Superwoman flies away with Sites
Financial services group Superwoman is the first Australian company to pilot Salesforce.com's new Sites product released overnight.
Companies adopting Sites use Force.com to build a database, defining what data and information is to be made public and to build the logic and business rules. They build the front-facing pages with standard web languages such as HTML, JavaScript, Flex and CSS before publishing their website or applications on Salesforce's cloud platform.
Using Force.com's analytics, users can monitor the performance of their websites and make changes. The applications can also be linked via the platform to CRM data already hosted on Force.com.
Australia's first Sites customer, Superwoman, provides financial services and courses specifically for women. It has a large marketing operation, emailing newsletters and event notifications to 50,000 customers stored in a Salesforce CRM database.
Sites has allowed the company to use links to lead customers to an individual portal, which displays their information direct from a Salesforce CRM database. The customers can also register for events direct into their own record.
Instead of receiving 500 duplicate entries per email campaign, the company said that it now receives none. The company has also been able to more closely follow the success of its campaigns as well as monitor customer preferences. Within two months, it saw an increase in sales conversions, raising the rate to 60 per cent from 50 per cent — an increase of 5000 per mail-out.
Salesforce.com also released a free version of its Force.com platform yesterday, which includes Apex, Visualforce and Sites. Currently it's only available in the US, although the company intended to expand internationally later this year.
It doesn't include Salesforce CRM functionality such as accounts, contacts, campaigns, leads, opportunities, forecasts, products, cases and solutions. Other limitations on the free product are that only one customer application and 100 users can be hosted, the created website can only see 250,000 views per month, and 1GB of storage is made available.