HTML Emails - The Relationals Way

The recording from the Success Series webinar on HTML emails and how to go from concept to campaign is now available.

• To download it, right click this link and select "Save Target As...": Webinar Recording. To view the file, you will need Microsoft Windows Media Player. WARNING: This file is over 90MB so it may take some time to download.
• The sample files used during the session are also available. To download those files, right click this link and select "Save Target As...": Sample FIles.

If you have any problems using Internet Explorer to download the files, try using Mozilla Firefox. Also if you have Media Player version 9 or below, you will have to download the GoToMeeting codec interpreter at https://www.gotomeeting.com/codec and click "Install GoToMeeting Codec."

Taking the (Web) Lead

Scenario: A potential advertiser visits your website looking for your rate sheet or a media kit and would like more information. They go to your "contact us" page and are faced with a list of reps or email addresses. They call, maybe their English isn't great, they try to give you the name of the business, already you're three minutes into the call just getting their contact info.

Solution: Did you know that you can using a quick web form that adds links directly into Relationals as leads? An interested party can quickly provide their information, it immediately gets added into Relationals, and whatever lead assignment policies you have apply. Capture their name, email, phone number, business, address, even a product type their interested in. They can fill your lead sheet for you! Your rep can just pick up the phone, contact the customer, and provide that extra bit of service to close the deal.

To build your Web Lead form, you'll need rights to customize the Relationals lead object and a little help from your web content team.

1. Go to Setup and under Customization, select Standard Objects.
2. Click on Leads.
3. Click the Web Leads Sub-tab.
4. What you'll see is a form where you can select fields from the Leads tab that will be included in your form.
5. You can also specify a landing page after someone submits a lead. Usually, this is a thank you or confirmation page.
6. You can also specify what will be entered as the Lead Source value. The default is "Web Lead," but maybe you have a specific campaign you want to identify it with such as "Job Fair (Web Lead)." You can enter that as the lead source.
7. Click Generate HTML. This produces HTML code which you can give to your web team to include in your "contact us" page. They can customize the code to fit the styling on your website.

You can have as many web leads as you want on as many pages of your website as you want. If you want to identify where they come from, change the Lead Source accordingly.

Creating HTML Email, the Relationals Way

Relationals generates quite a few campaigns to inform its customers about its services or new features. Email campaigns provide the best facility to convey lots of information, and HTML emails are an attractive, finished-looking tool that can really have an impact.

Below is an outline of Relationals very own processes for creating HTML emails. This is best suited for your graphics team, but you may find some value in it when you guide them during the design process.

• Start with a message and goal in mind - Know who you're mass emailing, what their level of interest is, and what will drive their next level of engagement.
• Write the copy first - Be concise. Anything longer than 500 words and you risk overloading the email. 250 words is a great goal.
• Graphics & layout - Adobe Photoshop is used to layout the initial page. Usually we stick with about a 600-700 pixel wide layout. The length of the page should be designed to be dynamic so that it can adjust based on the amount of content you have. Once the initial design is mocked up in Photoshop, slice it up so that you have a minimum set of graphics and that certain columns are properly sliced so when the height changes it will not affect the overall design. Once sliced in Photoshop, save the file as HTML with images which produces an HTML file and a folder of associated linked images.
• Upload images to public website - Next upload the images to a public website (either your corporate site or depending on how many you have, you can also upload it as a Document in Relationals and set to to "Publicly Available"). Also make sure you know what the absolute link is to retrieve each graphic. This is the full URL: "http://www.something.com/..."
• Web Layout - Next, we load the HTML into Adobe Dreamweaver (you can use any HTML editor). When you open the file in Dreamweaver, you see the entire email as a web page and a table with the cells sliced accordinly. My next step is to replace the graphics that are currently linking to my local drive to link to those that are publicly available using the URLs from the previous step. For sections that you want to put text on, remove the graphic entirely. When you do this, some of the layout may get skewed. To remedy this, set all the cells to align to the top, and set the cell width to the same size as the graphic you just removed. Everything should be corrected. If you have an image that is in the background with text in the foreground, make sure you adjust it accordingly.
• Adding Text - Once you've cleaned out the cells and adjusted cell alignment, add the copy. It's a simple copy and paste with some addtional formatting based on what you want the design to look like. Again, the benefit of having true text copy like this is you can also customize and personalize it once it's in Relationals as a Global Template.
• Testing - Save the file, open it in a web browser to make sure it's picking up all the linked images, and test the links. Once that's solid, copy the web source code directly into the Relationals HTML Email Body Field. Make sure you click the HTML checkbox before you paste the code in. Once it's embedded, send a test email to yourself to make sure it looks good.
• CSS Styling - Formatting can be touchy when combining it with HTML email, so a note about referenced CSS style elements. When you copy the raw HTML to the editing window you need to make sure you click the HTML checkbox. You also have to save any editing you do while still in the source mode. If you switch back to preview mode, you will lose the CSS definitions. Alternatively, you can use inline CSS styling.

Obviously, these steps can require both graphic design and web publishing skills. That is probably far more than you should expect from a busy rep or sales manager. So we thought that you might find some value in getting pre-made HTML templates. There are several available on the web. With these starter templates, it's a matter of replacing the graphics, color and content to fit your brand. 

We're hosting this topic as part of our Success Series webinars on August 7th @ 12PM Pacific. To sign up, click here: https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/252020925

New Search Feature

Looking for the right data can be a challenge, especially if you have information coming from a lot of different sources. Relationals is making its search feature a lot more powerful. For example, let's say you want know your client's last name is "something Smith."

We've now included the ability for you to search across all tabs to find all records where "smith" appears.

From the main activity console (when you first log in), click on Advanced Search to bring up the Advanced Search window. Here you can select the term you want to search, which tabs you want to search, even isolate it to your own records.

Also, from any tab, if you use Search All located in the top right, you can search for text within Leads, Accounts, and Contacts. You'll also have the option to perform deeper searches with an Advanced Search.

If you like this functionality, we'd love to hear you comments on it.

Building a Simple Call List

There are times when you want to contact accounts or leads because you know they have specific, non-filterable criteria -- for example, you know they are hiring and are primed for an offer to support their hiring process.

Within Relationals, you could build a telesales campaign, but if you just need a quick list, you can easily create a call list for yourself (or if your a manager for someone else) and add it to your tasks as activities. Here's how:

1. From either the Lead or Account tab, pick the check boxes for people you wish to call (highlighted in yellow in this example).

2. Select Group Actions from the side menu and select Create Call List.

3. In the Create Call List dialog, give the call list a subject (in this case, "Hiring Companies"), set a due date for the task, and if you want indicate the type of activity (for example, "Outbound Call"). If you're a manager, you can also assign a call list to someone and track the progress through a notification.

4. Once you click Save, the tasks will show up on your Activity Console as tasks to be completed.

Now you can track who you're calling, log the calls as you normally would, and add additional call lists as you want to. And for as a sales manager, you can push call tasks to your team.

WOW 'em with HTML Marketing

Graphic HTML emails have quickly become the standard for professional blast emails. Relationals can help you manage Campaigns to send these out to a wide audience, but how do these images get in to the body of an email? The answer is HTML code. Programs like Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Photoshop can help you design your layout and create this code.

In order to make the images visible to the email recipients you need two things:

1)      The files must be hosted globally

2)      The HTML document needs to refer to the URLs for where these files are hosted.

Normally, you will host these files on your own server.  It will be much easier to work in this way because you will have direct access to moving and managing these files. However, if this is something that is still coming together you can host the documents on Relationals. There is a limited amount of space on your Relationals account.  In order to not exceed your available space you'll want to carefully manage any items uploaded to the Relationals server.

Here are the steps for recreating your HTML file with images hosted through Relationals documents.

Uploading the images to Relationals:

1)      Sign on to Relationals.

2)      Click on the Documents tab.

3)      Select New Document in the Sidebar on the left hand side.

4)      Under Document Title – name the document.

5)      Under Category – select a folder (always choosing the same folder for each document in this project helps to keep it organized).

6)      Leave Visible to Everyone and Ready to Use checked.

7)      Check the box for Publicly available document.

8)      You may want to include descriptions so that other users understand what the documents are for.

9)      Leave storage type as Upload to Relationals

10)  Under File use the Browse button to navigate to the folder where the files were stored on the hard drive.

11)  Click Save.

12)  Repeat steps 3 – 11 for all other images that will be linked to on your HTML document.

Updating HTML document  with hosted URLS:

1)      Open a new window with the HTML file in it, from the View menu in Explorer I selected Source. This opens the HTML as a text file.

2)      Locate the image tag <IMG SRC...> for the first image and highlight the selection inside of the quote (“”) marks.

3)      Back in Relationals, on the Documents tab, click on the link to the first image.

4)      Highlight the text under URL for Public Document.

5)      Move back to the HTML file open in your text editor.

6)      Paste the URL you copied over the old image tag selected in step 2

7)      Repeat steps 2 – 6 for all other images in your HTML document.

Now you can save your updated HTML document and you are ready to go!

Sum-Sum-Summertime!

The weather is getting warmer - it's time to start thinking about vacations! Managers, although, have a little more to think about than which sunny destination to visit. Back at home it's the manager who makes sure that Accounts don't go by the way-side when the Rep is beach-side. Relationals can help! Unleash the power of Relationals to help manage vacations, maternity leaves, or any extended absence with ease!

How can you have the rest of the team call on the Reps accounts while they're away? The answer your looking for is marketing campaigns. Sure, they're great for blast emails or a big telesales push, but hadyou thought about using them for this? It's easy to do, you just need to define 2 things:

1. Who should be called?
As in any marketing campaign you need to create a view that contains all of the Accounts or Leads that you want to include. In this case it would probably be all of the Accounts owned by the Rep.

2. Who should get the calls?
This is decided when you specify a call owner in the campaign. If you want to spread the calls evenly among a group of Reps you'll select "Use Policies to Decide Call Owner".

You'll actually want to define the policy before you get to this step. So, let's talk about policies. Where and how do I create policies, and what is a policy anyway?

What is a policy?
Policies are similar to the Rules that you can set up in an email program to manage what happens with your incoming emails. Administrators in Relationals use them all the time to determine who will be assigned new Leads. In this example we'll need to create an Assignment policy that includes the

Where do I manage and create new policies?
If you read our recent article on setup area changes then you already know that policies are found under Setup - Customization - Objects Tabs. Here we select which type of record we'll create a policy for. Since we're working with accounts, which is a standard object, it's available on this main page.

Since we want a policy that will assign the calls for us we'll click on the assignments tab and select New Policy Group. Note that we'll only need one policy in the group that we create. Once you name and save the group you can create the actual policy: just click on new policy.

Policies can be created for a lot of reasons and can easily be made very intricate and complex, but our needs here are simple. Since we won't use any specific criteria we only need to fill out the required fields which are indicated by the blue bars: a name for the policy, the order to process it, and which users to include.

Once you've saved the policy it will be available back in the marketing campaign and you're all set! When the campaign is started the calls will be assigned to the other team members.

Globally Warm Up Icy Leads

Situation: You have a thousands of contacts in leads and accounts in the system gathered from years of prospecting. Most have sat on ice for awhile. It's a very common problem because contacts come from a variety of sources (marketing events, list purchases, website inquiries, contact managers, account databases, etc.). Are those leads dead? Maybe, but the hard work you and your marketing team took put in the get them in the first place is not all lost. One way to identify bad, old, and otherwise no-longer-relevant contacts is to use an email marketing campaign. It's also a great way to simultaneously stimulate your pipeline.

The Carrot: First, you need compelling content. Perhaps you have new information you want to push to your customers -- price reductions, special offers, event notice, etc. These are ideal opportunities to touch your marketable contacts because you're not actively selling and they can benefit from the information. Company newsletters also make great inbox stuffers.

The Campaign: The campaign we chose to offer up to these petrified prospects was a newsletter -- mainly because it is gives a lot of value in terms of information, a friendly presentation, and gets a lot of bite-sized messages out to a very diverse group. Because it's a compendium our blog, content to these leads is fresh and varied. It wasn't a hard sales message; just useful information. With a little help from Photoshop and Dreamweaver to create the HTML content, we used Relationals' email marketing campaign feature to send the newsletter to a targeted list.

Optimal Targeting: One of the most powerful features in Relationals is the ability to build highly filtered views and use these views within targeted campaigns. Why not just hit everyone on the list? Let's say you only want to target known cold leads, or you have multiple lead sources and want to exclude one, or you have accounts that aren't customers yet, but you only want to reach those. Trust me, everyone has their reasons for slicing and dicing up the contact pie. And here's a little secret: you can speed up campaigns by doing as much filtering as possible beforehand.

Below is an actual set of Advanced Filters we use to send out our newsletter to non-users and contacts (leads and accounts) that haven't signed up with Relationals. Why they haven't, who can really say, but we wanted to use this as a way to (A) clean out some of the bad contact data or (B) get them interested in thinking about Relationals again.

The way you'd set up your filters depends entirely on how you've set up your processes within your organization. For this situation, we used:

1. The first filter is Email. Because I know there are likely bad email addresses due to a poor merge job some time ago, I only want records that have an "@" symbol. It's not a perfect filter, but it'll do for now. This also eliminates any blank email addresses.
2. Next I've set Account No. to equal blank. We have some accounts in our database that are not customers yet, but we transitioned them into an account. But our internal policy is that if you become a customer, you get an account number. Thus if you don't have an account number, you're not a customer.
3. The next line is interesting. Related To is how we identify a contact that has a company associated with it. When we synch with Outlook, all our contacts are copied to Relationals. But we each have personal business contacts that I don't want to send to, so I make sure that this field has to have an entry. So if it's blank, I know that it won't send.
4. The Hard Bounce Count filter identifies contacts who have bounced less than 2 times. It's an arbitrary value I'm comfortable using. I could easily set it to 1, but 2 lets me know the first bounce wasn't a fluke.
5. Next I want to make sure I target users who are not opted out. The email processing engine does this automatically, but by adding this filter, I can save it a little time. In fact, the more filters you can put into the view, the shorter time the email engine will spend processing which will improve email delivery time.

The Afterglow: As the results came in from the campaign, Relationals tracked opened emails, hard bounces, click-throughs, and opt-outs. This information was invaluable because now we could create another view in contacts to clean out bad emails (those that are deader than dead). The opt-out list was automatically updated so we can reduce the number of emails needed to send in the future (and the number of people we bother). And (probably the most important), we got great visibility for our blog, webinar, and 2-day summit. The best thing is, the next newsletter we send will offer yet another opportunity to hone that list.

New Look in Setup

Recently the Relationals Development team made big changes to the look and feel of the Setup area. The new layout allows users to see a description of each of the sections neatly in the middle of the page before choosing an item.

Likewise, changes have been made to the layout for the administrator's Setup area. Each setup category is available through an expandable menu bar. Simply click on the category name to see only the menu items you need without scrolling through the entire list. As in the user view, administrators will see a brief description of each selection.

Managing Object Tabs has a new home under Customization in the Setup area. Each type has it's own tab to keep Standard Objects, Custom Objects and Web Tabs organized. Here you can create new Objects or select an existing one to edit or manage the associated policies.