The Salesforce Campaign Feature

Salesforce has a great marketing, advertising and sales management tool called campaigns.

Campaigns are marketing & sales projects that allow you to generate new business from your existing customers or leads (sales prospects). Salesforce Campaigns allow you to track the campaign budget, the number of customers or potential customers (leads), their responses, the number of open sales and the number of won sales.

With proper marketing campaign management, the ability to measure and monitor the return on investment (ROI) is just a few clicks away.

There are five steps to proper campaign management and when thought out properly, they should decrease your marketing & sales expenses while increasing revenue.

Step One: Create the campaign.

This sounds simple enough but usually requires the most amount of thought.

What are your campaign goals? Do you want to increase lead generation, send out a lot of holiday cards, promote a new product or service, publicize a webinar, or just stay in touch with your inactive customers?

Once you have determined the goals, you can use the standard and custom fields on the campaign page to track this information.

Salesforce allows for creating a campaign hierarchy up to five levels deep.

For example, you are running print advertisements in multiple magazines. You would create a parent campaign for print ads and then create a separate child campaign for each magazine. Not only will you be able to track the overall ROI of the campaign, you can track the ROI and effectiveness of each child campaign.

Step Two: Determine how to target the campaign.

There are two main groups you will want to target: existing customers and prospective customers (leads), or a combination of both. The goal of the campaign will determine which group you target. The Salesforce CRM system allows for easy creation of lists based on the target group and any criteria you choose such as industry, geography or title.

For existing customers and leads, adding them to a campaign is as easy as running a contact or lead report with your criteria (like all customers in WA, CA, and UT). Then just click the “Add to Campaign” button and set their default status.

You can also use the “Manage Members” button on the campaign itself to do the same search. Campaigns can hold a combination of contacts and leads so you do not have to create separate campaigns for each unless you want to.

For new leads, you can either add them manually as they come in (like responses to your print advertising) or group them into a spreadsheet (like attendees to your trade show or a purchased list of names) and use the campaign import wizard. The campaign import wizard allows you to import a list of leads and associate them to the campaign at the same time, saving hours of data entry.

Step Three: Execute the campaign.

Now that you have your campaign marketing group (campaign members), it is time to execute the campaign. Unless you are doing a small mass email from the Salesforce CRM system, this step is usually done outside of Salesforce. The campaign execution can either be online like mass email and webinars, or offline like trade shows and direct mail.

Each type of execution should be its own campaign but they can be children of a parent campaign. This will give you a better understanding of the effectiveness of each campaign.

Step Four: Track responses.

Before tracking responses, you will need to determine what responses you require. You can use the “Advanced” button on each campaign to add or edit status values.

The defaults are “Sent” and “Responded” but for a trade show, you may need “Attending”, “Registered” and “Registered-Canceled”. The “Advanced” button allows for different statuses on each campaign without creating a large picklist of all statuses used.

If your campaign points the recipient to your web page, you can set up a Salesforce web-to-lead form on your page that customers can fill out.

They are then automatically created as a lead and added to the campaign of your choice. This is the easiest way to track responses as it is automatic. You can have as many web-to-lead pages as you have campaigns but it is recommended that you pull the page from your site when the campaign is completed so as not to skew the statistics.

If your responses come in individually, like phone calls or emails, you can manually create the new lead and then manually associate it to the proper campaign or manually update the status of a pre-existing campaign member. This can be the most time consuming so you may want to look at mass uploading or mass updating.

For offline campaigns where you are adding leads and members as they respond, you would be better off creating a spreadsheet and using the Salesforce campaign import wizard on a regular basis. You can also use a spreadsheet to mass update the status of existing members, which can save you considerable time over a manual process.

Step Five: Analyze campaign effectiveness.

This is what all your hard work comes down to. Did you make or loose money? How many new leads did you get and how many of them converted into customers? Is this campaign as effective as my other ones?

Salesforce has some great tools to give you the answer to these questions and more.

Right on the campaign detail page, you can track the total sent and responded, the total contacts and leads, the number of converted leads, the total open and won opportunities and the total value of open and won opportunities.

If the campaign is a parent in a campaign hierarchy, you can also see the above statistics for all child campaigns right on the parent campaign page.

Salesforce also includes some standard campaign reports such as ROI analysis, Member analysis, Revenue, Influenced opportunities, and more. These can be customized to fit your needs and after customization, they can be used for campaign dashboards that can tell you at a glance how all of your campaigns are doing and how they stack up against each other.

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