Question
Our core need is pulling together and tracking all the touchpoints and interactions we have with people (whether they've engaged with us yet or not). We’re an online angel investing platform for healthcare. We also do expertise matchmaking as part of our model.
Our relationships:
1. investors - these are high touch, and are both online and offline.
2. partners and coinvestors
3. Leads - Lots of people we've identified and targeted, but that haven't engaged with us yet.
4. people seeking expertise matchmaking -generally only online.
Our activities/channels:
- individual email
- phone calls
- campaigns/newsletters
- drip/automated email campaigns based on segments
- transactional emails
- social interaction (mostly LI and Twitter)
- some ad targeting/retargeting
We send quite a bit of content through these channels too. We'll be doing more behavioral type email in the future, a la http://customer.io style emails. We also use referral and sharing functionality in our product and will be segmenting based on data we collect.
The bonus is we are a startup in a new market, meaning we're poor, short on time, and have too few existing processes. :)
What we want to do:
- One place to see all our interactions, even if it's just integrating with other options.
- accommodate engaged (contacts) and not yet engaged people (leads). tagging/reporting could work
- segmenting based on criteria we set manually or from user data
- Automated drip email campaigns - for onboarding and other types of campaigns
- custom fields - Multi-select lists are critical in this
- flexible reporting - adhoc report building especially
- deduping against both leads and contacts when importing - I only bring this up since Salesforce doesn't seem to do this without an external tool. We don't want to double up different campaigns on people
- Good API, at least for us to push data to
Answer
Great Question!
I see you are not looking to spend too much money on this so my recommendation would be to use free tools that will only cost you the time you take to set them up yourselves.
1. Accommodating contacts (engaged vs not engaged, segmenting, custom fields and flexible reporting).
For this I would recommend you use Podio. It is free for up to five users and will let you do all that and more. You can set up your templates with all the fields you want (drag & drop) and they are completely dynamic so you are welcome to change them at any point in time.
2. One Place to See All Interactions.
I would use Mandrill (from the makers of Mailchimp) to send and track all mail related interactions. They have webhooks that you can use to create all sorts of custom workflows behind the scenes. Of course this also means you can integrate it with Podio's excellent API to keep all your data in the same place.
Eventually you could even code in a workflow that would drip customized your content to subscribers using Mandrill. Essentially removing any need for additional software.
Best of luck! And let me know if you have any more questions!
