StrikeIron Blog

Post Eloqua Experience Notes and Multi-Channel Marketing with SMS

If you don't already know, Eloqua is a Web-based marketing and campaign management platform for lead nurturing, lead management, and campaign effectiveness measurement, all focused primarily around email. If you are trying to optimize the time of your sales organization (and who isn't), it would be a good idea to learn the concepts of "lead scoring" and "lead nurturing" to maximize sales team effectiveness.

A very simple example of lead scoring might include more "points" given for someone who lands on your Website after searching for your company name, rather than just a generic search term (clearly they were interested in specifically your company). This could be one of several factors affecting a "lead score". Then, depending on a lead's score, different sets of business rules might be applied (such as a phone call versus a follow up email). A good primer for this kind of approach is the book by Eloqua Founder Steve Woods entitled Digital Body Language.

Members of the StrikeIron team attended the Eloqua Experience user conference last week in San Francisco where they showcased Eloqua's integration of our SMS Text Messaging capability. It is a key component of using Eloqua for multi-channel marketing purposes. SMS can be used in a multi-touch lead nurturing program using various communication channels to nurture leads through the initial stages of the buying process.

Here is a screen shot showing how mobile text messages can be sent via template within the Eloqua platform:

All you need to do is come to StrikeIron to get your UserID & Password credentials, and then plug them into the Eloqua product, and you can start sending text messages globally (we handle all of the backend SMS capabilities and billing, supporting hundreds of carriers in hundreds of countries with fast, reliable message delivery).

At the event, to help showcase the SMS capability within Eloqua, DemandGen (one of our partners) created an SMS bingo game. Numbers were drawn during various sessions breaks and lunch to put a high tech spin on the classic game of Bingo, all done via SMS.

David Meerman Scott gave a good presentation at the Eloqua event as well that I continue to hear great things about. I would highly recommend new world marketers follow his blog and also follow him on Twitter.

Glimpses of the latest cut of the Eloqua product and platform demonstrated a really nice user interface, powerful reporting capabilities, and the ability to easily leverage non-email channels (such as SMS) as an effective part of any lead maximization strategy. While there are other choices to consider in the space, Eloqua is one of the best.

StrikeIron Exhibiting at DreamForce Event Nov. 17-20th, CTO to Speak

StrikeIron will be headed West to the Moscone Center in San Francisco to exhibit at what Salesforce.com is billing as the "Cloud Computing Event of the Year" November 17th-20th. With 12000 customers, partners, and employees expected in attendance at the event, we will be exhibiting our Live Data for Salesforce solutions that enable more comprehensive and accurate data to serve as the foundation of successful CRM.

These Salesforce-certified, natively-built solutions can be found on the AppExchange. They were built on the Force.com platform and utilize StrikeIron's Web services to access external data in real-time, meaning that any users of these applications don't have to worry about updating or maintaining any of the reference data that serves as the basis of these solutions - it is simply automatic.

In addition to demonstrating our existing Salesforce solutions, we will also be unveiling the batch processing capabilities of these offerings at the event, which will enable mass record processing in addition to the interactive capabilities that already exist.

Some examples of these solutions include:

- An email verification solution that ensures that the email addresses associated with contact records are valid and working email addresses that can actually receive email. For example, determining that an email address associated with a contact is no longer valid could often mean that the employee no longer works for that contact company, and this could trigger an opportunity to reach out to that prospect and find out who the new appropriate contact is, which in turn could result in a much better relationship with that prospect.

- A U.S. address verification solution (and a global one too) that ensures that all of the addresses of contacts and companies within the CRM system are accurate and complete for much higher data quality, better reporting and business intelligence, and better customer service.

- An integrated Do Not Call solution that enables automatic do not call checking to ensure compliance with US & State Do Not Call list regulations and avoid the costly fines of non-compliance.

One of the power aspects of these solutions is the ability to do custom mapping of Salesforce fields to the actual Web service and data sources to ensure that they fit your exact requirements as shown here:

Several other Web services such as IP address lookup, Cortera business vitals (and other demographic data sources), SMS and text-to-voice IVR capabilities are also available for enriched, more accurate CRM data and additional communication capabilities. And of course, if you want to build your own data source from free form Web data, you can do so with our Kapow solution.

David Motsinger, StrikeIron's Chief Technology Officer, will be talking about the importance of high quality data within a CRM system and how it can affect the ROI of CRM efforts on Wednesday, November 18th at the show. David leads the StrikeIron team that has built out our high performance onDemand Web services architecture that delivers millions of transactions to thousands of customers and users in 24x7 production environments.

If you will be at the event, drop by and meet some of our team members (including product engineers) at booth 818.

The Wallet in the Cloud for Ecommerce? Paypal Launches X.com

Paypal announced today at their first ever developers' conference the launch of their new developer platform called "X". It is now available for developer signup at www.x.com. This "wallet in the cloud" offering introduces the concept of "Adaptive Payments" that can be embedded in just about anything, geared towards abstracting payment system complexity from developers building applications and Websites that collect funds for goods and services. It also introduced "Adaptive Accounts", enabling PayPal accounts to be auto-created on behalf of your customers.

These offerings are built around the launch of a new offering of APIs (not all of which are entirely new) aimed at making PayPal a ubiquitous mechanism for buying anything, anywhere and substantially increasing the types of business models PayPal can now support. For example, Adaptive Payments ideally will enable such fun as buying directly off of TV's from your remote control, buying via smartphones, kiosks at the mall, at restaurants, within a car (pay tolls with PayPal?), or anyplace or anything else where it is physically possible to enter a Paypal email address and password.

Paypal currently accounts for about $70 Billion dollars per year of the $30 trillion annual global spend. This represents about 15% of the total ecommerce market. Clearly eBay (PayPal's parent company) believes there is a lot of room for growth and additional vehicles of commerce to capture. They insist that cash is dying a slow death and our grandchildren won't know what it was like to carry around cash, and other types of paper currency (such as checks) are becoming obsolete. PayPal is banking on opening up their platform and payment networks to an army of developers, and that this will lead to a wave of new online innovation with PayPal payment mechanisms at the core. With 240 million accounts now on PayPal, 80 million of which are active, it is a difficult theme for online vendors to ignore.

At StrikeIron, we follow ecommerce developments closely because of our many complementary APIs to ecommerce systems like Paypal, including everything from sales tax rates APIs, address verificationglobal too), email verification, telephone number verification and enrichment, currency rates, and even the ability to send SMS messages and text-to-voice messages to landlines to let people know that packages should have arrived for example for a better customer experience. These are all necessary components for those wishing to create an optimized ecommerce transaction and the best possible user experience. Everything that drives more ecommerce to occur is ultimately driving more need for own Web-based ecommerce SOAP and REST services, so we do everything we can to make sure our own APIs are compatible with and what our customers are using, need, and want. Hence our interest in developments at PayPal.

The new platform is already being put to use as was showcased during the event at the keynote presentations. I really enjoyed seeing SAP's demonstration of their new adoption of Paypal for B2B applications (they now have a PayPal module within R/3), enabling invoices to be generated within SAP, and then payment to be remitted and received via a Paypal account - all in a few simple clicks.

ShopSavvy had a nice iPhone application that enables one to search for a product, get a list of all online vendors selling that product sorted by prices, and then buy from the vendor of your choice. This is all achieved in a simple click with PayPal information and shipping information pre-saved in a preferences file on the iPhone. We even witnessed a pizza being ordered and paid for with PayPal.

Payments to and from the "Cloud" is a concept likely to succeed because it takes advantage of all of the things that make the Cloud itself advantageous, such as abstraction from the complexities of payment networks,  no software or hardware investments, easy API interfaces, simple adoption procedures, and usage-based expenses rather than capital expenses. And of course, the easier it is for buyers to buy, the greater the chance that they will. There are competitors of course to PayPal, including Amazon with DevPay and Google Payments circling overhead, and not to mention probably hundreds of smaller guys trying to make a living on the buying and selling of others, and it is still an early market so a lot can happen of course.

But I think this new platform and set of APIs with the easy ability for developers to incorporate Paypal as a payment mechanism for a whole new array of payment collection points will be a big win for all of us in the space and everyone seeking new, creative ways to conduct business.

Cloud Computing, Eloqua, and PayPal Events November 2nd-4th

I will be at the Cloud Computing Conference in Santa Clara starting today to see the latest and greatest in leveraging the Cloud and meeting with StrikeIron partners and customers (and hopefully future partners). There will be some interesting keynotes from Unisys, Oracle, and Yahoo about some of their efforts in this area as well a lot of emerging technology in the Cloud space to review. Infrastructure-as-a-service and abstraction the cloud is gaining steam, and this event ought to lay the foundation for 2010.

I will also spend some time at the PayPal X Innovate 2009 developer event in San Francisco to see how our various e-commerce APIs (sales tax rates, email and physical address verification, telephone number verification, etc.) are most applicable as the ecommerce world evolves and get a preview of PayPal's new APIs scheduled for release in 2010. There should be a good group of entrepreneurs at the event that I look forward to meeting with as well.

We will have a team and booth at the Eloqua Experience event in San Francisco this week as well, demonstrating the integration of our SMS text messaging API into the Eloqua platform, as well as several other data sources available "as-a-service" for lead scoring and other marketing purposes.

It should be quite a week!

Beyond Address Verification: Enriching Address Data

Address verification, the concept of using a Web service API to ensure that an address exists according to United States (or Canada) post office reference data, is easy, straight-forward, and valuable. With a single line of code, the capability can be built into Web forms, applications, business processes, and more to ensure that customer and prospect addresses that have been collected are accurate and complete.

From a business perspective, the United States Post Office estimates about $2 billion annually is spent on postage each year to undeliverable addresses. And this number doesn't include the cost of wasted print and marketing materials, missed opportunities, and poor customer service as a result of bad address data, the costs of which can very well be several times higher.

But solving this problem with address verification and correction is only part of the story. If you are already verifying the existence of an address, you can also enrich the data around the same address with many additional data points determined from that address. This can add some significant business value ROI, especially considering the ease at which it can be done.

For example, you can programmatically look up the current phone number that is associated with a specific address in a national phone book database that is updated every 24 hours. You can add latitude and longitude coordinates to an address to allow them to be plotted on a map to gain visual information about sets of addresses. You can also add other geographical information such as county, congressional district, and other post office specific data such as carrier route.

You can also determine if the address is that of a business or an individual, and then append the appropriate demographic data, such as revenue and SIC code for businesses, or estimated income, length of residency, and other census data for individuals.

In addition, you can also perform distance calculations on that address to other addresses (such as your closest retail outlet, or distance from your headquarters.)

For example, if all you have is this kind of simple, incomplete information about an address:

With a few Web services SOAP or REST calls you can automated the process of it becoming this:

As one example, we have integrated a lot of these capabilities into Salesforce.com using these same APIs, and that eliminates even the simple integration step: http://crm.strikeiron.com/

In other words, a simple address can be an effective gateway to a wealth of information that can aid marketing, customer service, sales, and provide better business intelligence about your customers, members, prospects, and other addresses you consider to be an information asset.

StrikeIron Exhibiting at Eloqua Experience 2009 Marketing Conference in San Francisco November 2-4

The Eloqua Global Users Conference is happening November 2nd-4th at the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco. I truly enjoyed attending the event last year, learning a great deal not just about Eloqua and its product's marketing capabilities, but also from the many case studies of how the technology was being implemented and finding success in a broad range of marketing organizations across several industries (I'm sure I drove our marketing director nuts with several new marketing ideas upon returning home!)

Also, the keynotes last year were of tremendous value as well, digging deep into the art and science of traditional marketing, and how it can be applied in the new era of marketing, including interactive Web marketing, email and viral marketing, social media, and metric-based optimization. Guru marketer and psychologist Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of the marketer's bible Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, gave a powerful keynote presentation on human behavior and its applicability in marketing. This year's keynote speaker is David Meerman Scott (author of the New Rules of Marketing and PR) and I am certain it will be just as compelling as last year's main event.

Several members of the StrikeIron team will be there to meet with our Eloqua customers and prospective customers. We will be demonstrating a couple of the Eloqua solutions available to their customer base, as well as our other data sources and APIs that are easily integrated into any platform.

For example, you will be able to see the integration of our SMS text messaging Web service into the Eloqua platform (actually built into the Eloqua product by their team) and how it is being used by Eloqua customers as part of a mobile marketing strategy.

We will also be showing how our address, telephone, email, individual, and company data verification capabilities can help provide a more accurate, better base of data from which to utilize the Eloqua platform, and how these straight-forward approaches can provide a much greater Eloqua ROI.

In addition, we will show how data enrichment with business and individual demographics can aid lead scoring efforts, lead nurturing, and other process-driven business rules to help optimize the time and maximize the output of a sales organization.

If you are at the event, please stop by the booth and say hello to our friendly, knowledgeable team.

Some other sponsors and exhibitors include Oracle, Reachforce, Astadia, EchoLane, eVariant, and Brainshark. It ought to be a good time.

What Domino's Pizza Can Teach You About Mobile Marketing, Social Media, and How to Use the Web

At the Direct Marketing Association event this week in San Diego, I enjoyed Rob Weisberg's presentation about Domino's Pizza seeing itself as a professional marketing organization rather than just an innovator in home pizza delivery. Rob is the Vice President of multimedia marketing for Domino's. I have always been a fan of Domino's, especially considering their use of our SMS text messaging capabilities.

Domino's is really trailblazing within the food industry using the Web, social media, mobile marketing, and online innovation in driving its business. Currently, 20% of all of its orders are received over the Internet. Considering the millions of dollars of orders per day they process, it makes Domino's one of the largest ecommerce companies in the world (and you thought Twitter was hot!)

They maintain oceans of demographic data about their customers so they can personalize messaging, and even predict when they are most likely to want to order a pizza. They have hundreds of thousands of fans of their Facebook page, and a legion of followers on Twitter.

Last month, they launched an iPhone-optimized Web application (also for Palm Pre and Android) for ordering from smartphones, and they use mobile platforms such as Air2Web to track mobile marketing efforts. For example, at the San Diego DMA event, they gave a simple code to the audience to send in via text message to receive $5 off their next five orders at Domino's Website, and they will be able to track the proliferation of that code through social networks and get a read on the demographics of the individuals that respond to the code, allowing for even more precision marketing going forward. Send me an email (bob.brauer AT strikeiron.com) if you would like the code.

"Pizza Tracker" on their Website enables you to follow the progress of your pizza (in the same way you can track packages with Fedex). You can see your pie moved from being "prepped", "in the oven", and "out for delivery" so you can make sure you are home once it is on its way to your house (or end the meeting at the office).

They also have an interactive pizza builder on their site so you can customize your pizza experience, as well as other online tools, most of which are now also available on their smartphone applications.

Domino's is a shining example of some of the ingenuity we will see in consumer products both in marketing and customer interaction in the social media and mobile age, and demonstrates well how a traditional, established company can turn itself into an exciting ecommerce company.

Optimizing a Sales Team's Time With an Email Verification Web Service

Great Marketers know that one of their top priorities is to optimize the time spent on leads for the sales organization. One way to achieve this is by verifying (more than just syntactically) the existence of an email address. Email verification is an effective means of filtering garbage, non-existent leads out of the sales process thereby preventing a considerable amount of a sales professional's time from being wasted.

For example, A lead should only be inserted into a CRM database from a Web form once it is confirmed that the email address is indeed a valid one (or definitely NOT an invalid one), otherwise a sales person could spend valuable time composing emails and trying to contact these phantom, non-existent leads while legitimate opportunities otherwise dangle in the wind. Of course, running an entire email list through a batch email verification can also go a long way in keeping customer and prospect data up to date, especially since people often leave organizations and once-valid email addresses are sometimes no longer valid (and this can trigger a sales-related activity as well once discovered trying to determine who the new contact is).

The first way to determine that an email address is invalid (within an algorithm) is to parse out the domain name from the email address and sure be certain that it does indeed exist. After the email structure is first validated structurally, existence checks can be achieved with an Internet "ping." Ensuring existence of the domain is one of the first of several tests.

One thing helpful to an email verification algorithm is that there are some level low-level SMTP (a standard protocol for sending email) functions that can be taken advantage of, enabling for the querying of the actual existence of email addresses without actually sending an email. Unfortunately, many different email server implementations may respond in many different ways to these queries, so pulling this off algorithmically can be very complex. In some scenarios, email servers will respond with success even though the email address does not really exist, meaning no individual has that address (and no one is certainly reading the emails). In these cases, email servers accept these unknown email deliveries and either discard the email or archive them. This kind of email server behavior is why email verification algorithms sometime respond with "unknown" (or equivalent) when an email verification check is performed. The server is saying "ok to send" even though nobody is using that particular email address. In other cases, some servers just take too long to respond (using distributed server locations as part of a commercial offering can help overcome this) and therefore the validity of an email address is also unknown in those cases.

The key to a good email verification process is to eliminate the 20-50% (or more) of made-up email addresses submitted by individuals who want to remain anonymous (and therefore submit email address such as mickey@mouse.com, elvis@graceland.com, etc.) or otherwise don't have any real interest in the product or service being offered. Achieving this kind of optimization is a big win for Marketing organizations because it enables sales reps to spend their time working on legitimate, interested leads.

New Web Services Now Available, Minority and Woman-Owned Business Indicator and Federal Employer Identification Lookup

Two new data sources are live and available on our platform for easy integration into applications, Websites, third-party solutions (such as CRM) and business processes.
 
The first is the Minority and Woman-Owned Business Information Web Service. It provides minority-owned business flags such as whether a business is woman-owned, veteran-owned (both disabled and Vietnam veterans), its certification status (8A, state/local government, HUBzone), and minority type (Asian American, Black American, Hispanic American, Native American, South Asian American).

Typically, this type of data is necessary for eligibility in certain government-related programs and for meeting federal guidelines of vendor diversity, or internal diversity goals, for larger organizations.

The second new service available is the Federal Employer Identification Lookup Web Service. It provides Federal Employer Identification Numbers, also known as EINs, of over 12 million businesses in the United States.

This type of data is used for the purposes of business verification, to locate Tax ID numbers for vendors you are working with, for assisting in federal compliance with BSA and Anti-Money Laundering legislation, as well as compliance with other legislation such as the US Patriot Act.

Both of these services are related to vendor information that is often very incomplete, outdated, and inaccurate in organizations that work with a large number of vendors. These two services, especially when integrated for real-time data enhancement when new vendors are added to databases, can go a long way in improving the quality and usefulness of this internal data. Of course, it can also be used to target certain organizations for diversity programs as well.

This is a case where we have made two new services available as a result of customer demand. If you have other ideas for additional useful data sources to integrate over the Web where we make things incredibly easier for you by handling all of the data updates and data maintenance, please let us know.

Webinar Showing Creation of Web Data Feeds with Kapow Thursday, October 15th, Noon EDT

Note: this Webinar has been recorded and is now available here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/551640186

On Thursday via Webinar we will be introducing the availability of Kapow Web Data Services via the StrikeIron platform. Now, using your StrikeIron account information, you will be able to create custom data sources and feeds from the infinite supply of data that you can find out on the Web. In other words, all the world is a data source! To reserve your seat for the Webinar, click here:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/551640186

The 45-minute Webinar plus Q&A will focus on the exciting new launch of a subscription-based service of the Kapow OnDemand technology, specifically aimed at the SMB market and departmental use. This technology enables "data robots" to quickly and easily be built, allowing users to create their own custom data sources from anything they can see in a Web browser, even data only available behind login screens. These custom data sources are easily exposed as REST services or RSS feeds for seamless integration into applications, Web sites, mashups, business processes, or any other place Web data feeds can provide value.

I'll be joining with Kapow founder and CTO Stefan Andreasan to discuss how cutting and pasting from the Web is a thing of the past. We will demonstrate the technology, discuss why this launch is important to the industry, show how easy it is to create these data sources and feeds, and talk about common use cases.There is a press release discussing the actual launch, as well as another blog entry I did on the subject that will provide some more background information.

I hope you can join us!