There are multiple ways to add Leads or Contacts to a Salesforce Campaign. Sometimes you will need to add Campaign Members in mass (eg. a list upload), but there will be other times where team members will prefer to add records one by one – think personal dinner invites, or close relationships salespeople often have with key stakeholders in their accounts (subjective, and cannot be automated).
The option you choose will depend on who is adding leads to campaigns, and how many have to be added at once. Perhaps your existing ways are not ideal or have obvious limitations. It’s time to explore the other options outlined in this guide.
1. Add to Campaign on Lead/Contact Record
You can add a lead or a contact to a campaign via the ‘Campaign History’ related list.
Where this list is positioned will depend on your org; however, if it’s missing, the Salesforce Admin will need to add the related list to the page layout.
2. Add to Campaign Button on Lead/Contact List Views
This option is manual or mass selection, depending on how you look at it!
On each lead or contact list view, by default, there is an ‘Add to Campaign’ quick action that appears like a button at the top of the list. Sales people love list views! List views offer many advantages, to quickly view, filter, and update a number of leads/contacts at once. By selecting one or multiple leads/contacts, sales people will happily add prospects to campaigns!
3. Campaigns Related List on Accounts
Pardot has been consciously developing the product to cater to account-based marketing strategies that are common among B2B marketing organizations.
From a Salesforce account record, you can add all contacts to a campaign, using the drop-down arrow. Plus, see the entire campaign history of all contacts in the account and their level of engagement:
This relies on the Salesforce Admin adding both the Lightning quick action and the related list to the account page layout within Setup, as shown below:
4. Campaign Member Related List on Campaigns
This option will likely be popular with marketing users that live in campaigns day to day. Marketers think ‘campaign first’, as opposed to sales people, for example.
Looking at a typical Salesforce campaign, you will see a related list called ‘Campaign Members’, usually on the ‘related’ tab, as shown below:
Your page layouts may differ (eg. the Campaign Members related list may be on the ‘Details’ tab, or the sidebar). Again, if you don’t see it, then the Salesforce Admin will need to add the related list to the page layout.
Once you click the ‘Add Leads’ or ‘Add Contacts’ buttons, you will be guided through the steps to add one, or multiple leads/contacts. As you add leads/contacts, they appear in the top box. Search for multiple leads/contacts using the search bar, for example, to add all leads from the same company, then select multiple records using the checkbox on the column header.
While this method is great for quickly adding one-off leads/contacts to campaigns, or ones that share common criteria (eg. company name), you will likely want to look for other methods in order to add leads to campaigns in bulk.
5. Salesforce Reports
Salesforce reports offer the ability to add all the records in a Salesforce report to a campaign. you will likely want to look for other methods in order to add leads to campaigns in bulk.
This opens up more complex filtering options by multiple different fields – not only based on lead or contact fields, but also based on related object fields, such as opportunities, assets, and even previous campaigns (campaign history).
Click on the drop-down arrow on a lead or contact report, and ‘Add to Campaign’:
Note: you have to save the report before this option appears.
6. Data Import
You have a choice of two import tools when importing records into Salesforce (Data Import Wizard and Data Loader). I recommend you use the Data Import Wizard when starting out. It has a more
user-friendly interface, and you can access it from Salesforce setup (whereas Data Loader is an application, accessed externally).
Some people will like this option, others may find it jarring. You need to prepare your import file with the correct information, eg. Campaign ID, Member status, and more.
7. Mass Action Scheduler App
So far, the options covered have relied on admin or marketing intervention. When I was working as a consultant, I would often be asked how leads or contacts could be added to a campaign automatically. There is no easy way to achieve this using Salesforce point-and-click (declarative) automation; in this case, you would need to look to Apex triggers, which are not the easiest to monitor and debug.
I searched for more declarative options, and came across the Mass Action Scheduler app by Doug Ayers. This worked a treat! The app can be set to add or remove campaign members from campaigns based on a Salesforce report. You are able to set the schedule by day and time, to keep the process recurring week after week, eg. run the process every Friday at 10am. Not only is the configuration clear, there are also error logs available to monitor skipped records.
I recommend taking a look at this option if you are looking for a way to automate adding/removing campaign members on a recurring schedule!
8. Pardot Completion Actions or Automation Rules on Prospects
If you are a Pardot customer, you can leverage either Completion Actions or Automation Rules to add a prospect’s associate lead/contact record to a Salesforce campaign.
Completion actions can add prospects to Salesforce campaigns when a form is submitted, a custom redirect is clicked, or an email is opened/clicked/unsubscribed from.
Use the ‘Add to CRM Campaign’ action to do this. The below example will add prospects to the campaign if they click in this particular email after receiving it:
This second example is an option that marketers may prefer vs. data loader, or the other ways discussed in this post:
Summary
Although there are multiple ways to add Leads or Contacts to a Salesforce Campaign, some options will be better suited to your needs than others. In this post, I have shown you 8 ways to do this, either in mass or one-by-one, manually or automated. Hopefully you will face less inefficiencies when adding your campaign members to Salesforce campaigns!
Comments: