CRM Companies 2009: Silverpop

Silverpop has already been a leader in the world of innovative email marketing which, needless to say, falls in the CRM space - especially because the marketing model that they’ve developed their applications and services for is built around customer engagement. But rather than rest on their laurels as a leader in this space, they’ve instead decided to take the next step to fall in lockstep with the empowered customers that businesses now face. What drives them to this list of companies to watch is a simple set of buttons to click. Its a new feature called Share-to-Social and it literally allows you to do just that. Take an HTML email that you’ve received and with Share-to-Social activated you can share the email to Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other social networks. Pretty nifty. What makes this smart is that it makes an email viral and the buttons are embedded into what can be hundreds of thousands of emails - a smart move if there ever was one. People love sharing these days in case you hadn’t noticed. What makes this a particularly valuable feature is that the results can be tracked. Yeppers. They can be tracked. This is a highly respected company that can handle high volumes of email that is more than share-to-social buttons. They have thousands of customers and their CEO, Bill Nussy is a technology industry influencer. In other words, they have chops. They are making some tentative steps in the social CRM right direction. Though tentative, they are well worth watching in 2009 - if they continue to take more steps.