What is a campaign in Salesforce?
A campaign is basically any group of leads or contacts which you can handle as you wish. Want to invite your customers to an event? Add them to a campaign and send them invitations. Want to know which ones of them showed up? Change their campaign member status and send them thank you notes or follow up on the conversations you had at the event. Want to know which trade show to attend in terms of returns on investment and lead acquisition cost? Add leads to a campaign and follow up on the conversion rate of leads from trade shows to make better-informed decisions on marketing investments.
Creating a Campaign in Salesforce
Creating campaigns is easy! There is only one requirement: You must be a Marketing user to create a campaign. How do you know if you are a Marketing user? Navigate to Campaigns in Salesforce, and see if you have the New button available. If yes, you are one. If not, ask your admin to make you one. It is done in Setup -> Users -> Users. If you cannot see campaigns at all, your admin can also help you with that.
Please remember that the pictures here don’t necessarily have the same components as your Salesforce. All organizations are configured individually and can contain different page layouts or fields.
And here’s where you can edit the Marketing user status in Setup:
And then to the actual creating of a campaign. Click on New, and a new window opens. Depending on your Salesforce setup, all you need to do is fill the mandatory fields. If no changes have been made to the default Salesforce setup, the only mandatory field is the name. Click on the Active tickbox, and Save, and you’ve created your first campaign. How easy is that! You can add a lot of relevant information on the campaign, for example, the start and end dates and budget.
How to add Leads or Contacts to a Salesforce Campaign?
Once you add a lead or a contact to a campaign, a new record is created called Campaign Member. A Campaign member has a Type of either Lead or Contact, a status that can be edited, and the contact information picked up from the original lead or contact.
There are several ways to create campaign members. First, let’s say you have a campaign set for marketing purposes, and you want to add a bunch of people to it at once.
- Find the correct campaign
- Click on Campaign Members. Depending on your page setup, it could be as a Related list link, or as a section on the page, or on the Related tab under the campaign.
There’s different ways to edit campaign members. - Click on Add leads or Add contacts
- Choose the ones you want, or use the Search box to find them and click on Next and Submit, and you’re done!
The other option is to add a single lead or contact to a campaign.
- Find the lead in question
- Find the Campaign history button. Again, it could be in different places depending on your org’s Sf record page setup.
Campaign History is also accessible from several places in Salesforce. - Click on Add to Campaign, Search for the correct one, click on Next, and Save.
The third option is that you are at an event or trade show, and you want to add leads to a campaign on the go as they actually show up. Then I recommend using a mobile app designed to do that, such as Zero Keyboard.
How to Export Campaign Members from Salesforce
To get campaign members exported in csv or Excel format, you need to create a report in Salesforce. Don’t worry, it’s very easy to do. Go to Reports, and click on New report. Then find Campaigns on the left column, and Campaigns with Campaign Members on the right, and click on Continue.
This returns a huge amount of columns and data. The easiest way to start editing would be by filtering the members from a specific campaign by the campaign name. Click on FILTERS, next to the OUTLINE section on the left side. Click on the Add filter box, and type in Campaign name. Click on Campaign name in the list. Then type in the name of the campaign you want to filter by, and the Apply button.
Next, go back to the OUTLINE section, and remove the columns you don’t need. Then click on Save & Run. Give your report a descriptive name, and choose the folder you want to save it to.
To do the actual exporting, click on the arrow next to the Edit button, and choose Export. Depending on the format you want to export, choose the Formatted report, or Details only. The Formatted report opens in an Excel view, and the Details only allows you to use csv format. Now you’re ready to use the exported data as you want!
