Chapter 13
In This Chapter
Creating campaigns
Creating a target list
Executing a campaign
Assessing campaign effectiveness
Companies want to increase revenue by spending marketing dollars intelligently. However, because of the disconnect between sales and marketing teams, managers have a harder time executing campaigns, let alone tracking and measuring the results of their marketing programs. Now, more than ever, marketing departments have to prove that they are contributing to the sales funnel versus being regarded as a cost center. Marketing executives have to show that their marketing spending is resulting in new customers. If this sounds familiar to you, campaigns in Salesforce can help you manage and track your marketing programs more effectively, helping you manage your customer acquisition costs, bring in more qualified leads, and contribute more to sales.
A campaign is any marketing project that you want to plan, manage, and track in Salesforce. The higher-level goal is to create something (a content piece or an event, for example) that generates demand for your product or service. Depending on your current or planned strategies, types of campaigns include trade shows, search engine marketing, e-mail marketing messages, online promotions, webinars, online events, and print advertising, although this is by no means a complete list.
In this chapter, you find out how to create and manage campaigns, segment target lists, execute campaigns, track responses, and analyze campaign effectiveness.
Available for Professional, Enterprise, and Performance Edition users, the Campaign module in Salesforce is a set of tools that you use to manage, track, and measure your marketing programs. Its foundation is the campaign record, which can be manually or automatically linked to lead, contact, and/or opportunity records to provide real metrics on campaign effectiveness.
A campaign record comes standard with a set of fields that help you manage and track your campaigns. The following list describes the fields that you use most often to measure campaign effectiveness:
If you’re a marketing manager, you can plan and manage the majority of your campaign preparation inside Salesforce. You can
In the following sections, we show you where and how to accomplish these tasks.
To create a campaign, log in to Salesforce and follow these steps:
A New Campaign page appears, as shown in Figure 13-1.
If you manage marketing programs for your company, you should see few surprises in the campaign fields. See the preceding section for a summary of the standard entry fields.
Optionally, you can click Save & New if you have more than one campaign to create and want to immediately start on the next one.
After you save your final campaign, the campaign page reappears with the information you entered as well as additional system-generated fields that automatically update as your company makes progress on a campaign.
A campaign member is a lead or a contact who’s part of a specific campaign. Depending on the type of campaign you’re running, you can modify the campaign to have a unique set of member statuses. For example, the member statuses that you track for an e-mail campaign (Sent, Responded) are typically different from those of a trade show that you’re sponsoring.
To customize member statuses for a specific campaign, follow these steps:
The Campaign Member Status page for your campaign appears. When you first begin to create campaigns, Salesforce creates a default set of member status values of Sent and Responded.
The Campaign Member Status page appears in Edit mode, as shown in Figure 13-2.
For example, if you’re sponsoring a booth at a conference, the preregistrants list is part of the package, and if you want to invite attendees to visit your booth, you might add member statuses of Registered, Invited, Attended, Visited Booth, and Met at Show.
This field tracks the Expected Response Rate field against the actual response rate.
The Campaign Member Status page reappears with your changes.
One of the biggest challenges that marketing managers face is developing the right target lists for a campaign. Target lists are the lists of people you’re targeting in your campaign. Depending on the type of campaign that you’re planning, your lists might come from different sources, such as rented or purchased lists from third-party providers or existing lists of leads and contacts already entered in Salesforce. If your target list is comprised of the latter, you can create your target list directly from the Salesforce Reports tab and associate specific campaigns to those leads and contacts, or you may add leads and contacts directly to specific campaigns.
With a rented list, your options are limited. Depending on the circumstances, sometimes you don’t know who’s on the list because the list is controlled by the vendor. Other times, you agree to limited use terms, such as one-time usage. In these circumstances, simply use the external list as the target list instead of importing the list into Salesforce.
If you own or purchase a list and intend for your teams to follow up on all the records, you can import the list into Salesforce as lead records and automatically link the records to a campaign. Here, we show you how to select a list on your computer to import, mass-associate various characteristics to the list (such as the lead source or campaign), perform the import, and verify that your settings came through.
To import a list and attribute it to a campaign, follow these steps:
A drop-down list appears.
The Campaign Member Import Wizard starts.
Step 1 of the Lead Import Wizard appears. Here, you associate various field statuses to the list of leads that you want to import.
Here are the main steps to perform:
or
Add and fill in a column for Lead Owner unless you’ll be the owner or you’re applying lead assignment rules.
.csv
format on your computer.A Choose File dialog box appears.
The dialog box closes, and the filename appears in the field.
If you’re using this within the United States, you most likely won’t be changing this. To be sure, check with your system administrator.
Step 2 of the wizard appears, where you confirm the mapping of the Salesforce field to the correct column in your uploaded file.
Step 3 of the wizard appears.
Your new campaign members will appear under your campaign record, which you can access from the Campaign tab.
Assuming that your company has already imported users’ leads and contacts, you can build your target lists directly in Salesforce in three ways:
After you link your desired leads or contacts with a specific campaign, you can begin to target them.
To associate existing leads or contacts to a campaign you’re planning, start by making sure that you can see the leads or contacts via a List View. See Chapter 5 (contacts) or Chapter 9 (leads) for information on using List View. You can add as many as 200 leads or contacts per List View page. Then, follow these steps:
A picklist appears.
In this example, we add existing leads. The Manage Members Wizard appears.
This is the default.
You may use an existing lead view or create new criteria now to get the leads you want for this campaign.
If you’re not yet sure what subset of leads to use, step back and give this some thought. E-mailing all the leads in your database might not be a wise decision.
The search results appear below the filter criteria.
Your selected leads now appear on the Existing Members subtab.
Don’t worry. If your itchy trigger finger got you to add some members before you were ready, you can use the handy Remove button to disassociate the members from this campaign and start over again.
The campaign record reappears.
As many as 50,000 leads or contacts in a single lead, contact, or campaign report may be associated to a campaign. To add existing members by running a report, follow these steps:
A Reports page appears, as shown in Figure 13-4.
The Add Members Wizard appears.
The default is to not override existing member statuses.
Step 2 of the wizard appears with a status message of your attempt.
You’re returned to your custom report page.
If you’ve followed our example to this point, from any lead or contact view page, you can add members to campaigns. Note that the capability to add members to campaigns from any lead or contact view page allows only marketing managers to select and add members one page at a time, so it’s best for adding a small amount of members. If your view is more than one page, you have to advance to that page and then add members. To add a member from a List View, make sure that the view has already been created and follow these steps (to see how to make custom List Views, read Chapter 9 or 10):
In Figure 13-6, we add some contacts to a campaign.
The Add Members Wizard appears.
Step 2 of the wizard appears with a status message of your attempt.
You return to your view page.
Depending on the type of campaigns you’re running, you might execute those campaigns online, offline, or in combination. And, based on the complexity of the campaign and your resources, you can use Salesforce to assist with the execution parts of your campaign.
If you send e-mail campaigns as part of your marketing strategy (and who doesn’t nowadays), you can use Salesforce for elements of the execution. Those elements might include
See the later section “Using Web-to-Lead forms.”
You can use Salesforce to deliver and track mass e-mails, but Salesforce wasn’t designed or intended to be used for large-scale, mass e-mail marketing. Some Salesforce customers use the mass e-mailing tool for small campaigns. Depending on which edition of Salesforce you have, you can send 100 (Professional), 500 (Enterprise), or 1,000 (Performance) e-mails per mass mailing. Your company is always limited to 1,000 e-mails per day.
If you execute offline campaigns, you can also use Salesforce in a variety of ways to simplify the process. How you use Salesforce depends on the type of campaign, but here are some suggestions:
After you launch a campaign, you can use Salesforce to track responses. In Salesforce, you have three basic types of tracking mechanisms, which we describe in the following sections.
Whenever we help clients with using Salesforce, we take a look at their Contact Us web page. If it’s filled with a bunch of e-mail addresses (like [email protected]
), we immediately recommend that they get Web-to-Lead up and running. After all, a company with a website using Salesforce in this day and age should take advantage of capturing information via an online form.
Web-to-Lead is a Salesforce feature that enables your company to easily capture leads from your websites and automatically generate new leads in Salesforce. With Web-to-Lead, you can collect information from your websites and generate as many as 500 new leads daily. Say that you already have a registration or a lead form on your public website. With Salesforce, you can — in minutes — generate HTML code that your webmaster can apply to your existing form. Then, when people fill out the form on your website, the information is routed instantaneously to users in Salesforce. By using Web-to-Lead, your reps can follow up on leads in a timely manner.
Specifically for campaign tracking, you can also create forms for specific landing pages designed for a unique campaign to capture information on a campaign member who responds.
Before you can capture leads from an external web page, though, you need to enable Web-to-Lead, add any additional custom fields to your lead record, generate the HTML code, and add the code into a web page. Of course, involve your web team and web designers to test and review this before it goes live.
All Salesforce customers can capture leads from web forms. First, check whether you need to turn it on for your company.
Log in to Salesforce and follow these steps:
The Web-to-Lead Setup page appears. Under Web-to-Lead Settings, make sure that Web-to-Lead is enabled. You can tell by looking for the Web-to Lead Enabled check box. If it’s selected, you’re good to go. If not, go to the next step.
The Web-to-Lead Settings edit page appears.
Salesforce provides three fields:
The Web-to-Lead Setup page reappears.
You can use a tool in Salesforce that takes the guesswork out of generating HTML code for your web forms.
To generate a general or a campaign-specific Web-to-Lead form, log in to Salesforce and follow these steps. If you just finished the steps in the preceding section, click the Create Web-to-Lead Form button in the Web-to-Lead Setup page, and you’ll arrive here.
A Web-to-Lead Setup page appears.
The Web-to-Lead Setup page appears.
Click a field name in the Available Fields column, as shown in Figure 13-7, and then click the Add arrow button to add that field from the Available Fields column to the Selected Fields column. Conversely, remove fields from the Selected Fields column by similarly clicking a field name in the Selected Fields column and then clicking the Remove arrow.
Balance selecting enough fields so that they help you route the lead to the right person with the patience level of the prospect filling out the form.
The return URL corresponds to the landing page that appears after the lead has submitted his information online. If you don’t know whether you have one, or which one to use, check with your marketing manager and your web manager. When you click the Generate button, a page appears with HTML code inserted in a box, as shown in Figure 13-8.
If you’re creating a web form specific to a campaign, create the campaign first, and make sure that you selected the Active check box for that campaign record. By doing this, you can select the fields for Campaign and Campaign Member Status, which enables you to track the specific campaign.
You return to the Web-to-Lead Setup page.
You can view and test the HTML code as an actual form by using your favorite web publishing application and a browser.
To view and test the form, follow these steps:
Popular programs include FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and HomeSite. You can even use Notepad or TextMate.
.txt
!) on your computer.A web form appears with the lead fields that you selected. The form is relatively unformatted, but your webmaster can apply code to make the form fit with your desired look and feel.
If you inserted a return URL, that page appears. If not, a page appears that displays the information that was sent to Salesforce.
The leads list for today appears. If the test lead isn’t listed, click the Refresh button in your browser until the test lead appears.
The lead record appears and displays the information that you submitted. Don’t forget to delete the test lead record after you’re comfortable that everything’s working!
You should see a link to the campaign and the default member status. If you selected the Campaign Member Status field when generating the HTML code, you can apply a member status to all leads derived from the web form.
If your campaign is designed to have recipients respond by phone or e-mail, your reps can manually update records as they interact with campaign members. Reps might have to create lead or contact records first if you didn’t build your target list from Salesforce. For example, if you rent a third-party list for an e-mail campaign, the respondent might not yet be recorded in Salesforce.
To manually update a lead or contact responding to a campaign, follow these steps:
See Chapter 2 for details on using Search.
See Chapters 5 and 9 for details on creating contact and lead records, respectively. If you find the record, skip this step.
For example, you might use the fields to enter additional information supplied by the respondent.
In those circumstances when your target list was built externally, reps need to add the member to the campaign.
To manually add a member to a campaign, go to the lead or contact record and follow these steps:
A Lookup box appears.
The Search Results page appears.
The New Campaign Member page appears.
The Campaign Member detail page appears.
If the lead or contact is already linked to the campaign in Salesforce, you’ll want to update the member status when he or she responds.
To update member status manually, go to the lead or contact record and follow these steps:
The Campaign Member Edit page appears.
If leads or contacts that are part of a campaign respond in a batch, you can do a mass update of campaign members. For example, if you sent an e-mail campaign to existing contacts and received a batch of online registrations as responses, you could perform a mass update. The following sections tell you two ways to update statuses: in a campaign or in a report. Sometimes you’ll be working directly out of a campaign. Other times you might be running a specific report that isn’t campaign related (for example, an existing “Northern California Active Customers” report), but you might want to update the status of people that turn up in that data set.
To mass update campaign statuses for all contacts or all leads in a campaign, log in to Salesforce and follow these steps:
A picklist appears.
The Manage Member page appears, with the Existing Members subtab selected.
You can also manually select which members to update by selecting the check box next to their names in the results.
You may select up to 200 members to update.
A status bar displays the results of the operation. You may continue updating by selecting new views, or click the Back to Campaign: [Campaign Name] link when done.
To update the status of several members at once, follow these steps:
A page appears, allowing you to select a specific campaign.
A Campaign Call Down Report for your campaign appears.
The Add Members Wizard opens.
The default is to not override existing member statuses. However, if your goal is to update all statuses of members in this report, choose to override the status.
Step 2 of the wizard appears with a status message of your attempt.
You return to your view page.