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.

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.

Data Operating System

At the Web 2.0 event in New York last week, Tim O'Reilly referred to Web 2.0 as a "data operating system". While "Web 2.0" is a protean term, I really like this particular classification.

If you think about the traditional definitions of an operating system for the computer, you ponder things like management and coordination of the computer's resources and activities, but you also think about a list of "services" that are available to applications and are traditionally accessed via APIs or system calls. This is not only true for desktop computers, but also other forms of computers such as mobile devices, gaming units, and even the iPod.

The same is true with Web 2.0 in that its core resource is data, and that data needs be managed and coordinated, and a lot of which can be accessed is accessible via API.

So while there are many applications out on the Web such as social networking, rich Internet applications on top of Flash, SAAS applications, mashups, and several others, the one commonality is that they are all driven by data. So while there are many shapes, sizes, and formats of data all over the Web, making it availability programmatically via an API is where it becomes most useful. It is this access to these data APIs that a company like StrikeIron is trying to provide the framework, infrastructure, and coordination and management of resources for.

The challenge is that While Web services and data APIs have solved a lot of the old integration problems of the Web, data access, and distributed applications such as platform and programming language independence, they have presented many new challenges as well. These include dealing with multiple types of authentication mechanisms, endless permutations of error and response codes, no interface or data structure standards, and a wide array of new business models. All of these inconsistencies must be dealt with by the builders of this new class of Web 2.0 applications, which in turn requires some pretty complex logic. And as we all know well, complexity limits adoption.

These are the very challenges that we at StrikeIron are focused on. With every Web service/data service API available from StrikeIron, they all have the same interface, same authentication mechanism, the same set of response and error codes, and the same business model. The idea is that this Web API standardization goes along with reducing the complexity of this new age "data operating system" for those who would like to tap into it. And with less complexity always comes increasing adoption.

So whether you are getting credit data from D&B, sales and use tax rates, verifying addresses and phone numbers, integrating financial data from NASDAQ, Zacks, NYSE, or MIdnight Trader, getting maps via API, or sending an SMS message, the API is the always same. So rather than doing fifty separate integrations each with its own set of variables to contend with, only one integration into the great data operating system in the sky is required.

So far it seems to be going well as we have over 1500 customers, all getting a piece of the new D.O.S.