Using Account Engagement and Salesforce Campaigns to Report on ROI

You will need to go through a few steps to set up this kind of reporting. You will need to create Salesforce campaigns, add Account Engagement prospects to Salesforce campaigns when they take certain actions, associate prospects' opportunities with campaigns, and then build reports based on contacts' and opportunities' campaigns. Note: there are many ways to run reports using Account Engagement and Salesforce. The example below is just one way to report on ROI.

Scenario

You are attending a tradeshow and want to track attendees from the moment they come to your booth to a closed-won opportunity. You want to make sure that your campaign is credited with the won business. You'll need to use these elements:

- Salesforce Campaigns
- Account Engagement Automation Rules, Completion Actions, Segmentation Rules and/or Engagement Studio Program actions
- Salesforce Opportunities and Primary Campaign Sources
- Salesforce Campaign ROI report
- Optional: Salesforce Campaign Influence Reports

Salesforce Campaigns Overview

A Salesforce campaign is an outbound marketing project that you plan, manage, and track within Salesforce. It can be a direct mail program, seminar, print advertisement, email, or other type of marketing initiative. You can organize campaigns into hierarchies for easy analysis of related marketing tactics. To review a complete guide to the necessary steps to setup and use campaign management, check out the Campaign Management Implementation Guide .

In a tradeshow scenario: Create a Salesforce Campaign for your tradeshow! Anyone who attends will be marked as “Attended” or “Responded.” Tip: Create a parent campaign for the tradeshow and nestle each marketing activity like email campaigns and live events as child campaigns. This enables you to roll the statistics into the overall tradeshow performance.

Creating a Salesforce Campaign

1. Sign into your Salesforce account.
2. Navigate to Campaigns tab.
3. Select New.
4. Fill out the relevant campaign information. Fields with a red line next to the box are required.
5. Mark the Active checkbox so that Account Engagement and others at your organization can see the campaign.
6. Click Save.

See Salesforce Campaign documentation for more information. After you’ve created your campaign, you can edit Member Status Values by clicking the Advanced Setup button. Account Engagement will be able to attribute these statuses to Prospects who respond to your marketing efforts. Note: Fill out the Actual Cost field when the campaign is completed. This value is pulled into the ROI report.

In a tradeshow scenario: Capture attendees' information through a Account Engagement form at the booth. The form can be displayed on an iPad or laptop at the booth. Make sure to enable kiosk/data entry mode and use a form completion action to add prospects to the Salesforce campaign. Use completion actions to add prospects to a list and designate their Account Engagement campaign as “Tradeshow.”

Adding Prospects to a Salesforce Campaign with Account Engagement

You can use Account Engagement's rules and actions to add prospects to Salesforce campaigns. Automation rules, segmentation rules, completion actions and Engagement Studio Program actions can add prospects to Salesforce campaigns with statuses that you designate. See this article for more information on using completion actions to add prospects to Salesforce campaigns.

In a tradeshow scenario: Now that your prospects have been added to a Salesforce campaign with the Attended status, you will want to ensure that your sales team attributes the Tradeshow Campaign to an opportunity as the Primary Campaign Source.

Attributing a Primary Campaign Source in an Opportunity

1. Create the Opportunity in Salesforce.

2. In the Primary Campaign Source field, select the appropriate campaign.

3. Complete all required opportunity fields.

4. Save.

In a tradeshow scenario: Now that you've completed your tradeshow, added the Tradeshow Campaign to opportunities, and sales representatives are closing deals, you are ready to run an ROI report. Salesforce makes this really easy!

Running a Salesforce ROI report

1. Sign into Salesforce.

2. Navigate to Campaigns tab

3. In Reports, click Campaign ROI Analysis Report.

4. Customize with filters/dates as needed.

5. Save.

In a tradeshow scenario: There are many factors that influence a buyer, and maybe the tradeshow wasn’t the Primary Campaign Source. If that’s the case and you’d still like to have a report on which Contacts/Leads where influenced by the tradeshow, i.e. multi-touch reporting, enable Campaign Influence Reporting in Salesforce!

How to Set Up Campaign Influence in Salesforce

1. Sign into Salesforce.
2. Navigate to Setup > Customize > Campaigns > Campaign Influence
3. Click Enabled and specify a time frame (this is the maximum number of days between the campaign first associated date and opportunity created date.)
4. Designate any association rules like: Campaign Member Status > equals > Responded.
5. Save.

Note: Take advantage of Account Engagement's out-of-the-box Campaign Influence models. Learn more here.
Relevant article for further reading: Connect Account Engagement and Salesforce Campaigns

Summary

Putting the pieces together, we now have a Salesforce Campaign ROI report that shows us the number of responses, the number of opportunities tied to the campaign,the number of won opportunities, the campaign’s actual cost, the ROI of the campaign, and the average cost per customer and response.

Notes:

- Remember that prospects are not automatically pushed into Salesforce (they are pushed in when they are assigned to a user, a queue, or a group). We store the campaign record and status with the prospect and then sync this information over to your CRM once a triggering event occurs (typically an assignment of the prospect).

- Your Campaigns (and the options associated with them) are pulled into Account Engagement during the pull/sync routine. If you create a new campaign object in Salesforce, you may have to wait a few minutes until it is available in Account Engagement .

- If the record already exists in Salesforce with that campaign and a given status, Account Engagement will always overwrite the existing status if a triggering event causes a status change (form completion, automation rule, etc.).