Zoho Launches Zoho Campaigns Application

NEW YORK (CRM Evolution 2012)—Zoho today announced the launch of Zoho Campaigns, an email and social media marketing application that is bidirectionally integrated with the Zoho CRM Suite, at CRM Evolution.

"Many customers have been asking for campaign management, CRM, and customer support," explains Raju Vegesna, evangelist for Zoho. "When you're in CRM and you go to a contact, you can see all of the email campaigns that a particular contact received…and get into the particulars of the campaign, like what time he received the email and the number of clicks."

In addition to creating and scheduling email campaigns, with the ability to use predefined templates or upload their own HTML5 template or file set, users can monitor through detailed, real-time reports the number of bounce-backs and list unsubscribes, as well as send A/B test and chain campaigns.

Zoho Campaigns users can also promote campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and can subsequently see how many people viewed the campaign, allowing the campaign manager to track how many likes, comments, tweets, retweets, and shares a particular campaign incurred.

CRM Contacts and Leads can be synchronized with Zoho Campaigns contacts, which, according to Vegesna, empowers salespeople to keep track of how customers interfaced with past email marketing campaigns from within their CRM system.

Zoho Campaigns integrates with Google Apps, and lets users sync their contacts with Google contacts. For those who wish to use Google Drive to create documents, they can be created and then sent out through Zoho Campaigns as well.

Vegesna says that Zoho Campaigns will not be limited solely to a module within Zoho CRM and that the company is opening up APIs to developers who wish to import and export data from the system.

"Currently there are a good number of customers using (Zoho) CRM with MailChimp," Vegesna remarks about the email marketing service. "On the functionality side, (Zoho Campaigns) has most of the features of MailChimp, but I would say the key differentiator is the CRM integration, and the social component. Constant Contact is also integrated with our email system."

Zoho recently integrated its Zoho Support module with social platforms Twitter and Facebook, which allows a customer support representative to convert a tweet into a support ticket, or assign a case to a certain rep. The company also beefed up business intelligence by integrating Zoho CRM with Zoho Reports.