Tracking Marketing and Campaigns with the Salesforce platform In this blog we will give you a glimpse of how Salesforce campaigns work, how they can help organizations maximize ROI (return on investment), how marketing managers use salesforce campaigns to track their effectiveness, and some of the top marketing apps that integrate with Salesforce. Traditionally, marketing and campaign managers struggled to gauge the success of their campaigns as they had no way to link the actual sales and donations with ‘campaign members’. This has since changed with technologies such as the campaign management feature in Salesforce.com. Tracking Marketing Campaign information is now collated in one place as opposed to being stored in numerous places such as Excel spreadsheets or legacy systems. You can monitor and track the performance of your campaign every step of the way! For example, how many people were invited to an event, how many of those invitees were registered, and how many of them turned out on the day. Most importantly, you can track the leads and opportunities, as well as any donations/revenue generated by a campaign. Subsequently, you can generate more higher-quality leads for sales and/or donations, thus enabling you to make smart and informed decisions on where to invest your resources. Salesforce.com Campaign Flow Tracking Marketing Campaign (Email, Events, Social media, webinars) –> Leads –> Opportunities–> Donations/Revenue Salesforce.com campaigns provide some great functionality right out of the box, including (but not limited to) the ability to track common metrics such as unique open rates, unique click-through rates, delivery success rates, lead conversions, and unsubscribes. Another crucial piece of functionality is the campaign influence feature, where opportunities are directly linked to the campaign it came from thus enabling the marketing manager to measure the ROI of any running campaigns. Once a campaign is underway, the marketing manager will want real-time insight into how it is doing. Salesforce offers a powerful solution in the ‘reports’ feature that will allow you to prepare visual representations of all your data through Pie charts, Bar graphs, Scatter plots amongst others. These reports can then be delivered to your stakeholders in a practical and concise manner. Salesforce has a well-rounded platform that not only offers great standard functionality when it comes to marketing but that it is also able to integrate with various third-party marketing automation tools to help maximize impact and efficiency. Here is a list with a brief description of some of the top ones. MailChimp MailChimp is a great email marketing automation tool, and the free version offers support for up to 2000 subscribers and 12000 emails per month plus a 15% discount for nonprofits or charities. With the free salesforce integration you can sync your data in both directions and not only can you manage MailChimp subscribers from salesforce, you can view campaign results and click/open information within Salesforce so you can keep track of their interaction all in one place. Pardot Pardot is another marketing automation tool. It offers a more robust solution than their competitors. Pardot comes with some great features e.g. Lead scoring & Grading, Forms & landing pages, Social posting, Automating marketing activities. But one of the big Cons of campaigns in Pardot however is its high price and it may not be feasible for smaller organizations to support – although they do also offer a non-profit discount. Dupecatcher As the name suggests this is a tool to help with data quality and to eliminate any duplicates. We all know there’s nothing worse than a CRM full of “dirty” data. This free tool will identify, block and merge duplicate leads, accounts and contacts in real time. Eventbrite Whether the event you are running is paid or free, small or big, Eventbrite is a great choice. The salesforce connector is very clever and it allows it to grab all the information about the attendees and report on it. If a mixture of leads and contacts attend the event it will update the relevant records in Salesforce. Cirrus Insight While this tool is not just for marketers, Cirrus Insight for Gmail is great to attach emails from leads and contacts to the salesforce record with just 1 click. On top of being able to add emails you can also sync calendars, save contacts, create new leads/contacts/accounts, and manage your CRM all from inside your Gmail account. Cirrus offer 50% to nonprofits and higher-ed organizations. And that brings us to the conclusion of this blog! Although this is just the tip of the iceberg we have gone through how salesforce.com campaigns can help marketers be more efficient while maximizing ROI through standard functionality and third party tools at a top level. If you’d like to learn more about Campaign Management and Online Donations come join us at our Seminar on Thursday October 22.
