When you’re walking around an unfamiliar market do you methodically visit every stall in alphabetical order? Or do you get the advice of a local expert who can point you in the direction of the best food, clothing, and artisanal cheese?
To the uninitiated, the Salesforce AppExchange is full of all the enticing sounds, smells, and exotic cures of a bustling marketplace in a foreign land. And it can be overwhelming to navigate.
With the right advice, however, the AppExchange can be a rich hunting ground for savvy business owners looking to boost their CRM with events management functionality.
To help steer a path through this maze, we’ve compiled an introductory list to Salesforce’s events management apps and how they could help track your event’s progress, performance and analytics through the Salesforce platform.
1. Free event management applications
Firstly, searching for “Events” in the AppExchange lets you browse the full marketplace with an overview. This of this as the information counter at the gate where you gel all your maps and brochures. One free app Events, helps you automate your conferences and executive briefings. It allows you to connect and track events, speakers, venues, rooms, tracks, sessions, registered attendees, budgets, expenses and MDF. Users can manage public or private events, and it’s fully customisable to your business.
The well-recognised events website EventBrite has its own Salesforce App, EventBriteSync. This app integrates EventBrite and Salesforce to help track and manage events with all your other marketing and sales activities. Event data can be imported into Salesforce and synced real-time, and the app can be optimised to your specific business processes with custom mapping.
2. Go further and fully automate customer engagement
Dashcord is another marketing automation and event management app useful for both your free and paid events. It is a native marketing automation solution, which means you and your data never have to leave Salesforce. Dashcord provides drip & nurture campaigns, tracking and scoring of activity from web/email/print, and personalized email communications based on recipient profiles.
More comprehensive social media engagement and marketing automation capabilities can be found from Salesforce themselves: Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot. When engaging with invitees, prospects, registrants and attendees, these high-powered apps can build and manage far more meaningful customer journeys throughout the course of your event.
3. When it’s all over, automate new customer journeys and get insights
While managing an event is often made arduous with multiple tasks across multiple departments and staff, TaskRay is a project management app that helps all staff track customers after the new customer is onboard. Features include repeatable tasks, automation, and simple project visualisations for a full post-sale process.
The Get Feedback app provides a fantastic user interface to collate feedback during and after the event. Users can easily create branded, mobile-ready surveys that integrate perfectly to Salesforce. You can send these via your own email or on your website, and use
GetFeedback’s multiple reporting options to analyse the results of your event.
How Salesfix uses event management apps
So how do we know these apps are so great? As one of only 4 Salesforce Gold Consulting Partners in Australia we stand behind our recommendations – and use them all the time with our clients! We have recommended both in-Salesforce solutions and free or paid event management apps for international trade organisations, a worldwide healthcare education provider specialising in events for members, and many more clients. We have enabled them to prepare lists of invitees, integrate their events with their data in Salesforce, follow up emails, and track and record thousands of attendees – all with a view to progressing their business and success.
What we love about the AppExchange is that all apps are able to integrate seamlessly with Salesforce, which provides a single platform for your whole team to track events – in real time. With the right guidance, getting your events management under control with the AppExchange will see you go from task-heavy event overload to automation and analytics in no time.