some of your requirements as stated: You want to merge a senders name into an email? Outlook and Exchange Server already do that. You want the senders name in the email itself for 150 reps? Using a personal template for each user, defined at log on will achieve that.

Or do you want to have the recipients name merged in so that it looks like a personally written email to a specific recipient with a customised greeting? That requires a basic CRM package if you want to do it in HTML techno-colour and thereafter track what the hell happens to the responses. Maximizer by itself and Salesforce, with some add-on applications will do this. So will Goldmine, ACT, Sage, and Microsoft CRM and so on. To be honest the third party email merging services seem to have won the day as far as bulk emailing is concerned (Well done them – apart from not getting blacklisted by your ISP for spamming, there is little advantage until you get to 10,000 emails!!)

You need to be much more specific about what you want – for example, if you did your basic application from Maximizer, you could tell if the email was opened and if it was read. If someone replied to you it would kick up an alert for the sales person and stuff a copy of the email into the database so when IT clean out Outlook or Exchange Server. You do not lose the record of what you sent and who replied.

If you want to turn the exercise into revenue or sales, then all that is needed is to decide on a strategy to be followed for each email sent, opened, read and replied to. It might be that you phone people who open and read but you repeat mail those who do not reply or only open – up to a reasonable limit such that you do not spam them. If all the recipients are known, then you may want to phone most of them.

All I can say is that if you start off down these routes and ask the right questions. In fairness, the vendors should be asking the questions as well if they are doing their job properly so don’t be put off if you don’t initially understand why a particular piece of information has been requested – ask them to explain.

And for heavens sake, don’t go for a system simply because it appears to be the lowest cost up-front. If it is fit for purpose, fine, but if it a cobbled compromise, remember that the main cost of doing this is after you have paid you bills. Get it right and rather than be a cost it will be a source of revenue.

Steve Alker
Xspirt