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.

More Than Just Data Sources

Often StrikeIron is described as an iTunes of data sources (with our SOA Express Excel Add-In the equivelant of an iPod). In the same way that iTunes brings standardization, aggregation, consistency of purchasing, and reduction of complexity (and therefore success) to the MP3-standard-driven music world, StrikeIron has done a similar thing in the SOAP/REST standard-driven world of Web services. For example, via the offerings available in our Web Services Marketplace, we can provide consistent access to business demographics, financial data, healthcare-related data, reference sources, address and telephone data, and much more for easy integration into many different applications and Web sites.

However, there is more available than just standardized access to diverse streams of constantly changing data. For instance, take a look at two of our Communication category Web services, Global SMS and the Notify! Voice Notification Web services available in the Marketplace.

With Global SMS, we have eliminated the complexity of dealing directly with carriers, broad fluctuations in per-message pricing depending on where a message is sent, and having to know the provider of a given mobile device to send a notification message to. All you need is a number, a message to send, and a StrikeIron account. SMS-based notification is a powerful addition to many applications that leverages the world’s telecommunications networks that are already in place, and now a simple programmatic SOAP or REST-based interface makes it easy to integrate. Why not put it to use?

Our voice notification is very similar in terms of its application, however it dials a number and when the call is answered by any phone (not just mobile devices), the message is delivered via a human-sounding electronic voice (many different voices are available). The applications are limitless. Visit our site to try both of these for free.

And as always, simply utilize the same consistent interface to these Web services as you will find with all of the various the data sources we provide. Your UserID and Password is all you need.

Bob Brauer
President and CEO

Salesforce.com Announces AppStore Checkout

With Salesforce.com’s announcement of AppStore Checkout this past week, I received several notes from colleagues asking if this is a potential threat to StrikeIron and our Web Services Marketplace.  The assumption was that somehow we compete with the AppExchange. I often find myself reminding folks that the AppExchange is largely a Marketplace of user-interface driven add-ons for Salesforce CRM (that also exist in standalone form for use in other ways).  From what I can tell, AppStore Checkout (due in December 2007) is a mechanism that will make it easier for third party applications to be purchased and paid for in a manner consistent with the Salesforce business model. While this is obviously a pre-emptive-still-very-far-from-beta announcement, it is clearly aimed at other CRM vendors such as NetSuite who are also fervently trying to create marketplaces in support of their own CRM and accounting-on-demand applications. The announcement encourages Salesforce partners to continue to market their Appexchange applications over their competitors because of the promise of good things coming. Pre-emptive strategies such as these often work well with direct competitors also to keep the other guy looking like a me-too.

As for StrikeIron, one must remember that the AppExchange is about applications, and StrikeIron is about delivering reduced complexity, consistency of usage, and frictionless integration across a diverse set of data sources (such as CRM-related demographic data) and componentized business functions (such as sending an SMS notification message anywhere in the world) available over the Web. The key is that we provide a consistent way to do both, in ANY application or environment. And, we offer the ability to pay for access to all of these data sources and functions in a single location. Remember, consistency in payment does not mean consistency in usage, and this is much harder to enforce with applications built by a diverse range of developers, so the AppExchange model will still be one with significant challenges ahead.

Fortunately, we have several partners with applications that are available in the AppExchange that consume data from StrikeIron, so the AppStore Checkout is good news for us. Again, part of the challenge of the adoption in applications from the AppExchange is all of the diverse ways to buy these applications currently, so the easier it is for organizations to acquire third party applications on top of their Salesforce.com installation, the more data that will be consumed via StrikeIron, and the more revenue that can be passed on to our data provider partners. The CRM technology vertical only represents a small portion of our revenue, but once the AppStore Checkout goes live, this will help improve that. So what’s good for Salesforce is good for StrikeIron.

Bob Brauer
President and CEO, StrikeIron