What is campaign management? I think of it as managing a series of tactics and programs designed to achieve a specific business goal. This could be generating leads, pipeline, customer adoption, etc. Campaign managers usually leverage a campaign management system or tool that aids in the planning, execution, tracking and measurement of these programs.

Why use a campaign management tool? To get a holistic view of how your marketing initiatives are performing and maximize your marketing investments by replicating successful programs, tactics, and channels.

How does it work in Salesforce? That’s where the fun comes in….

Let’s start off by talking about the campaigns tab since this is the heart of our campaign management system in Salesforce.  Campaigns allow marketers to track at a granular level how their marketing tactics are performing, from lead generation to pipeline creation. Some companies do this today using the lead source field or perhaps a custom field on the lead, but that can get messy and even unusable once your pick list gets too long. Campaigns are perfect for this level of detail. 

Campaigns can be associated to leads and contacts in 3 ways.

1. Through your web-to-lead form. If you are generating leads on your website and using the Salesforce web-to-lead form you can easily pass the campaign ID as a hidden value through the form so every lead that is created from that form is tagged with your specific marketing campaign.
2. Manual association. You (or anyone with access) can manually associate leads, contacts to campaigns through the campaign history related list on the lead/contact record.
3. Mass association. You can add leads and contacts to campaign through the “Add to Campaign” button on reports or through a csv file upload using the “Manage Members” button on a campaign.

Campaigns can be associated to opportunities in 2 ways:

1. Lead Convert. When a lead gets converted to an opportunity, the campaign that was most recently associated to the lead will automatically pass over to the opportunity
2. Manual Association. You can manually associate any active campaigns to an opportunity using the look-up functionality next to the campaign source field on the opportunity.

Now anytime a lead, contact or opportunity is associated to a campaign, you can see that reflected in the statistic fields back on my campaign. These fields are updated in real time as leads are converting to opportunities and opportunities are closing so marketers always have the most up to date information on how my campaigns are performing.

You can see from the image above there is also the concept of a “response” reflected in the campaign statistic fields. For leads and contacts you can determine what the campaign member status of each record should be and if that status should be considered a response to the campaign based on your organizations business process. This is defined in the advanced set up are on campaigns and probably best explained through an example. If I am running an event, I would associate all of my leads and contacts to the campaign with a member status value of "Sent" with the responded checkbox set to null. At this point in my process I am using the campaign to identify my target audience and since individuals have not yet  registering for the event I want to keep the responded field set to null.

When individuals do register for the event, I would update the member status to "Registered", with the responded checkbox marked. All records with a member status value with the responded checkbox marked are reflected in the responded statistic field. Now, I can tell my conversion rate and for future programs better project how many invites it will take to achieve a my desired registration number.