6 Achieving Business Goals Using Campaigns

Campaigns are outbound marketing initiatives that target leads and contacts. They can take the form of direct mail, events, print ads, emails, or any other marketing outreach where you are trying to get a response from the recipients. This response can take the form of interest in a product, attending an event such as a seminar or a webinar, or clicking on an ad. Campaigns tie marketing and sales together as they help generate leads and track those leads as they convert into opportunities and, finally, into opportunity closure. This closure can either be Closed Won (a sale) or Closed Lost (a lost sale). Campaigns use campaign members to track who is associated with a campaign. Campaign members can be leads or contacts that have been contacted for a specific marketing campaign. Campaigns can also be nested in a hierarchy. This means that you may have an overall campaign, such as 2022 Email Campaigns, and underneath it resides all the email marketing...

Technical requirements

For this chapter, make sure you log in to your development org and follow along.

Creating campaigns

Campaigns are outbound marketing initiatives used by marketers. The reason campaigns are so important is that they are a primary means of obtaining leads and starting the sales cycle. You can look at campaigns as buckets that bring together leads, contacts, and opportunities.

Business use case

You are a marketing rep at XYZ Widgets. You have been tasked with delivering a webinar and you need to create the webinar campaign in Salesforce, as well as inviting attendees and tracking their progress. Let's see how this is done.

Creating a campaign

Let's take a look at how to create a campaign in Salesforce and go through the various fields to include when creating a campaign:

Go to the Campaigns tab to start the process, then click on New:

Figure 6.1: Option to create a new campaign from the Campaign tab

In the following screenshot, you can see part of the campaign creation screen:

Figure 6.2: Fields on the New Campaign creation screen

As you can see in the...

Adding campaign members

Campaign members are the leads and contacts that you reach out to be a part of your campaign. In our webinar example, this includes any leads or contacts you reach out to attend the webinar. Some members may respond and sign up for the webinar, while others may not. Out of the campaign members that respond, some may go on to make a purchase as a result of the webinar—these sales would be tied directly to the campaign and show the ROI of putting on the webinar. Let’s take a look at how to add leads and contacts to the campaign we created in the previous section.

Adding leads as campaign members

As you can see in the following screenshot, you first need to navigate to the Campaign Members section:

Figure 6.5: Option to add leads from the Campaign Members section

After navigating to the Campaign Members section, click on Add Leads.

In the following screenshot, you can see the Add Leads to Campaign page:

Figure 6...

Managing marketing with campaign hierarchies

Campaign hierarchies allow you to group campaigns under a top-level campaign. This can help in showing you the overall performance of a type of campaign over a year. For our webinar example, we want all the webinar campaigns that took place in 2022 to reside under a parent campaign called 2022 Webinar Campaigns. Let’s see how to do this.

In the following screenshot, you can see that the parent campaign for our January 2022 webinar is 2022 Webinar Campaigns:

Figure 6.15: Parent Campaign information on a campaign page

This means any numbers for this January campaign automatically come under this parent campaign.

In the following screenshot, we can see how the campaign hierarchy numbers show up under the parent campaign:

Figure 6.16: Campaign hierarchy information

This shows the number of leads and contacts in the child campaigns, any opportunities that result from these campaigns, and any sales that...

Improving campaign functionality with third-party apps

So far, we have seen how campaigns work. In our example, the marketing rep chooses leads and contacts and adds them to the webinar campaign. These campaign members default to a status of Sent and when they sign up for a webinar, the status updates to Responded. How does this status change happen? Without a third-party app, it would need to be updated manually.

In the following screenshot, we can see the campaign members that we added:

Figure 6.17: Member Status field for members of a campaign

Notice that the status is set to Sent by default. There are many third-party apps available for campaigns such as webinars, events, conferences, or any other campaign use cases. Without using a third-party app, in our example, whenever a lead or contact signs up for the webinar, you would need to go into the system and update the status manually. This can be very time-consuming.

To find an appropriate third-party app, you can go to https:/...

Summary

In this chapter, we covered how to create campaigns and what the important input fields are on campaign records to increase our visibility of the market. We discovered that both leads and contacts can be added to campaigns, as well as how to add a lead and contact to a campaign.

We went through how to view the campaign history of both leads and contacts and we now know what a campaign hierarchy is and how to add a campaign to a hierarchy.

Finally, we explained how third-party apps can be used to automate campaign responses, cutting out manual work that could be inefficient and unreliable due to human error. We also now know where to find third-party apps on AppExchange to automatically find out when a member signs up.

Now that we have covered sales and marketing, we will look at how Salesforce handles customer service through cases in the next chapter!

Questions

1. What are the two types of campaign members that can be added to a campaign?
2. Why would you want to add a parent campaign to your campaign?
3. What is the name of the section where you can see campaigns related to leads and contacts?
4. What field lets us know if a campaign is Active?
5. Why would you want to use a third-party app with campaigns?
6. What are three examples of types of campaigns?

Further reading

• Salesforce campaigns: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=campaigns_def.htm&type=5
• Salesforce campaign members: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=campaigns_members_working_with_parent.htm&type=5
• Campaign hierarchies: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=campaigns_hierarchy_setup.htm&type=5