Salesforce Marketing Blog
Salesforce Marketing Blog - Campaign Management
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Best Practices in Campaign Management: Tips & Tricks
Oct 31, 2007Now that we’ve covered the basics of how campaign management works in Salesforce how do you get the most bang for your buck? Here are some suggestions to get you started:
- Naming Conventions. A must-have for any organization running a lot of campaigns. The campaign name is what appears in search so you want it to be unique and easy to identify. Campaign names should be structured in a consistent manner so they are easy to decipher by people outside of marketing. For example: Program - Tactic - Audience - Quarter
- Add custom fields to campaigns that align to key metrics. You may want to know how your programs perform by offer or by tactic (email, web promo, etc). Add these as custom fields to your campaign so you can report on them later. If these metrics are key to decision making in your organization be sure to make them required fields.
- Use the active flag on campaigns with purpose. There are 2 reasons why campaigns need to be active. The first reason, is so you can run the super secret “Campaign Call Down” report. The second reason is so your sales team can find the campaign name from the lookup on leads and contacts and manually add the campaign to the campaign history. If you have thousands of active campaigns, this look-up view for your sales reps gets pretty muddy and decreases the likely hood they will use it, so try and keep your active flags up to date. (Tip: In the Winter ‘08 release you will be able to run the campaign call down report on both active and inactive campaigns removing the necessity to have campaigns active for reporting purposes only)
- Create a section on your campaigns for follow up. This is a great way to communicate to your sales reps or inside sales teams what the appropriate follow up is for each particular campaign. This section could contain key messages, any email templates that should be used for follow up, etc. This way an inside sales person can simply click in to the campaign, and easily identify what their next steps should be.
- Standardize your member status values. Reporting across campaign membership can be difficult without consistency. Maintaining standard values will allow you to compare the performance of your programs against each other. Some example status values are:
- For web promotions set the default value to “Responded”
- For events and webinars set the default value to “Registered” with additional values for “Registered – attended” and “Cancelled”.
- For email marketing set the default value to “Responded”
- If you don’t have it already, install the “Campaign Membership” web link from AppExchange. This web-integration link on the campaign detail page pulls up the “Campaign Call Down report I referred to earlier and allows you to see all of the campaign members (both leads and contacts) in one report. If you don’t have this already, install the link off the AppExchange here: https://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?NavCode__c=&id=a0330000000j5OdAAI
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Best Practices in Campaign Management: The Basics
Oct 24, 2007What 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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
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How to Measure Campaign Influence
Oct 1, 2007Thanks to everyone who came to Dreamforce! If you missed it, keep an eye out on successforce.com for the recorded sessions - they should be posted soon.
In the last session of the Marketing track, “How Salesforce uses Salesforce Marketing”, many of you were asking about how to measure the influence of marketing campaigns on opportunities. Using Custom Report Types (CRTs) we can start get a better handle on this metric.
Note: You will need to have the "Manage Custom Report Types" permission set on your profile in order to create and publish CRTs.
To create a new Custom Report Type go to Setup -> Build –>Custom Report Types
First thing you want to do is pick the primary object you want to report from (in this case it will be the
Opportunity), name your report and identify what folder you want it to show up in.Next you will create the relationship between objects. In this case we want to report from the Opportunity to Contact Roles to the Campaign History.
Once you have saved the report you can go in and edit which fields show up in the report by clicking the “Edit Layout” button highlighted below.At this point, we are finished creating the reporting structure for campaign influence, however I do want to point out one of the most powerful components of CRTs which is hidden on the edit layout page under the link “Add fields related via lookup”.
This link allows you to extend your report even further by adding in fields from objects that are related by a lookup to any of the primary objects you are reporting from. For example, I could get to information on the account record from the lookup to the opportunity, or I could get to user data from the lookup to the campaign record. This hidden gem can come in handy, so keep it in mind for other reports you may be trying to run.
Now, back to our influence report…I’ve saved the report type down and can get to it through our regular reporting wizard.
Just like any other report, you can structure it in any way you like. I prefer to create a summary report grouping the results by campaign. This way I can see how much opportunity has been touched by campaign, regardless of what the campaign source is on the opportunity.
Once you’ve tested out your report, don’t forget to go back in and deploy it to all of your users so anyone with access to your report folder gets the benefit of this new report!Added 10/03:
Thanks to Tom Tobin who packaged up this CRT and put it on the AppExchange here:
https://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000004IOTRAA4 -
Batting Averages and Clickthrough Rates
Apr 5, 2007
John Gartner is obviously a fan of the book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,
as am I. Moneyball is a book by Michael M. Lewis released in 2003
about the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane, and
his team's approach to running the organization. One of the central
tenants of Moneyball, is that in the game of baseball, real statistical
analysis has shown that on base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and that avoiding an out is more important than getting a hit. In his article, Do Your Metrics Measure Up,
John analogizes a batting average in baseball, to a clickthrough ratio
for marketers. This begs the question, which metrics are most
important to your marketing organization? The Internet has fundamentally changed the way we all live an work. This has never been more true for marketers. As marketing dollars and advertising spend has shifted from Madison Avenue to Amphitheatre Parkway, marketers can measure almost every aspect of the performance of their marketing programs in real-time. One of the potential effects of this, aside from Google's repeated quarterly revenue home runs, is a potentially overwhelming amount of statistical information associated with your various marketing programs. If you get lost in a sea of stats, and lose track of what is important, it is very easy to miss your targets, which in the b2b world is likely along the lines of pipeline, revenue, and profitability.
John's article certainly shares our mindset. While clickthrough rates, quality scores, and conversion rates are key metrics to track closely, if you live in the b2b world, be careful not to get so bogged down in the myriad of metrics that you lose sight of your original goals:
Driving new leads, pipeline, revenue, and profitability for your organization.
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Associating Web Leads to a Campaign
Mar 9, 2007We recently decsribed the process of setting up web-to-lead forms on your website. In addition, it is also quite simple to auto-associate inbound leads to a Campaign. Every Campaign record in Salesforce has a unique ID, which can be found by looking at the Camapign detail record:
Once you have the Campaign ID, simply insert an additional "hidden" field in your web-to-lead form that passes the campaign ID along with the form submission.
Republish your enhanced form to your website and Salesforce will take care of the rest! Every new lead submission from this form will be automatically associated to your Campaign.
Additionally, we recommend creating unique landing pages for every marketing program. This will allow you to optimize conversion rate by custom tailoring a landing pages to the offer(s) you present in your targeted email, advertising, events, or other. Every landing page can contain unique Campaign ID field and auto-associate new leads to the appropriate Campaign.
You can learn more about Salesforce's lead management features, and how Salesforce CRM Software as a Service can keep your sales lead processes optimized for sales growth.
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Capturing Leads from Your Website
Mar 6, 2007Companies often contact us with basic questions about website name/lead capture forms. To our surprise, many Salesforce customers are unaware of the standard web-to-lead functionality that comes out-of-the-box with every salesforce account.
There are a few simple steps to get started with website lead capture:
(1) Enable Web-to-Lead functionality
Enabling web-to-lead is a simple step that should take only a few sceonds. Log into Salesforce and navigate to the setup area for web-to-lead (Setup > Customize > Leads > Web-to-Lead). From here click on the hyperlink to enable web-to-lead for your organization. You will be required to assign a default user as the lead creator for new inbound leads.
(2) Create a Web-to-Lead form
Salesforce does not host web pages for customers, but we do our best to make the process of creating a web-to-lead form as simple as possible. From the web-to-lead setup area, you can get started by selecting the hyperlink labeled Generate the HTML. You will be asked to select the Lead fields that you want to capture on your website, and specify a return URL. The return URL is a web page where you direct visitors after they have filled out your web-to-lead form. This is often a "thank you" page, a "download whitepaper" page, or something similar.
(3) Cut and Paste the HTML
Salesforce will generate a working HTML page that contains the web-to-lead form you generated. It's not very beautiful, but it works! From here, you can copy and paste the HTML and load it onto your site, or send it over to your web designer to apply your corporate stylesheet. Here is a sample web-to-lead appearance after applying a corporate stylesheet:
(4) Get Smart with Landing Pages
A landing page is simply a web-to-lead page that is highly tailored to a specific offer. As a best practice, instead of driving users from programs to your homepage, we recommend that you create for every marketing program you run. In addition, you can include Salesforce Campaign IDs in your web-to-lead forms and automatically associate inbound leads with email, search, telemarketing, or other programs. -
Marketing in the Google Era, Part 1
Feb 28, 2007Thank you for the overwhelming attendance and feedback from yesterdays Marketing in the Google Era webinar. Here you will find the details from yesterdays presentation.
Marketing in the Google Era: Webinar Slides (Adobe PDF, 5.5MB)
Marketing in the Google Era: Webinar Recording (Abobe Breeze Presenter, Streaming)
Also, many of you have asked us for the 7 techniques reviewed in the webinar, the bookmark set and blogroll that was listed at the end of the presentation.
Bookmark Set: http://del.icio.us/kswensrud
Blogroll: http://www.bloglines.com/public/kswensrudSpread the word:
Bookmark in del.icio.us 
Digg it! -
Measure Marketing Effectiveness with Pipe-to-Spend Ratios
Feb 26, 2007It’s a basic question most marketers ask themselves and I'm sure many struggle with the right answer…How should we be measuring the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns?
In addition to direct ROI, we also look at a pipe-to-spend ratio for each campaign we run. This allows us to see for every marketing dollar we spend how many dollars of pipeline are we generating in return. Using a basic calculated field, all of our marketing managers can easily see how their campaigns stack up against the rest.
The result is a report like the one below that benchmarks all of your campaigns against each other.
Now your marketing managers can see which of their programs are effective (in real time!) and management can make educated decisions based on hard data rather than gut feel.
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Traditional Media Drives Web traffic
Feb 16, 2007In the Era of Trackable media, one red hot advertising trend is using traditional forms of media to drive new web traffic. From TV spots, to magazine ads, to newspaper columns, to direct mailers, to freeway billboards, marketers are trying to push consumers from traditional media onto the Internet.
If you dont normally think about this kind of stuff, try being conscious of it for the next 24 hours. You will notice that a clear shift that is upon us.
On the Internet, marketers can design a more targeted, relevant, interactive, and longer lasting experience (the famous example: Burger King's subservient chicken). Most importantly, marketers can measure every detail of a website visit. Every impression, every click, and every clickstream is logged, recorded and replayed. Free services such as Google analytics will tell you who is on your site, when they arrived, where they came from, what they clicked on, how long they stayed, and hundreds of other metrics that allow a marketer to dissect patterns and measure interest and behavior.
Simply put, what happens on the Web is trackable.
Think back a few weeks to the Super Bowl, the most significant day of the year in television advertising. Countless numbers of TV spots were used by marketers to drive viewers from TV to the web.
Naturally, it makes sense for companies like GoDaddy.com to drive web traffic, their site is a domain selling storefront, so new web traffic = new customers. (OK, GoDaddy may not be the best example, they have a history of using half-naked cheerleaders and tangling with TV censorship in an effort to drive web traffic.)
Take another example, this year Doritos ran a Crash the Superbowl program, creating an interactive microsite that allowed consumers to design a superbowl ad by uploading video. The final super bowl ads were picked out of the thousands of submissions:
And guess what consumers wanted to do after they watched the winning ads? They went to work on Monday and spent half the day on the Doritos website watching the ads that missed the cut.
USA today reports that in 2006, only one company, Blockbuster, noticably asked viewers to come to its website. This year, nearly all super bowl ads were designed to engage web behavior, both before and after the commercial aired on TV. The idea is simple, hook the visitor on TV and drive them onto the web where the consumer can have a longer lasting and interactive experience.
Even in cases such as the controversial Snickers ad/website, the content itself backfired, but the desire to drive web traffic was clear.
People are living significant portions of their life online, both at work and at home. As the web encroaches on traditional media, marketers need to rethink the bridge between online and traditional programs, and how they plan to enhance offline campaigns with online content.
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The Era of Trackable Media
Feb 16, 2007Imagine this scenario: Manufacturing wants to build a new facility that’s designed to increase capacity and decrease defects. In order to execute the project, they need $10M from management. Management (of course) asks manufacturing for an ROI model for the project.
Manufacturing’s response: We don’t have an ROI model, but we can promise you’ll like the way it’ll look.
Hard to believe? Well, it happens just about every day across corporate America, but not in manufacturing. It happens in marketing. Every day, marketers spend millions on advertising investments with uncertain (and worse, largely unmeasured) return.
They don’t do this by choice. They do it because advertising was forced by circumstance to develop the now time honored habit of investing serious dollars in untrackable media. Print ads with no response component. Big TV spend. David Ogilvy popularized John Wanamaker’s astute observation that:
Mr. Wanamaker, Mr. Ogilvy, meet the largest trackable advertising system ever invented, the Web. Now you can know. And not only can you know what worked, you can know which investments drove the highest response rates and which others drove the highest quality return. You can tune your advertising investments to your business needs.
The era of trackable media is here...Major ad budgets are shifting online, and Google's acquisition of YouTube starts to make sense.
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