In the era of the web, marketers have a standard dilemna common to much of an organizations IT infrastructure. Tool fragmentation. Online marketing affords many powerful tools. But like so much of IT, they're not integrated. Like software development, much of the goal of consistent messaging is having the ability to reuse content across multiple delivery channels. Like traditional IT, there are multiple systems used to deliver content, multiple user interfaces to learn and content that must be copied and even reformated between systems. Web CMS, Email Marketing, Landing Page applcations etc.
Some integrations exist, but few of those systems were designed from the ground up to deliver content from a single repository and a single interface to the web, publications and email with the power of an Enterprise CMS. Why should creating website content mean moving that content to a new system to create publications or emails? ...That's what we thought.
We also thought that web content management systems, like OrchestraCMS, have a much more robust ability to create rich content than traditional email automation platforms. OrchestraCMS already stores content separate from templates, allowing reuse across multiple web channels (public, portal, intranet, extranet). OrchestraCMS allows complete freedom to design templates to whatever specifications are required, providing rich design, innovative interactions and deep integration with Salesforce.com data, processes and analytics. Why not provide two more channels through which our customers could publish that content? Why not provide the flexibility to include different template types, to enable different looks across all of the available channels.
Introducing OrchestraCMS Publications and Email Distribution. As with all things OrchestraCMS, we believe everything starts with great content, delivered through designs as individual as all of our customers, to the best web channel for the application - public, secure Enterprise portal, intranet, extranet. Now we add the ability to easily assemble that great content into a publication that can be published to your website, portal or intranet, and delivered to your customers through email, based on subscription and/or customer preference, instantly, or on a schedule.
With the same visual ease that characterizes the OrchestraCMS user experience today, our customers will be able to quickly assemble content into publications on templates with the same limitless design as our standard CMS templates and push them through email with the same or unique look at feel, from their own set of templates. Same content, same interface, integrated platform. OrchestraCMS.
No copying content from one system to another. No compromise on the design of any of the templates. One system to learn, one content library to manage and package anyway you like. And with the new Analytics Edition included in Salesforce.com Spring 12, powerful analytics that bring email, publications and websites together on a single dashboard. That's the power of 100% native on Salesforce. That's the power of integration.
For the beleagured marketer, the application is the same, the look is the same and you can leverage separate native Salesforce Approval processes to accommodate any business process for any of those channels. Just select the content, select the template, publish or submit for approval. Create Publications that customers can subscribe to from your website and simply create a publication for the subscription. It will be published at the right time and and email of the publication received by your customer at the time of their choosing, from their subscription preference.
We think this is the new defintion of Customer Engagement Management, where both the Marketer and the Customer win. In the era of the Social Enterprise, we don't think this is an option. We think this is the only option - win/win.
Let us know what you think in the comments area below and watch for some great examples of customer implementations in upcoming posts.
