Email Marketing News and Tips

We at Boomerang spend a lot of time talking to clients and prospects about the importance of being relevant in email marketing communications. And if segmentation is a key factor in the ability to be relevant (and I think we can all agree that it is), then our new segmentation feature for Salesforce.com gives our clients a tremendous advantage.

There are two really cool things about this new feature:

1) It’s built right into the simple three-step workflow with which you are already familiar.
2) It works exactly like the Salesforce.com advanced filter feature for reports.

Let’s talk about how you’re going to use this new tool to get the maximum benefit for your email program.

The first thing that you’ll need to do, of course, is to log in to your Salesforce.com account, click on the ‘BlastWizard for AppExchange’ tab, and then click on ‘Get Started’. Next, select an email message and click on ‘Next’ again.

At this point you’ll be looking at the list building option screen seen here:

The fun begins when you select ‘Create your list by segmenting your leads and contacts’.

From here, you have a number of choices in the dropdown menu from which to choose depending on what you’re looking to achieve:

• All Leads
• All Contacts
• All My Leads
• All My Contacts
• Segment All Leads
• Segment All Contacts
• Segment My Leads
• Segment My Contacts
• Build a List By Searching My Account

Most of the choices are pretty much self-explanatory, but we do want to make a quick note on what we mean by “All Leads” or “All Contacts”. When we say “All”, we mean all of those leads or contacts that you have access to via your Salesforce.com profile, which may or may not include every lead or contact in your company’s Salesforce.com database.

Of course “My Contacts” and “My Leads” refer to those records in Salesforce.com that are actually assigned to you.

When you choose any of the first four “All…” choices, BlastWizard will pull those records into the system in real time, and they will then be available to send to as a whole (“Send to all”), or you can select which recipients you want from the group (“Send to the selected people only”).

When you choose any of the “Segment…” choices, you’ll find a familiar-looking filtering page like the one below:

The dropdown menus on the left contain all of the searchable fields that Salesforce.com allows for Leads or Contacts (whichever you’ve chosen as your starting point).

The middle dropdown menu contains the operators like “equal to =”, “less than <”, “contains” and so forth.

Finally, the fields on the right side are where you’ll enter the data on which you wish to segment.

If you’ve ever used the advanced filters in Salesforce.com to create a report, the BlastWizard interface will look very familiar. And if you’ve never had a chance to use them, you’ll find that they are quite user-friendly and rather intuitive. Of course, if you ever have any questions about this feature or any other part of BlastWizard, don’t hesitate to give us at a call at 1-800-769-4000. Happy hunting!