Salesforce Integration with Responsys: Getting it to work

Introduction to the Service…

One of my recent responsibilities as Salesforce Administrator was to integrate our already existing Responsys account with Salesforce. Our goal was to have the ability to send high quality emails to our Salesforce contacts as well as have better statistics and tracking within Salesforce. We wanted our salespeople to have access to the results of these campaigns, in addition to the marketing team. When I first attempted to find information about the integration, I noticed the lack of sufficient documentation on Salesforce.com and Responsys.com regarding the service. The only relevant items I found that even mentioned the integration were articles written 2006 and earlier.

So we contacted a Responsys representative directly and were able to get our hands on material that provided detail about how the integration worked. After we officially signed up with Responsys for the integration, we had a conference call for “training” and were told we were ready to seamlessly integrate Responsys with Salesforce!

Having the two products work together…

Once we began our first email marketing campaign, we immediately noticed issues that required assistance from Responsys. The primary issue was that the Responsys “Connector” wasn’t recognizing my Salesforce login as valid so it was unable to retrieve the information I was trying to send to Responsys (i.e. the distribution list). I sent my first email of many to the Responsys support team and was satisfied with the amount of time it took them to respond (typically a few hours, depending on the time of day). Although their replies arrived fairly quickly, the responses weren’t always relevant solutions to the problem I was experiencing, and were often written with poor grammar. Some typical examples include: “We have added the three new user,” “We have also send out email,” and my frequent personal favorite, “Please advice.”

Many cryptic emails and phone calls later, we were finally able to get the integration working properly. One of the solutions was to add the Responsys IP Addresses to our “Trusted IP Ranges” in Salesforce so Salesforce would allow Responsys to retrieve the data correctly. The Responsys support representatives that I spoke with weren’t aware of the recent Salesforce security measures that required this to be done until I presented my issue to them.

If your company already uses Responsys, it is possible to get it functioning properly with Salesforce…just be prepared to turn a blind eye to proper grammar usage and have a lot of patience!