Best Practices for the Campaign Object

Salesforce includes a number of standard objects with certain features that are predefined for you to build scalable processes as easily as possible on your org. In this series of articles, I am listing best practices for the main Salesforce standard objects that will help you make the most of standard features.

This time I’m outlining best practices for the Campaign object:

1. Organise your Marketing Initiatives with Campaigns

The Salesforce Campaign object is typically used for tracking a company’s marketing initiatives, as well as which individuals are targeted by them and their responses. By setting up Campaigns in Salesforce you will be able to track the number of leads generated by each campaign and the number of deals generated and closed as a result of your company’s marketing efforts.

It is likely that the types of marketing campaigns you run in your company are different: from events such as trade-fairs or conferences to advertisements, email campaigns, etc. If this is the case, setting up different record types and page layouts will help you display only the relevant information and make the necessary fields mandatory.

A good way to visualize your Campaigns is creating a calendar for it. You simply have to open your Calendar and create a new calendar by clicking on the settings icon next to “My Calendars”. You can set the duration of your calendar items by selecting fields for start and end. You can filter the campaigns you want to display on your calendar by selecting one of your list views in the “Apply a Filter” option. This way you can decide whether you want to see all your campaigns, your current ones, your planned ones, etc. by day, month, or year.

2. Group Campaigns into Hierarchies

Similarly to how Salesforce Accounts can be related to each other to build an Account Hierarchy, Campaigns can also be grouped into hierarchies. One of the main benefits of creating Campaign Hierarchies is that you can better measure the overall success of a group of campaigns.

To relate campaigns to each other, you simply need to search the parent campaign that your current campaign is related to in the Parent Campaign field. Once your hierarchy is set up, you will be able to see the results not only for each specific campaign, but also for the complete hierarchy.

Categorising your campaigns to build hierarchies can be is a decision that will depend on the type of marketing activities that are carried out in your company and how they are organised. For example, you can use one hierarchy to include different marketing activities that you want to group by time period, ex. Annual activities, quarterly activities, monthly activities, and you can use one hierarchy for a big event, for which a number of supporting marketing activities are going to be conducted.

3. Sort your Campaign Members

The target of a marketing activity can be a lead, a contact or a person account, which is a hybrid of an account and a contact and, in Salesforce, they are registered in the Campaign Member object.

Campaign members can be added to a Campaign in three different ways:

1. Manually, by adding leads and contacts from the Campaign Members related list in the Campaign
2. By clicking on “Add to Campaign” from any report returning leads, contacts or person accounts
3. By importing files with leads and contacts from the Campaigns Members related list on the Campaign page

It is also crucial to set up different statuses to record the response, if any, of the different campaign members to the campaign. Campaign statuses should reflect whether campaign members have responded to the campaign and how. It is important that you use the same statuses across campaigns of the same type, so that you can compare them in your reports. An alternative to compare campaigns that have different statuses is bucketing those statuses that are equivalent for reporting purposes. A good practice is to come up with a generic status categorization that you can apply to all the campaign statuses you have created in your org.

4. Set up and Track Campaign Influence

Your marketing efforts might have an influence on new business opportunities that originate during and after the duration of a marketing campaign. The Campaign Influence functionality allows you to track the influence of certain campaigns on a given opportunity. There are two options to do so:

1. Enabling Campaign Influence or allowing Salesforce Users to manually relate an influential Campaign to an Opportunity: If you consider that there is a specific time frame during which a campaign will have influenced any new opportunity that is created, you can enable Campaign Influence functionality. If you do not want such automatic association, but you still want users to indicate which campaigns have influenced which opportunities you can allow them to manually do so.
2. Configuring Customizable Campaign Influence: Because not every influential Campaign might have the same degree of influence on an Opportunity, Customizable Campaign Influence is a functionality that you can set up to determine how credit is assigned to each campaign that has contributed to generating a new business opportunity.

Wrap-Up

With standard objects, you can build scalable Salesforce processes. A rule of thumb is always using standard functionalities before resorting to developing custom ones, i.e. if the process you need to build on your org can be done with standard features, you should always leverage them for it. However, standard features will not always the most suitable solution to build certain processes you need for your business, so, for those cases, you should, of course, design and build custom solutions.