Salesforce is among the robust CRMs available in the market. It offers many tools for storing and organizing your company’s data as well as your customers’. And as a company, your goal might be to utilize this data optimally in order to serve the best to your customers.

There are multiple integrations available in the market but one of the best and widely useful is WordPress Salesforce integration. This integration helps you to utilize your data properly making it more valuable and as a result, you are able to provide better service to your customers.

Let’s look at useful ways to sync your WordPress and Salesforce data: 

If you are managing your website on WordPress and capturing leads from there, then integrating your WordPress with your Salesforce CRM becomes crucial. This way you will be creating a cohesive database of your users.

To integrate Salesforce and WordPress, you can configure WordPress functions like site registration, etc. to create new leads in the Salesforce database. You can also configure other fields between two applications so your teams can have access to proper data sets.

It doesn’t matter if you are running a membership-based company or host-specific data on your website which is only visible to your customer, with this integration, you can keep your users’ account status synced dynamically. 

Going a step further, you can also tag your leads as customers in Salesforce, and this customer tag update, in turn, gives your customers access to the “customer only” section of your website.

This will directly decrease your sales teams’ workload. This feature will help your sales team to serve your customers effectively and efficiently.

Let’s say you want to convert WordPress form submissions into leads, and if your website is integrated with Salesforce then it will help you smoothen the whole process. With the WordPress filters and hooks, you can send your form data into Salesforce and then you can also track the performance of these forms in your CRM. All this, in turn, will help your inbound marketing team to perform better and convert your leads.

If you want to identify the most trafficked area of your website then you can set up “logged-in” user page tracking to get user page history into a custom Salesforce object.

If you are using this feature in your WordPress site, then remember that this level of detailed tracking requires a good amount of computing resources. It also depends on your web hosting provider. Or you can also invest in a Salesforce customer portal that works with WordPress making it a cost-effective option to track the user activity and understand their needs.

There may be multiple ways for you to include your product database in your Salesforce CRM but there are only a few ways to keep data synchronized with external eCommerce stores. Still, there are some unique solutions available which work with as many Salesforce setups as you want. But what the point of concern here is that it won’t support any of the customizations done in your eCommerce store workflow. This will at the end make the data useless.

Therefore, a custom integration solution can include a product catalog; it even includes a full eCommerce solution that records stock quantities, sales, inventory updates, and other data in your Salesforce database. Having previous purchase data in Salesforce is very helpful when you are targeting customers for new products, promotions, or any other marketing campaigns.

You can create custom Salesforce objects according to your website. For example, if you want to build a website that tracks your rental cars and properties and stores their data in Salesforce then custom integration is the right solution for you. You can use this data to track car status, tenant rent, due dates, amounts, and payments directly from your Salesforce database. This even allows your customers to pay their bills directly through your WordPress website.

Want to link any core tailor-made WordPress actions with your Salesforce campaigns? Then linking WordPress actions with your Salesforce will enable you to track users who register on your WordPress site with a particular sales campaign. You can also add anyone who submits a specific form to a specific campaign by giving it a Salesforce campaign ID. 

Additionally, you can even tag particular website activities that you want to track. For example, you can even add a WordPress action that keeps track of the number of blog posts your users are reading in a particular product or the service category. 

If you are using any specific metric, you can associate them using a campaign ID that corresponds to each category. There are a number of custom actions you can create and track. In such scenarios, make sure you have specific and clear marketing or sales goals and can align in these actions as well.

Conclusion:

Salesforce and WordPress are among the most widely used CRM and CMS respectively. There are various ways you can use these two in the best possible way. But, the best outcome will be when you have integrated these two.

Before we start with the Salesforce customer portal, let’s explore all the types of Salesforce portals, their differences, and their use case.

Salesforce offers three types of portals that have different use cases:

- Partner Portal

- Self-service Portal

- Customer Portal

It is crucial that you pick one based on your requirement and which entities you want to manage. If it’s partners, then the partner portal should be your choice. Similarly, to manage customers you can either go with self-service portal or customer portal.

Let’s look at the difference between them.

The key difference here is that a partner portal is useful for when you want to share business-level insights with your partners. Each partner can get only the required data without being able to access all of your organization’s private data.

Compared to this, a customer portal works as a platform for your customers to approach your business, and get support on their own from the portal.

In this blog, we are going to explore multiple aspects of the Salesforce customer portal.

Customer Portal is a unified platform that provides self-service support, a user interface and online support channels for customers.

You can follow the steps given below to enable the Salesforce Customer Portal.

1) From Setup, enter Customer Portal Settings in the Quick Find box. Then selectCustomer Portal Settings or In Build, click customize, select customer portal, then click on Customer Portal Settings.

2) Click Edit.

3) Select Enable Customer Portal.

4) Click Save.

5) This is the view of Customer Portal after enabling the same. From there, you can create a new portal by clicking on ‘New’ or edit an existing portal.

6) You can change portal fonts, color with the option Change Portal Fonts and Colors button, and use the Edit button to change the header, footer, etc. Click on Edit and change it.

Note: This feature available only in Salesforce Classic.

1) From a contact detail page, click Manage External User, and then select Enable Customer User.

2) Verify the general information and locale settings, and enter any missing information. The customer’s Username defaults to the customer’s email.

3) Select a portal user license. The user license that you choose determines the permission sets, user profile type, and role hierarchy options which you can select for the user. See Customer Portal User Licenses.

4) Click on save to save the settings it.

5) Go back to the Contact Detail page and click Manage External User and select login to Portal as User.

After performing all the steps, this is how the Salesforce Customer Portal will look like.

- User interface

- Salesforce CRM content

- Custom objects and Tabs

- Multiple User profile and Record types

- Account Role hierarchy and sharing

- Branding and style configuration

1) User interface

In the salesforce customer portal, there are user interface features like search, quick solution identification, creating cases, reports, etc.

2) Salesforce CRM content

Through this Salesforce CRM content feature, your customers can access any product document and you can share relevant content with customers as well. It also has features like sharing, subscription and commenting.

3) Custom objects and tabs

You can create custom objects and tabs in the customer portal and share the same with your customers. These objects and tabs help you implement your business logic throughout the portal.

4) Multiple user profiles & record types

A feature to create multiple user-profiles and record types to help you provide some customized experience to your customers.

5) Account role hierarchy and sharing

You can use a three-level role hierarchy and share with your customers.

6) Branding and style configuration

Customizations in the home page, header, footer, colors, and fonts enable you to match the portal with your brand, therefore creating a synergy.

The Salesforce customer portal is expensive if you put it at $1 per user, per month. It increases your customer retention cost.

Apart from cost, there is also a certain limitation when it comes to the number of accounts. You cannot have over a certain number of accounts, depending on the Salesforce edition you use.

But there are third-party solutions that you can use that to allow you to scale your customer base at a much more reasonable price point.

CRMJetty is a hub of innovative customer relationship solutions. You can connect, collaborate, and engage with your customers smartly using our ready to integrate portal solutions for SuiteCRM, Sugar CRM, Salesforce, and Dynamics CRM.