Last week I had a demo of Sitecore’s new Emal Campaign Manager “Sitecore ECM”. The Sitecore ECM offers the ability to deepen the understanding of those reading your emails. The greatest obstacle to improving the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns is in understanding what readers do beyond the “open rates” and URLs clicked. So marketers tend to rate the success of email campaigns based on increases or decreases in opens and URLs clicked. This is frustrating because email marketing can be a very effective way of reaching your prospects and current customers. Without much data available it is difficult to understand what is hindering or helping our email marketing success. There are so many factors to consider: subject line, design, CTAs, content… And the worst part of email marketing is that even if you manage to figure how to tweak the above – you don’t know what happens when the email opener clicks through to your website. Sure, you might be able to compare the effects on traffic on the day you sent your campaign and the days following. But that doesn’t necessarily tell you enough. And then there’s the joy of trying segment your email marketing database! More

Well here’s some exciting news! Today Sitecore released a new product: Email Campaign Manager. I’ll be doing a demo next week, so I will write another post then to share as much as I can. In the meantime I can just give you an overview. If you want more info in the meantime, Irina Guseva has the ticket! More

Guest Blogger: Lars Birkholm Petersen  


There is a lot of buzz going on around personalization in the online world; how to use it, does it matter, won't the visitor be suspicious, etc..
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Marketers are very concerned with the volume of traffic reaching their websites. However concerns and opinions of measuring conversion rates are all over the map. On many a webinar I have heard someone say a high bounce-rate is bad. I don’t think that is ALWAYS the case. To get straight to the point, conversions are likely the most important analytic because “conversion” usually somehow equates to making money or tightening a relationship. But if you have only a basic analytics system at hand, then you have a very limited view or understanding of what people are doing on your website. You might be able to track how many new customers you have versus returning customers, average pageviews per visitor, which pages have the most traffic, which CTAs are clicked thru, etc. But usually you have very little insight into the on-going activities of any particular people on your website…even those that unbeknownst to you are in the buying-cycle.  More

Yesterday I had the good fortune to squeeze my way into a presentation by Laust Sondergaard, VP of Business Development at Sitecore, “5 Ways to Improve Your Online Conversions by Better Understanding Your Visitors”. The room was packed as Laust Sondergaard delivered a plethora of information into a short 30 minute session.  More

The next Sitecore Southern California User Group meeting is on March 9th at 6pm. This month Prasanth Nittala will be talking about Sitecore and Social Media. That should be an interesting topic since comScore reported that in December 2009 nearly 4 out of 5 internet users found themselves on a social media website. More

This topic has two different approaches based on the EPiServer CMS product version. The last CMS version R2 has already integrated the configuration provider, under EPiServer.Security, so in this version the Active Directory (AD) integration is really simple. In the other hand, for previous versions, we have to do a manual configuration, in this case we have to download the source code from the EPiServer community website.  More

Oshyn employs a rigorous test-driven development process and continuous integration that allows development to be done with greater transparency, greater efficiency and greater predictability. This diagram describes the Oshyn Sitecore Development & Configuration Management Methodology.  More

by Byron Calisto  More

Want to learn more about Sitecore CMS? Sign up for the Southern California User Group! The inaugural meeting will take place on Wednesday January 13th at 6pm at Oshyn's headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. It's a good group to get involved in if you have an interest in Content Management Systems (CMS), WCM, Online Marketing, or even just scouting out ways to make your website a better performer! Oshyn is providing pizza and refreshments - so sign up on Meetup so we know how many mouths we're feeding! Sign up here: http://www.meetup.com/Sitecore-User-Group-Los-Angeles-Oshyn/  More