Salesforce is one of the leading Cloud Computing Services that can help you grow your business. It is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that enables you to manage every aspect of your business. However, integrating marketing campaigns with Salesforce can be complex.
This article will discuss how to do this task efficiently.
Understanding Salesforce
The first thing to know about Salesforce is that it’s an application that integrates with your company’s other systems. It acts as a central hub for all your customer data. This makes it easy for you and your team to access information about customers, leads, opportunities and more in real-time.
Sales teams commonly use Salesforce because it helps them manage their interactions with prospective and existing clients. You can use the platform to track everything from leads and opportunities to cases, contracts, payments, marketing campaigns — and much more.
A large benefit of using Salesforce is that it allows you within your organization access to the same information at all times. This means no longer having multiple people working on projects without knowing how their work fits into the bigger picture.
It also means fewer mistakes. There is less chance of miscommunication between employees and departments that rarely talk face-to-face.
Now that you have a good foundation of how Salesforce works, you can use the steps below to integrate Salesforce into your marketing campaign.
1. Connect Your Marketing Tools to Salesforce
Salesforce is a highly intuitive tool on its own. However, it integrates with other platforms that can significantly enhance your marketing campaign. For instance, you can combine it with software such as MailChimp, HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot and other tools.
When you integrate Salesforce with your marketing software, you can accumulate more data and trigger actions between each tool.
There are several ways to integrate your marketing campaign with Salesforce. You can use Salesforce’s built-in CRM to manage leads, contacts and opportunities.
It also has a powerful marketing automation feature that allows you to track customers’ interactions with email and other types of marketing communication in one place.
You can understand how these tools work by setting up an account and experimenting with the available features.
For example, if you want to create an automated workflow for incoming leads from your website, click “Create New” from the Lead section of the navigation bar at the top of your screen.
This will open a new window where you can choose what actions to take when filling out your form.
2. Map Out Your Campaign Funnels
In Salesforce, you can use it to create a campaign funnel, which maps out the steps in your sales cycle. The first step is defining goals for each step in the process. Then you can use Salesforce to track progress towards those goals.
Here is a closer look at how to map your campaign funnels:
- Define your campaign funnels: Create a new object called Campaign Funnels. Use this object to define your final structure, so you can easily track each stage of the buyer’s journey.
- Track milestones as they occur: Each milestone represents a specific action someone has taken when they’ve expressed interest in what you offer. For this strategy to work, you must track your milestones to measure them accurately over time.
- Measure ROI from marketing campaigns using analytics tools: You’ll need some form of data collection system installed like Google Analytics — in addition to other channels, such as emails sent through MailChimp or Intercom. Both tools are excellent for integrating directly into Salesforce and tracking your ROI within the dashboard.
3. Customize Your Marketing Campaigns Dashboard
The dashboard in Salesforce gives you access to reporting and analytics. However, you’ll want to customize it so you can place all of the most relevant information in one place. That way, you can track your campaigns and identify new lead opportunities.
The first step in customizing your Salesforce dashboard is using the Dashboard Designer. From there, you can add your own custom fields to the dashboard. Or, you can add tabs containing graphs and charts relevant to your campaign activities.
If you go to the Dashboard Designer, you can click on a tab, which will turn red as soon as you hover over it. Once it highlights, click “Add Field” on the toolbar at the top of your screen.
This will open up another window with several different options for which fields you want to add to this specific page of your new custom dashboard.
Once you’ve added a new custom field, you can add it to your page by clicking on the field’s name in the “Select Fields” box. This will open another window where you can choose which pages of your dashboard should display this information.
After you add all your information to your custom dashboard, click on the “Save” button in the top-right corner of the screen. This will save all changes you’ve made and allow you to view them in Salesforce.
4. Get the Most Out of Your Data
Data is the foundation of your marketing. It’s the key to making better decisions, improving personalization and relevance — and driving higher customer engagement.
To get more out of your data, you must integrate it into every aspect of your business. Salesforce generates a lot of data from each contact within its system. You can use it to improve your marketing across various areas, including the examples below:
- Account management: Get in front of buyers at exactly the right time. You can use analytics-driven account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns based on lead quality scores.
- Marketing automation: Create workflow rules based on data points such as product usage patterns or purchasing history. That way, when someone clicks through an email link, they land on a page tailored specifically for them.
Remember that since Salesforce produces large amounts of data — you should always use a data backup and recovery tool to prevent data loss in case of a breach.
5. Nurture Leads Until They’re Ready to Buy
Once you gain new leads from your marketing campaigns, you can use Salesforce to nurture them and ensure they’re ready to buy.
To start, you should create a lead score based on the prospect’s behavior. The higher their score, the more likely they are to become customers.
Then, you can use an automated campaign workflow rule that automatically escalates leads with high scores — and follow up with them until they respond or close a conversation.
Additionally, Salesforce offers various features like auto-responders which enable companies to send automatic emails when someone reaches out about specific topics. You can use these features to provide support and maintain contact with potential buyers.
6. Keep In Touch With Existing Customers
Use Salesforce to retain your customers by keeping in touch and consistently selling to them. You can do this by creating a list of all your existing customers, then segmenting them into groups.
For example, you might group them according to whether they have purchased from you. You can then send targeted messages to each group, depending on what stage they’re at in the relationship.
This will help you ensure they’re aware of your company’s products and services — increasing the likelihood of repeat business every time.
7. Measure Your Success in the Right Way
Measuring your ROI is critical to your success. You’ll need to know how much revenue each campaign generates, what salespeople are doing with the leads they receive — and how much time it takes to close a deal.
For example, suppose you’ve launched an email campaign and want to see how it’s doing. You can measure your ROI by adding a “call-to-action” button at the end of an email and linking it directly to Salesforce.
From there, you can automatically track all the leads generated from the email in one place.
Once you have this data, it’s easier to determine how much investment you can put into your next campaign before seeing an ROI. You also can see which campaigns are working best for your sales team. That way, you can focus on those that provide the best results.
Strengthen Your Marketing and Sales Teams With Salesforce
Salesforce is a highly valuable tool to strengthen the relationship between your marketing and sales team. Oftentimes, companies silo their marketing and sales departments, making it challenging to streamline the sales process.
However, Salesforce offers the benefit of tracking your marketing campaigns, leads and sales pipelines. That way, you can see how well your campaigns are doing, who you need to contact and so forth.
Integrating Salesforce into your marketing campaign can be quite a learning process. But once you’ve figured everything out, you’ll be well on your way to streamlining your sales process in one platform.
Take Time Integrating Salesforce into Your Marketing Campaign
Integrate Salesforce into your next marketing campaign. It will help you track leads, automate follow-ups and trigger emails and measure success in real-time.
While this may seem like a large task, the good news is that Salesforce has plenty of resources available to help with these steps. Integrating Salesforce into your marketing campaign is a great way to ensure your business stays on track.
Take time to test its many features, and you’ll find it will improve your company’s overall efficiency.
About the Author!
Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.
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