customer engagement – BizConnector

BizConnector Still Going Strong

Who would have thought that after more than sixteen years, BizConnector is still going strong!

With loyal customers – some since 2009, it has been chugging away, day after day, 24/7, interacting via email and SMS, sending alerts and reminders and more, intelligently and unobtrusively.

Even as a small business, BizConnector technology competes with the best small business marketing and workflow automation services out there – at reasonable prices.

Contact us if you have a question. Or install BizConnector from Salesforce AppExchange to get started (you need to be a Salesforce customer).

Rules vs Campaigns – The BizConnector Approach

Campaigns as incorporated in Salesforce and other applications implement the traditional model, in which leads and contacts are explicitly added to a named campaign.

This enables these leads and contacts – called members in Salesforce – to be tracked and sent emails according to the strategy and objectives of a specific campaign.

So members have to be explicitly added to a campaign in order to be part of that campaign. And if there is more than one campaign, this has to be done separately for each campaign.

The BizConnector model is very different. Instead of incorporating the notion of campaigns in which you have to specifically add members to campaigns, BizConnector has rules which ‘discover’ leads naturally and automatically when they match rule conditions.

There is a natural conflict in Campaigns vs Rules. Without BizConnector, the campaign drives how you decide what to do about a lead. In BizConnector, rules take over this role, and rules are much more dynamic in nature.

So, simply by the match of rule conditions with the field values in a lead or contact, a rule can ‘fire’ on that lead or contact. In this way a relationship is created between the rule and a lead or contact – individually. This relationship is dynamic – it starts when the match is recognized and the rule fires, and it stops when the rule conditions no longer apply to the lead or contact or when the rule actions have run their course.

This dynamic behavior is much more in tune with the needs of the market today. Market conditions change daily, if not hourly or by the minute. This is surely true for your industry. BizConnector rules are sensitive to change – in (near) real time – record by individual record. It is this flexibility and dynamism that makes BizConnector rules achieve your marketing, lead nurturing, and workflow objectives.

Are Your Drip Marketing Emails Too Long?

Drip Marketing has been around for some time now – long enough for people to understand that it is a way of keeping your company, product, or service ‘on top of mind’ over a period of time. It has been found to be a successful strategy, and is being used by a growing number of small businesses who realize that its benefits are not only the province of large companies.

There seem to be two different types of drip marketing campaigns – at least that I have observed. As far as I can tell, they produce very different results.

The first type is similar to mass emailing – only that mass emails are executed as drips. ie. Don’t only send one mass email; send a number of them, with perhaps some changes from one to the next.

The second type employs some level of interaction, and uses this interaction to determine what to do next.

The first type falls under the category of one-way communication (“Hello there! I have something to tell you!”), while the second uses, and relies on two-way communication to succeed.

The first type usually results in emails that are too long. There can be a number of reasons for this, but typically, senders are trying to get as much information as they can into each message. Result: recipients’ eyes gloss over, or the message gets deleted or ignored.

A number of articles have been written about why your emails are too long (Why your emails are too long — and how to improve, 10 Reasons Your Emails Are Too Long), and they get near, but don’t get the cigar. The real reason is relevance to the recipient’s question. This is the point. If you are employing one-way communication, you don’t have interactivity. Without interactivity, how do you know what the recipient is asking? And if you don’t know the question, how do you know that your message is relevant?

If you are the sender of interactive emails, your messages can be short, and to the point. Result: they are much more likely to be read – and responded to.

People no longer have time for wordy emails – especially when the communication is one-way. Email is not dead, and email campaigns will be around for a long time to come. The success of services like Twitter have shown that messages don’t have to be long to be understood. And this is especially true when interaction provides the context by which we communicate. So be brief!

As Baltasar Gracian (Spanish Philosopher) said: “Good things, when short, are twice as good.”

BizConnector employs two features which enable relevant interactivity in drip marketing campaigns:

It is based on rules, which only fire when their conditions are satisfied. Rule conditions are allied with relevance.
The Instant Feedback feature updates records in real-time when recipients respond to questions in the body of emails.

Isn’t it time you made your campaigns interactive?

Raising Your Automation-Interaction Intelligence

Much has been written about the diminishing success of mass emails and how to develop new strategies that engage your prospects and customers. If you are up-to-date on this then you have probably recognized that it is no small task, not without its own challenges and pitfalls.

From its inception, BizConnector / Lead Follow-Up was built with bi-directional communication in mind. It incorporates the notion that communication is a series of ongoing ‘conversations’ with prospects and customers, and that each conversation is potentially different, just as much as each prospect or customer is potentially different. This is antithetical to the ‘one size fits all’ approach fundamental to the mass emailing model.

A conversation is an interaction between two parties. The term ‘interaction intelligence’ includes, among other things, how relevant one party’s messages are to the other. The more relevant a message, the more likely it will be taken into account by the other party.

Now bring automation into the picture. Automation-interaction intelligence measures how well you do all this automatically.

To be able to send relevant messages using an automated application requires that the application is sensitive not only to differences between its stored prospect and customer profiles, but that it is also sensitive to changes – in real time – in these profiles, and can react accordingly.

Not too many products do this successfully, and the reason for this may lie in their core architecture.

BizConnector / Lead Follow-Up does do this successfully. The main reason for this stems from its core architecture – manifested by (near) real time business rules (see What Is A Business Rule). The other is the Instant Feedback feature (see Getting Instant Feedback) that updates recipient responses in real-time.

These two mechanisms work symbiotically to respond sensitively to the profiles and stated needs of the target population, effectively raising its interaction intelligence through automation.

An Example:

If all this sounds too theoretical, then the following simple example may help to illustrate.

Let’s assume prospect records contain a field called ‘Product Interest’. This (required) field is populated initially by a prospect submitting a form on your website. Let’s say that for one prospect the field value starts off as ‘Product A’.

Let’s say you have two rules; Rule A firing and sending relevant emails over a period for ‘Product A’ prospects and another, Rule B, sending relevant emails over a period for ‘Product B’ prospects.

The above describes an ongoing ‘triggered email’ marketing environment in which prospects are receiving information (drip emails) relevant to their stated needs.

But in one or more of these emails you have an embedded ‘Instant Feedback’ question, and a prospect who initially requested ‘Product A’ information has changed her mind – now she wants ‘Product B’ information. She clicks ‘Tell me about Product B’ in the email.

Rule A immediately stops, and Rule B starts, for this prospect. The effect of this is that emails describing Product A are suppressed, and emails describing Product B start arriving in the recipient’s inbox.

Now wouldn’t you call that automated-interaction intelligence?