Sitecore's Email Management Tool Ties In WCM, CRM and WEM

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Jun 17, 2010

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While we've been looking closely at Web Engagement Management lately, Web CMS vendors were perfecting their WEM offerings.

Sitecore (news, site), for example, released a new module today. The main concept here is around how email is fitting in WEM beyond click-throughs and open rates.

WEM Perspectives: The Challenges of Email Management

We spoke to Darren Guarnaccia, VP Product Marketing, (see his latest post we published on CMSWire on relevance of relevance). Guarnaccia describes email as a triggering mechanism to keep the conversation going. It can be useful to warm up prospects, or to keep ongoing engaging conversations with existing customers.

And while there're quite a few options out there for email tech, the goal is to prevent customers from ignoring everything we send them. How to do it? Sitecore's answer it to make email meaningful and personally relevant to customers, get them to open it. This brings us to thinking of email less from a technology perspective, but more from a vision behind email campaign management standpoint.

First things first: who the customer is and what does he/she care about? This is the time to loop in WCM and leverage your website and everything you know about it to dialog and engage with customers and specific segments of them over email.

Lather, rinse, repeat — as you go through the iterative process of managing email campaigns and gathering customer intelligence and testing to fine-tune your messages.

The ability to tie in CRM that is transparent to marketers is the next logical step. But what happens quite often is that there are too many manual steps in that process, as marketers have to import contacts into their email system and then do segmentation.

Sitecore's Take on Solving These Challenges

One of the features in the new Email Campaign Manager release — which is tied closely to both Sitecore CMS and the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite (OMS) — is the ability to expose contacts in CRM as users in Sitecore Web CMS, where CRM lists are manifested as Sitecore user groups.

sitecore email message disppatch.jpg
Sitecore email message dispatch architecture

By binding people in CRM to site sessions, marketers are able to bind the data they know about customers back into the CRM. In cases where there's no CRM system used to begin with, contacts can still be imported and treated as Sitecore users with all the bells and whistles of applying security and permissions.

Managing CRM contacts as Sitecore users

What happens next is that you can create marketing lists in the CRM, map to Sitecore groups, and as you send out your email blasts all links included are auto-generated and encoded to cater to specific individual interests. Click on a link binds the data from CRM to WCM.

One of the challenges is to figure out where the money is being spent on and how effective that marketing spend is. This is when you as a marketeer would want to truly understand your website visitors across website and email and merge that sessions data to get more qualitative measures.