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Bislr Brings a Bunch of New Tools for Easier Marketing Automation

Early this year Bislr launched with an impressive goal for a startup: It wanted to do for marketing automation what Steve Jobs and Apple did for mobile. That is, it wanted to take an arguably still clunky, expensive and difficult-to-use piece of enterprise software and transform it into something that people would actually want to use.

Bislr

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It rolled out its version of that vision with the company’s launch — an intelligent marketing operating system with some in-browser tools. Now, eight months later, the company has kicked it up a notch with a new version of this system and a slew of new in-browser tools. These include a drag-and-drop app that creates campaigns and landing pages, and new targeting capabilities.

“We started by looking at all the different functions a marketer must perform today and then trying to reinvent, from the ground up, those tools and processes so they are easy to use,” Michael Sharkey, CEO and cofounder of Bislr, told CRM Buyer.

A Consumer Interface

“We came up with a different approach from traditional marketing automation, which tends to rely on schema marketing,” Sharkey added.

There are a number of tools that make up Bislr’s approach, but overlaying them all is the most important component: a user interface that is an Apple-worthy piece of software development in Sharkey’s eyes.

“What we did is build a consumer interface onto functionality that up until now could only be had by complex enterprise software,” he said.

Three Main Functions

Bislr addresses three primary functions, Sharkey explained.

One is multichannel marketing automation.

“Being able to touch users and interact with operations across multiple channels can have a huge impact very quickly on a bottom line,” he noted.

Another key function for users is content marketing, and to that end, Bislr gives users the tools to build optimized landing pages and the ability to add lead intelligence to those websites.

“We can track interactions across a landing page and show the emails and Web-based interactions related to a particular campaign,” he said. “Our lead intelligence I am particularly proud of — you can easily see who is doing what with the social data.”

Real-time reporting and third-party integration comprise the third main use of the application. This, too, is key for companies that often need to craft campaigns on the fly depending on market events or new and sudden trends. Part of the upgrades in the new version of Bislr are connections to Demandbase, Eloqua, NetSuite and Salesforce.

More Tools

To deliver on those uses, Bislr added a number of tools besides the new connectivity to CRM applications.

  • Bislr AutoPilot is a new in-browser app that offers drag-and-drop tools to create multichannel campaigns, including Web, mobile, social and offline. AutoPilot connects a campaign to any Web application that uses Web hooks or a REST API. As one example, the AutoPilot tool can create a workflow that sends a prospect a follow-up email if she has navigated to a campaign’s initial landing page at least three times.
  • Bislr Landing Page creates branded landing pages via drag-and-drop tools that — unlike many other apps on the market — do not require coding in JavaScript.
  • Bislr Anywhere allows users to apply Bislr within any content management system.
  • Bislr Persona Based Targeting automatically segments prospects by job title, vertical market or persona.

Sharkey tells of one customer that used the application to search its own customer database for particular attributes of companies that might be inclined to buy a new product they were testing. The application was able to mine the database for these particular companies, which were then sent a campaign.

“The company wound up closing an additional $200,000 in sales,” he said, “because Bislr surfaced up that data.”

Erika Morphy has been writing about technology, finance and business issues for more than 20 years. She lives in Silver Spring, Md.

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