For now though, a recap.

First TImers and Expo Reception

Sunday evening they held a short session on how to get the most out of Dreamforce. This was basically an overview of the guides and maps, some tips for getting the most out of the sessions, and an intro to some key players in organizing the event. It was a nice way to start the week.

Then we were off to the expo reception. I stopped by to chat with our friends from Genius, Jigsaw, and Instant Service and then started winding up and down the aisles to get a feel for who was there, what was new, and who would I need to be sure to spend some time with before the week was out.

Keynote: 1

The first keynote was by far the best. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, led the keynote which included the announcement of force.com sites and a reveal of Neil Young’s LincVolt project.

Off to the Sessions

After the keynote it was off to the sessions. I attended a session on AdWords that unfortunately didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know. It also made me want to stand up and walk out of the room when the presentor claimed that organic SEO is a waste of time and resources.

We had some lunch with our Sr VP of Sales, Peter Grace, and helped him prepare for his own session based on our email campaign and reporting strategy. We were shocked to have a packed house of over 150 attendees, and very pleased with Peter’s presentation. We gave huge props to our buddies at Genius including a step-by-step demo of how their product works and then focused on how reporting and tracking throughout the sales process can help identify weaknesses and ways to help reps improve their close rate.

Foo Fighters and More Networking

After the sessions came the Dreamforce Gala featuring the Foo Fighters. Now this is not a concert I would buy a ticket for, I’m just not a huge fan, but the do put on an amazing show. Of coarse, loads of free liquor will make anyone seem incredibly entertaining…

Keynote 2

The second keynote featured some pretty cool stuff from Dell and some stuff that just confused us all. The whole theme of Dreamforce was cloud computing…and they were featuring some of their servers…so that was a head scratcher for us.

Sessions: Day 2

Lets just say I still didn’t see anything that totally blew me away.

Sessions: Day 3

There was no keynote on day 3, we just dove straight into the session. This was the day that rocked my world. I’m going to go into great detail here, I want to do that in individual blog posts, but what I saw was:

• All about Facebook: Ads, Ideas, Apps, anything from salesforce you want to expose to the masses
• Ideas: Dell and Starbucks featured their Ideas sites and explained how they use them, moderate them, and what makes their customers love them.
• Campaign Management through Salesforce: How Salesforce uses Salesforce to manage campaigns and track results.

Keep an eye out in the coming days for more info about these sessions.

All in all, Dreamforce was a great experience. I found out that we are doing something unique and innovative and that my skills are more marketable that I thought. It reassured me that I am doing my job of keeping up to date with my skillset and strategies. Even in an industry that doesn’t always support or encourage out-of-the-box strategies, we’re pushing the limits and so far its working for us.

Deciding Who the Audience Is

The first thing we have to do is set up a good recipient list. The bests lists are ones that folks have opted-in to, but a bought list from a reputible source (Like Jigsaw.com) is great too. Now take that recipient list and think about whether or not you’ll need to divide it into multiple lists based on industry, level, interests, etc. You’re going to want to target as narrow an audience as possible in your emails so you are more likely to speak directly to the recipients.

Creating the Email

Subject line: It needs to grab the reader’s attention, tell them to perform an action, and maybe restrict their time to respond. When readers feel like they will miss out if they don’t act quickly, they are more likely to open the email and do what it says.
Header: Just as important as the subject line, the header draws the reader in to actually read the email. Sub heads are also important. Sub heads make skimming the email easier for the reader.
Look and feel: So, we came up with a great subject line and got the recipients to actually open our email. Great! But now, we need to do something to keep them interested. Text is great, its obviously important, but if you send out a word-heavy email with no pretty things to look at, you’ve just lost the reader. And the graphics have to be good.  A nice, clean background is great. Add a slick logo, a nice demo or progression of screenshots and you’ve got their attention.
The Text: The text is there to do one thing. Call the reader to action. Use links with specific anchor text (don’t fall into the Click Here effect). Using active, rather than passive voice is also important.

• Unique Value Proposition: The content of your email should convince the reader that the product/service you have to offer is unique and better than anything they can get elsewhere.
• Testimonial: Including a customer quote relevant to to the product/service is great.
• KISS: Keep it simple, stupid. We’ve all heard this one. The best way to cut content is to write a draft, read it out loud, cut out what sounds awkward, boring, or confusing. Repeat. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you lose 30-50% of the original text.
• Call to Action: This is the most important part of the email. Its where we get to tell the customer what to do. It should be close to the top of the email, the link should describe what we want the customer to do, and we should limit the choices of actions to one or two different links. (The content of the page can have multiple links to your site as well)
• Branding: Branding is a great way to appear professional and organized. Its also a way to communicate our personality and objective. A clean, sleek logo with matching color scheme that ties into the website is ideal.
• Sending at the Right Time: Obviously first thing Monday and last thing Friday are out. That email is going in the trash, and quick. For B2B email marketing the best times are Tuesday and Wednesday mid-morning or mid-afternoon. For B2C email, try early evening during the week and Saturday afternoons.

The Results Are In!

So, we’ve run the campaign, and gotten our reports back. Let’s talk a little about what all of those stats mean.
Total Recipients: Pretty obvious. It’s all the people we sent the email to.
Successful Deliveries: These are the emails that made passed the spam filters and firewalls and landed in a real, bonafide email inbox.
Bounced Emails: These are the emails that did not make it to an inbox. There are generally two reasons for this:

• Hard Bounce: It’s an undeliverable address. The person closed their account, was fired, moved to Fiji, whatever. Basically this email address is useless and should be removed from the list
• Soft Bounce: Usually this means the email account was not available at the time we sent the email. This could mean the server was busy, the account was full, etc. This could be a good email address, but we’re just not sure.

Anything more than a 10% bounce rate and we need to reevaluate our email list. If we keep our bounce rate too high, we can start to look like a spammer and email services will automatically start flagging all ADX emails as spam. That’s no good, so we want to make sure we keep our email list nice and clean.
Total Opens: this is the total times the email was opened. This number is really misleading. If one person opens your email 200+ times, you might think you’ve had an effective campaign, but further investigation will show that what you really had was one person who really liked reading your email over and over.
Recipients Who Opened: This is much more useful. Our report shows who opened the email and how many times they opened it.
Total Unique Opens/Clicks: This shows the number of times the email was opened or a link was clicked with all duplicates removed. So, that person I mentioned earlier who opened the email 200 times now only counts for 1 open. (By the way, a good open rate across all industries is about 22% but see the bottom of this email for a breakdown of each industry).

Post-Campaign Checklist

• Bounced Emails: Determine how many emails bounced and why, then clean up the email list.
• Unsubscribes: How many unsubscribe requests did we have? Why are people unsubscribing?
• Open Rate: How was the open rate? If it was lower that 20%, rethink the subject line and the time the email was sent.
• Links: Did people click like we wanted them to? If not, go back to draft on the email layout and content.
• If they did click, were leads generated? If not, work on the website content.
• Longevity: At what point to people stop clicking and opening? If folks are still clicking a week after the email was sent, a follow-up newsletter may be a good option for us.
• Cost: How much did the campaign cost in effort and resources? Was it worth it? Is it worth it to do it again?