You may be using Salesforce campaigns. But are you using them correctly so that you understand the performance of each of your campaigns?
How do you know which Salesforce campaigns to invest your time and money into and which ones to stop?
The majority of companies using Salesforce campaigns are not making effective use of them. Many companies start to set them up and then, for a variety of reasons, loose interest in them. Or resources needed to see their campaigns through to completion are diverted somewhere else in the company and the campaigns sit untouched.
Another mistake companies make is that they try to reinvent Salesforce to better meet their needs when in fact they’re making it impossible to use Salesforce Campaigns. A common example of this is companies who decide that they’re not going to use the Lead object in Salesforce and instead try to use the Contact object for tracking leads.
If you are not using the Lead object, you can not track which Leads are converting to Opportunities, which will prevent you from tracking this information in Salesforce Campaigns. This will limit the effectiveness of the built in analytics of Campaigns.
Here are some things to consider to be successful with Salesforce campaigns:
- Follow Salesforce best practices. We offer a list of more than 50 best practices that anyone can download.
- Have someone in your company who is responsible for managing campaigns in Salesforce. This person should be trained on how to use Salesforce campaigns or else they’ll likely create a mess which will result in having a bunch of meaningless campaigns in place.
- Have a clear understanding up front with all Salesforce campaign stake holders on what the goals of the campaign will be. This will help to determine what data will be gathered and will provide a road map for creating and managing the campaigns.
- Keep your Salesforce campaigns organized. For example, if you’re running several web-based campaigns create a parent campaign called Web Campaigns and put all child campaigns under the parent.
- Understand how you will track responses for campaign members. For example, if you have a campaign for a trade show the default response of sent or responded should be replaced with attended.
- Setup campaign influence reporting if you’re running multiple campaigns. Then you’ll have data so you understand how each of your campaigns contributed to generating the opportunity.
- Dedicate time every week to manage your Salesforce campaigns, even if you only have a few campaigns. We recommend doing this the same time and same day every week.
- Analyze campaign effectiveness by setting up the appropriate reports and dashboard components.