Yesterday morning while driving in the early sun, I was thinking about email, the different ways it is used and system limitations.

You see, Salesforce.com places a daily limit on the number of mass emails that you can send based on the kind of license that is purchased.  Professional Edition can send 250 emails per day; Enterprise can send 500 emails per day; Unlimited can send 1,000 emails per day.  Keep in mind this is through their mass email functionality.

Mass email is the most common way that marketers use email.  Pull a list, create an offer and send it to the whole world - you know 50,000 - 1M+ in a day.  Well, Salesforce.com doesn't want to be in the email service busines.  Hence the daily limit.  They prefer to leave this to the email service providers like SilverPOP, Responsys, Vertical Response, ExactTarget and many others.

However, what about the company that has a salesforce of 5,000 users all on salesforce.com.  Clearly Salesforce doesn't limit the quantity of emails that these good people can send each day.  In aggregate, if my 5,000 head sales team sends 20 emails each, per day, my instance of salesforce.com could send 100,000 emails each and every day.  This is not considered mass email because it doesn't use the "mass email" marketing function in salesforce.com - but clearly it contains "mass".

So, what's a person to do that wants to construct a group of event-triggered business rules that support the sales team and automatically sends to customers whenever a certain event happens?  Is this a mass email marketing campaign?  Or is it an email sent by the sales team?

I'll tell you... according to the salesforce.com - it is not a marketing campaign and therefore does not bump up against the daily limit.

So here's my advice, all you marketers out there, if you want to create and send 1to1 marketing messages, stop thinking in terms of marketing campaigns and start thinking like a sales person.  You're talking to your customer one at a time and each email is personalized and connected to the ongoing conversation that you're having with the customer.  You may have 100,000 that get sent in a single day but it's not a campaign its 100,000 individual conversations.  Salesforce.com is a solid platform for this type of marketing automation and from an integration standpoint, one of the big benefits - its part of the same CRM tools that the sales team uses and they can see every message that you send to the customer.