Email Campaigns: Using Sitecore s Digital Marketing System

guide Email Campaigns: Using Sitecore s Digital Marketing System Best Practices Guide

Table of Contents What s In It for You? 1 Best Practice #1: Plan for Engagement 1 Why Engagement? 1 One System for Email and the Website Plan for New Possibilities 2 Email Campaign Tools 2 Planning Considerations 3 An Ecosystem of Possibilities 4 Best Practice #2: Establish a Goal-Driven Program 4 Why Goals? 5 Goals for Email Campaigns 6 Optimizing Email Campaigns Using Goals 6 Best Practice #3: Leverage Your Website 7 Create Goal Conversion Scenarios 7 Create Content That is Targeted to Goals 7 Segment Email Recipients Using Website Behavior 8 Best Practice #4: Automate Email Flows 9 Create Flows to Increase Email Conversions 9 Create Flows to Support Key Objectives 9 Combine Email Flows with Website Visits 11 Best Practice #5: Contribute to Sales 11 Identify Prospects and Customers on the Website 11 Integrate to CRM 11 Contribute to CRM Lead Scoring Using Value Engagement Points 12 Best Practice #6: Optimize Using Analytics 12 Optimizing Email Response Rates 12 Understanding Where to Optimize Using Executive Insight Dashboard 13 Gaining Insight Using Engagement Analytics 14 Summary 15 About Sitecore 15 About the Author 15

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What s In It for You? This best-practices guide is aimed at marketers who are using (or considering using) the Sitecore Digital Marketing System (DMS) for email campaigns. Whether your role is on the front line with hands-on execution of email campaigns, or in marketing operations or marketing management, you will most likely find valuable insights in this guide. The intention of this guide is to provide relevant information that can be applied in a variety of business scenarios. This includes email marketing scenarios within B2B, B2C, and e-commerce, and for organizations of various sizes and geographical constructions. This guide does not aim to cover all possible best practices. The topics covered start with planning and continue to cover execution, optimization and analytics. Throughout this guide, there are helpful tips and insights that are intended to help you keep it simple, get started and grow. Best Practice #1: Plan for Engagement What are some of the ways you can leverage the fundamental capabilities of Sitecore DMS to generate business results? This chapter provides insights that can be used when you are shaping your marketing approach and defining campaign activities. Why Engagement? So what is all the fuss about engagement? Let s start by explaining why we think engagement is so important and what it means for your email marketing approach. First off, if we look at the evolution of business websites over the past ten years, some overall tendencies emerge. For one thing, the main focus for many companies is to simply generate a lot of website traffic. The amount of the traffic is the main objective. Accordingly, marketing activities such as email marketing center on driving higher amounts of traffic to the website. The key website metrics tend to be number of unique visits, number of pages viewed, percent of new visitors, bounce rates, and similar. No doubt these numbers have value, but it s a limited value. Over the past few years, advances in technology as well as initiatives at leading-edge companies have led to the emerging practice of capturing and measuring conversions. A conversion is when a visitor meets a defined objective on a website. Measuring conversions has a business value, without question. A minority of companies measure conversions, but for the majority the main focus is measuring quantity and generation of traffic. The general assumption is that companies need to generate ever higher amounts of traffic because the conversion rates are in the single digits. Less than 3 percent is not unusual. Similarly, companies tend to accept website visit bounce rates of 20% to 35%. High traffic and low conversions. Is there a better way? The answer lies in customer engagement. The starting point is to flip the equation: instead of the quantity of the website traffic, the focus should be the quality of the website traffic. And instead of focusing on traffic and conversions, companies should focus on what happens in between first new visits and conversions achieved. 1

How? Enter the idea of engagement: if you can nurture your website visitors with a relevant experience based on their intent (their reason for visiting the website) and what they do while visiting the website, you will build trust. You can then leverage the trust to win commitment of varying degrees including conversions. For Sitecore, engagement focuses on increasing and measuring relevancy for website visitors. To do this, the DMS provides tools for personalization, analytics, automation, testing, online campaigns and of course, email campaign management. Most importantly, the DMS enables you to create goals and assign value engagement points to important goal completions. The level of commitment exhibited by your customer is the secret ingredient of quality that we call Engagement Value. Using the above tools and capabilities, you are able to increase relevancy for site visitors and consequently conversions. For email marketers, you will want to design your campaigning initiatives to contribute to engagement. You will measure and optimize your campaigns based on the quality of engagement. One System for Email and the Website Plan for New Possibilities Email marketing has been around since the late 90 s. As with many technologies, the early evolution has been driven by point solutions. Thus, today the predominant setup is a standalone or integrated email marketing system that is provided via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) system. While point solutions have enabled marketers to become adept at email marketing execution, many installations compromise on providing end-to-end business value due to the costs and complexities of integrating a standalone email system with the website. When considering how to use Sitecore for email marketing, it is important to keep in mind that Sitecore combines the email marketing piece with the website (as well as other channels like mobile and social). Unlike the traditional setup, with Sitecore your email marking capabilities are tightly coupled with your website capabilities. There are some obvious benefits like easy reuse of content and not having to learn two separate interfaces. But for email marketers, the tight coexistence of email and the website means that there may be campaign scenarios you have not thought about doing because they required a lot of integration. So for example in the Sitecore setup, the ability to use website events in your email marketing campaigns comes to you out of the box. The ability to create simple or advanced automated email flows comes out of the box. And you don t have to live with some of the common trade-offs for integrating forms or landing pages while at the same time supporting multiple devices like ipads and Android phones. Now, you don t have to waste time on integrating these and making trade-offs. You can focus more on getting results than on just execution. Email Campaign Tools What are the primary tools that Sitecore DMS provides for email marketers? Email Campaign Manager The DMS application is used to create emails and send them as mass email campaigns or as 1-to-1 triggered emails. Email recipients are stored in Sitecore or in an integrated CRM/backend system. 2

Engagement Plans & Engagement Plan Designer For each email campaign sent to a target audience, the system creates an Engagement Plan. The default plan is used to monitor email opens, clicks, etc. as well as the goal value that the email campaign generates. Analytics: Executive Insight Dashboard For each email campaign, the system creates an analytics report in the Executive Insight Dashboard. Users are able to understand the contribution each email campaign makes to goals, value per visit, etc. Web Form for Marketers The application that non-expert users can use to create web forms in minutes. Users are able to assign business logic that should be applied each time a form is submitted. Sitecore App Center An umbrella service provided by Sitecore consisting of 3 rd party companies that offer cloudbased services. The tools that support the Sitecore Email Campaign Manager are described in the section An Ecosystem of Possibilities in this chapter. Planning Considerations When planning to use Sitecore for email marketing, what are some important capabilities to be aware of and to consider using? Area Key Considerations Users Data Segmentation Content Users for the Email Campaign Manager are typically the same as web editor users. If you have multiple users who are spread around many regions and business entities, you can consider implementing user roles and rights in Sitecore. Users can create emails from templates that have locked areas. International users can also create emails copied from a centrally shared master email that may have partial or international English content completed. When establishing your database in Sitecore, consider adding data fields that will be used in segmentation and possibly mapping to your CRM system. Consider segmenting email recipients using techniques such as data field values collected from web forms, email behavior, website behavior, and by using data from integrated backend systems. When creating templates for the emails, remember to include areas for personalization. If applicable, use the workflow functionality in Sitecore to manage the process by which emails are created and approved. You have easy access to website content, including the media library. Consider how to reuse content with automated emails to save time and increase productivity. 3

Execution Measurement Sales generation Optimization The Sitecore App Center can be used to configure your website and Email Campaign Manager to send emails via a hosted, professionally managed email server. Mass emails can be sent using the Email Campaign Manager. Double opt-in is included as a standard feature. It is optional for each target audience. Targeted, 1-to-1 emails can be sent based on a variety of conditions using the Sitecore Engagement Plan Designer. Sitecore DMS includes standard email reports. Sitecore DMS provides analytics tools for email marketing to measure website goal conversion. There is a standard feature in DMS called lead reports that can be used to inform salespeople about prospects and customers who have visited the website. When a CRM or other database system is integrated, visitor data can be passed to the CRM system and the CRM system can be used to determine content that is displayed on the website for visitors who are in the CRM System. The analytics tools provide the ability to optimize email campaigns to increase goal conversions. In addition you can gain insight into the predictability of which channels are working and which are not. An Ecosystem of Possibilities In the email marketing arena, there are a number of niche services provided by specialist 3 rd party companies that can be advantageous to use. Sitecore recognizes that cloud-based specialist companies can give execution agility to Sitecore customers. Therefore Sitecore has created the Sitecore App Center. For email marketing, there are important services including: Hosted Email Server MTA you can connect your Sitecore Email Campaign Manager to an email server that is professionally hosted and managed by a cloud-based company that specializes in email scalability and deliverability. Email Preview and Spam Check you are able to preview an email in a wide variety of email clients. Also provided is the ability to run an email through a spam checker to understand if the email content contains text or html that can trigger a spam filter. Best Practice #2: Establish a Goal-Driven Program Ideally, all marketing initiatives should have defined objectives with outcomes measured against business goals. For some companies, this holds true. But more often than not, marketing initiatives are driven by get it done rather than get it done effectively. Due to the sheer number of things that marketers need to get done, often the reality of marketing is that most energy is used on execution and not enough on maximizing the business results of marketing activities. This phenomenon points to the need for easier ways to map business objectives to outcomes like website conversions. 4

Why Goals? Think about the last time you became a new customer of a company offering products or services. Most likely, there were several (or at least a few) back-and-forth exchanges of communication before you became a customer. For nearly all companies, when selling their products and/or services, the path from unknown prospect to landed customer typically takes several rounds of communication. Hence the term sales dialog. Within these dialogs, there are events. Events can be page views, clicks, deliveries, inquiries, human conversations, etc. in connection with searches, website visits, referrals, email messages, mobile messages, phone calls, and more. Some exchanges are more significant than others. Some are general and some are specific. Some exchanges are prompted by the seller and some by the buyer. Goals in Sitecore DMS give you a mechanism to identify the key events in the sales communication dialog. For the events that are more important, you assign points. The number of points for a given goal will correspond to how influential the goal is towards the final objective. Typically, only a goal where there is an exchange of data for example a person enters information into a web form and submits the form will get points. Key events where a website visitor consumes an important page of information may be defined as a goal but not given points. Simply put, goals are conversions. The conversions that are more important will have points. In Sitecore, these points are referred to as value engagement points. By making use of Sitecore goals, you can define the major and minor steps a prospect will take on their journey to become a customer. As steps are completed you use goals to measure the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives. You can use the goals scores engagement value points to help determine what marketing activities you should do more of and where you should scale back. Figure 1. Example of an Engagement Value Point scale for a B2B website. 5

Goals for Email Campaigns Sitecore goals give email marketers a number of useful ways to execute and improve the effectiveness of email campaigns. Traditionally, the effectiveness of email has been measured by opens, link clicks and perhaps unsubscribes or replies. But once you have established goals on your website and for your email campaigns, you are also able to measure the effectiveness of your emails based on goal completions including website conversions and the number of value engagement points generated by the recipients that visit the website. From a daily operational perspective for email marketers, there is no extra work needed to benefit from goals. Each time you create a mass email activity, the Sitecore system automatically keeps track of the performance of the email, measuring completed goals and the number of value engagement points accumulated. There are standard reports that show value engagement points accumulated per email campaign. You can see this report by clicking in from emails sent via Email Campaign Manager. If needed, you can modify the standard report to see conversions for specific goals. With website goals associated with email campaign activities, all your email campaign users are able to measure email campaigns by the same set of goals. Because you are measuring beyond email opens and clicks, you and your team get insight into the amount of business value your email campaigns generate compared to other campaign channels like Google AdWords and social media campaigns. Optimizing Email Campaigns Using Goals Using goals, there are a number of valuable ways you can optimize email campaigns. Two of the most useful are using goals for segmentation, and using goals for information triggering. First off, you can segment your prospects by the goals they have completed. (Remember: goals are the same as conversions). You are able to segment by those who have converted and who have not converted. Using this concept, you can create lead nurturing scenarios where you define a funnel. You can define goals for each step in the funnel and define communications activities to move prospects through the funnel to achieve conversions. You can also use goals to trigger email communication and website content. Using the Sitecore Engagement Plan tool, you can define a process perhaps like a lead nurturing funnel where you trigger emails in order to elicit responses from prospects and move them through the funnel. What s more, you can display targeted website content for these visitors when they click in an email and browse the website. Using techniques like the above, you are able to increase the relevancy of the messages that you send and present to prospects. And because a process like a funnel consists of goals and the goals are used to segment and trigger you can focus your efforts on the communication and not simply on execution. 6

Best Practice #3: Leverage Your Website As mentioned, with Sitecore your email campaign capability and website are in one system. What are some of the ways you can take advantage of the tight coexistence between your website and your email campaign tool? Create Goal Conversion Scenarios As a paradigm of direct marketing, email marketing is about calls to action. Often email marketers place easyto-see calls to action in emails. In many cases, the actions that you are asking your prospects to perform will be defined as Sitecore goals on your website. Here are some examples of actions you may want to consider using: Web form submits when you create a web form using the Sitecore Web Form for Marketers tool, you get the option to create a Sitecore Goal and the option to assign value engagement points to each person who submits the form. Landing page visits for the referrals from marketing channels such as social networking sites or Google AdWords, you may want to direct this traffic to landing pages that are part of your website. You can create Sitecore goals for these landing pages. Such goals can be triggered by page views or when the visitor performs an action on the page. Downloaded and viewed PDFs Sitecore tracks views for the PDF document type in your site s media library. This gives you a means to gauge interest and define conversions based on viewing information in PDFs. Executed website events there are a number of website events you can define as Sitecore goals. Examples include joining a community, requesting a login and password, viewing a page such as a price list, viewing a video to completion, making a purchase, etc. Keep in mind that while there are several types of Sitecore goals you can define out of the box, it is straightforward for a developer to create custom goals using the unique identifier for each goal. Create Content That is Targeted to Goals Because the Sitecore DMS gives you the ability to define goals, you will want to create content that serves the purpose of getting site visitors to achieve these goals. It s almost as if you want to think of how you can set traps on your website and bait the traps using content. Here are a few suggestions that apply to website content as well as email content: Create content for macro goals and micro goals always include hard and soft calls to action for goals. It typically takes a number of micro conversions before you get a macro conversion. When defining templates and content, make sure to create areas for calls to action for the different types of goals. Relate interest level to points consider creating content that would be appealing to visitors who have a deeper interest in your products and/or services. If a person clicks through three pages of products specs, you may to define this as a goal. Setting up content to gauge and score interest is a technique that is becoming more widespread among digital marketers. 7

Use personas for content Sitecore DMS give you the ability to define personas. A persona is a fictitious person who represents major characteristics for a segment of your customers. When it comes to email content, we recommend you use personas when defining content. The underlying purpose of personas is help increase relevancy for website visitors, and the relevancy in turn builds trust to gain commitment. Segment Email Recipients Using Website Behavior There are a number of highly effective ways you can segment your email recipients using website behavior. Unlike traditional email marketing systems where the complexity of building a tight integration is cost prohibitive, with Sitecore you can easily use website behavior for techniques such as email segmentation. Segment using keywords when a person visits your website by first going to Google and entering keywords, then clicking on a result presented in Google, the keywords are passed to your website and saved in the visitor web sessions. You can save the keywords used in the profile for the person if they subsequently opt-in to receive emails. This means you can create email segments of recipients in, for example, Sitecore Engagement Plans or your CRM system, if integrated. Segment using predictive personalization based on the DMS tools for personas and profiles, you can capture visitors who match predefined profile cards. Not only can you use this technique to display personalized content in real time, but for visitors who have opted in to receive emails, you can save the matched profile name to the person s record in Sitecore and/or your CRM system. You can then segment based on this behavioral profile. Segment using content consumed an additional possibility to consider is to segment email recipients based on the website content they have consumed. For example, you can specify that if a person has viewed a page you can update an attribute of the person s record in Sitecore and/or your CRM system. You can subsequently use the attribute and value for segmentation. Another supported possibility is to use viewed PDF as an event to trigger an email via an engagement plan. Figure 2. Example of an email that is personalized using roles in the Sitecore Email Campaign Manager. 8

Best Practice #4: Automate Email Flows As a famous actor once said timing is everything. When it comes to websites and the seeming randomness of the paths website visitors appear to make, timing is crucial if you want to get these visitors to do something in particular commit and convert when they are on your website. Using Sitecore DMS, there are a wide range of possibilities for creating automated email flows that generate business value. Below are a few possibilities you may want to employ. Create Flows to Increase Email Conversions If you have never tried the following technique then you should really consider it: a few days after you have sent a mass email campaign, resend the email to recipients who have not opened or clicked in the original email. Change the subject line in the second email. In general, the second email will likely garner up to a 10% open rate. The lesson here is that frequency and timing play a significant role in email open rates. The combination of receiving emails from your company over a span of days as well as receiving the email at a different opportunity results in a significant increase in the overall email open rate. You can set up a Sitecore Engagement Plan for resending to non-openers and non-clickers using the Engagement Plan Designer. Create Flows to Support Key Objectives Leading-edge marketers aim to align marketing activities with business objectives. Here are some examples of email flows that support specific business objectives. You can build any of these flows using the Sitecore Engagement Plan Designer. Keep in mind that it is easy to copy and edit an Engagement Plan for easy reuse of a flow. Use welcome flows to support customer acquisition when people sign up to receive your newsletter, it indicates interest here and now. You can define an Engagement Plan to send a series of welcome emails where each mail is sent after a defined number of days from the sign up. The first email can be sent when the person signs up. This technique has been shown to consistently increase conversion rates as well as reinforce timely communication and awareness. Use reminder flows to prevent customer churn for businesses that sell subscriptions-based products and services, for example, you can define a series of reminder emails to encourage subscription renewal. The subscription expiration date can be used as the trigger. Such a flow could send reminder emails 14, 10 and 3 days before the expiration date. This type of flow can also be used effectively to remind about seminars, webinars, contests, special offers, or similar. 9

Figure 3. Example of an email subscription welcome flow. People who opt-in to an email newsletter receive welcome emails 7, 14 and 21 days after subscribing. Figure 4. Example of how the Engagement Plan Supervisor enables you to monitor the welcome flow. You are able to see how many people are in each stage of the flow. You are also able to interact with the flow and advance any selected person to the next stage of the flow. Use event-based flows support lifecycle communication because Engagement Plans can use website events as the criteria for when to perform an action (such as sending an email), you can define flows that support customer lifecycles. For example, if a customer has placed an order or if a customer has made an inquiry you are able to use these events to trigger a specific email. Use time-based flows to support customer re-engagement reactivating customers who have become dormant is important for many companies. Similar to the previous scenario, you can define an Engagement Plan to use the non-occurrence of an event, together with the passage of time, as the criteria for when to trigger email communication as well as actions that should be registered in the CRM system for sales person follow-up. 10

Combine Email Flows with Website Visits Here is a great way you can use email flows to increase Sitecore goal conversion counts. Using an Engagement Plan, you can specify that when a person clicks a link in an email to enter your website, you can subsequently specify that specific content is displayed in, for example, the right column of every page or in the header and footer of select pages. There are Engagement Plan actions that not only trigger emails but also trigger content that is, display specified content for specific website visitors. This technique is an effective way to increase relevancy, and increase the frequency and impact for communicating important content and calls to action. Best Practice #5: Contribute to Sales For many companies, it is unclear how much the marketing spend contributes to revenue generation from sales. Often it is the sales organization that is seen as the revenue generator, and not the marketing organization. However, with the advances now being made with marketing automation, the contribution of marketing can now be quantified. Three approaches for doing so are described below. Identify Prospects and Customers on the Website You may or may not have a CRM system integrated with your website. In either case, your salespeople can be informed of when prospects or customers are on your site and what they are doing. Using IP lookup functionality in combination with the Sitecore Engagement Analytics tool, you can identify website visitors by characteristics such as company, geography, and other criteria. Using this analytics tool, you can categorize visitors as customers, leads, partners, robots, etc. This information can then be emailed to salespeople or flowed into your CRM System. Using a feature called lead report in the analytics tool, the system is able to inform salespeople about important visitors to the website that account representatives can follow up on. It is also possible to trigger notification emails to your salespeople when a person submits a web form. Using the Sitecore tool Web Forms for Marketers, you can define criteria that should trigger the email. For example, if the visitor checks that he or she would like to be contacted and has an interest in buying, a notification email can be triggered to a sales person or an email list of sales people. Integrate to CRM When it comes to managing customer relationships, all roads lead to your website. Some of the important ways you can integrate CRM and your website are described here. Note that there are more than 25 different types of CRM systems integrated with Sitecore installations globally. This indicates the wide range of possibilities supported when using Sitecore. Create and update leads and contacts in your CRM system using the Sitecore tool Web Form for Marketers, you can create and update contacts and leads in your CRM System. This tool provides a number of save actions. Certain save actions can be used to specify what fields should be updated in the CRM and if tasks should be generated for salespeople to follow up on in the CRM System. 11

Update any CRM entity the Web Form for Marketers tool can be used to update data from the website to the CRM System. You can specify any CRM entity to be updated. This includes standard entities as well as custom entities. Targeting an entity from a web form is functionality they can be used by non-expert users out of the box. Use CRM data in engagement email flows it may be the case that you want to use CRM data or a CRM workflow to trigger an email or display certain content on certain webpages (for visitors to the website who also exist in your CRM System). To do this, you can specify that data in your CRM System can be used as a trigger for an engagement flow. Display website content based on CRM data if you have a customer or partner portal on your website and the members of the portal are also in your CRM System, you can use Sitecore Engagement Plans to specify that certain members are presented with specific content when they visit the website. In addition, you can specify that emails are triggered to these website visitors based on their status in CRM. Contribute to CRM Lead Scoring Using Value Engagement Points It may be the case that you re using lead scoring in the CRM. If this is the case, then you can synchronize your value engagement points with their CRM lead scoring. You could, for example, specify that leads over a certain engagement point value are updated in the CRM and placed into a certain lead scoring category such as hot warm or cold leads. Keep in mind that CRM lead scores and Sitecore value engagement points are two different things. However, value engagement can be used as a lead qualification parameter and it may make sense in some scenarios to combine these complementary concepts. Best Practice #6: Optimize Using Analytics For many companies, email is the most important channel for driving interested traffic to the website. But in many cases, the analytics for email campaigns is contained in a system that is separate from the website analytics system. It may be possible to understand email-only conversions, but not how email contributes to conversions on the web site. With Sitecore DMS, because email and the website are in one system that uses one set of goals, you have many possibilities to optimize your email campaigns. You can do so using the analytics tools built into Sitecore. Optimizing Email Response Rates For each email campaign that you send using the Email Campaign Manager, you are able to view the classic email response rates. This includes email opens, link clicks, click-thru s, etc. These response rates can be used by email marketers to understand what works and what does not work in terms of email clicks and opens, and to subsequently try new tactics in hopes of generating better response rates. The Email Campaign Manager includes A/B testing capabilities. This enables marketers, to for example, optimize the email subject line to increase open rates and conversion rates. 12

Understanding Where to Optimize Using Executive Insight Dashboard How engaged are your email recipients? You probably answer this question by looking at email opens and clicks. Again, this has a value, but it s a limited value. It s far more important to your business to understand how email recipients contribute to your website goals and Value Engagement Points. Using the Executive Insight Dashboard, you are able to gain insight into the conversions and value engagement points accumulated by your email campaigns. One of the important views in this tool filters traffic by email and by engagement. The resulting report will show you the top goals converted by your email traffic and for each goal you will see the value points generated. You are also able to filter by campaigns and by email campaigns. The different views available enable you to understand the total value generated by specific email campaigns and to understand the value per visits for each email campaign. Email Figure 5. Example of how the Sitecore Executive Insight Dashboard enables you to view how email traffic contributed to completed goals and value per visit. 13

Gaining Insight Using Engagement Analytics The Engagement Analytics tool captures session information for website visitors. This includes website visitors who click into the website from emails sent via the Email Campaign Manager. This session information includes page views, downloads, web form submits, and an array of actions that website visitors may take. While this is granular information, it can be useful for email marketers. It is possible to tag certain actions, and analyze tags and tag values. Figure 6. Example of how Sitecore Engagement Analytics enables you to view details from individual website visits. Visitors who enter the site from email campaigns are tracked for goal conversions, campaigns and engagement value points. Summary With the high volume of emails people receive every day, you have to work harder to stand out from the crowd and prove the worth of your email marketing efforts. Using the previously outlined best practices to tap into the full range of possibilities provided by the Sitecore Digital Marketing System, you can continue to optimize your email campaigns while benefiting from a holistic view of your customers and prospective customers to engage with them across all channels. Better engagement results in a better experience, which will increase the likelihood that a visitor will take that final, all important step from prospect to paying customer. 14

About Sitecore Sitecore s leading Content Management System software is the first to cohesively integrate with marketing automation, intranet portal, e-commerce, web optimization, social media and campaign management technologies. This broad choice of capabilities enable marketing professionals, business stakeholders and information technology teams to rapidly implement, measure and manage a successful website and digital business strategy. Businesses can now easily identify, serve and convert new customers with Sitecore s Digital Marketing System, part of its encompassing Customer Engagement Platform. Thousands of public and private organizations have created and now manage more than 32,000 dynamic websites with Sitecore including, ATP World Tour, CA Technologies, Colliers International, Comcast, Heineken, Microsoft, Nestlé, Royal Navy, The Knot, TOP-TOY, Visa Europe and Verizon. As a Gold Certified Microsoft Partner, Sitecore works closely with Microsoft in the development and improvement of both products and services. Sitecore s solid architecture and dedication to the.net framework and Service Oriented Architecture principals provide companies with virtually unlimited development and integration opportunities. Microsoft named Sitecore ISV partner of the year in 2004, based on the impressive success of Sitecore s software for many significant mutual clients. For more information about Sitecore CMS, visit www.sitecore.net. About the Author Christopher Nash is a seasoned technology-driven marketer who has worked in marketing for more than 25 years. As an early internet user, Chris has long understood the value of combining marketing and technology. For the past 10 years, Chris has worked intensively with email marketing as well as multichannel, event-driven marketing concepts and technologies. 15