Extending Marketing Reach with Key CMS Integrations
By 10/05/2011 12:08 pm—
While a web content management system is a worthy cornerstone of web marketing, its effectiveness is multiplied when some key connections are made.
When visitors navigate your site, you can learn about each individual's interests. This, in turn, allows you to customize the experience for them, personalizing key elements of the site to fit their needs. You can even help them complete forms by pre-filling fields you already have information on, making the trip to the submit button a shorter one. Tie your CMS into a service like Pardot or Eloqua to automate your marketing.
Prospects can opt-in to your regular email newsletters, subscribing to any number of email lists you manage, with the help of an email marketing provider. Take the integration a step farther and you can push content from your site through the email marketing provider (who monitors bounce rates, increases delivery rates, and helps ensure compliance with anti-spam regulations) for email campaigns. Think Streamsend, Constant Contact, and ExactTarget.
Customer Relationship Manager
When you collect information about someone, whether in a subscription form, a contact form, or a form needed to download a whitepaper, you can store it centrally in a CRM. There you can schedule and track your interactions with the person, and use sophisticated workflows to ensure each one gets the attention they deserve. Salesforce.com is the big one, but there are others.
Many CMS's have their own web shop, so you can evaluate whether it meets your needs or whether it would be better to integrate a separate platform like Magento. Remember to tie your checkout form to your CRM as well.
Similar to marketing automation systems, a recommendation engine provides content specifically tailored to each user. But a "recommender" uses complex algorithms to determine what products (or news articles, or whatever) may be of most interest to the visitor. I'll provide a blog post exploring these tools soon. An example engine would be YOOCHOOSE.
Adding some (or all) of these tools can greatly improve the effectiveness of your CMS marketing efforts. Just be careful that the introduction of new features all are done with an eye toward continuously improving site usability as well and do not detract from your visitors' overall experience.