Linking our Website with Salesforce Campaigns

I recently completed a big first step in syncing our marketing efforts with Salesforce's Campaign functionality. While it has only been in place for a few days, it should give us some great insight into the influence of marketing on our sales efforts, as well as a more complete picture of our lead and contact base. 

I started by created a campaign for each CTA we feature on our site. All of our CTAs are already linked to Salesforce, so I then had a developer add the campaign ID as a hidden field in the web-to-lead code. 

This worked for the majority of our CTAs, but not for webinars. People can attend a webinar live, or they can check our website for the downloadable recorded version after the webinar has happened. I created two campaigns for each webinar -- one for registration, and one for download. This meant that there needed to be a way for me to easily add the IDs for both campaigns without messing with any code.

To enable this, Dave added two fields to the metadata tab of the webinar content type in our CMS. I can add the campaign ID for the live version and the downloadable version of that webinar. As long as the webinar is available for registration, anyone who registers is added to the live webinar campaign. Once the webinar has happened and is available for download, they are added to the other campaign. 

There are still a few manual imports I have to conduct in order to update campaigns. When someone registers for a webinar on our site, their status in the campaign is marked as "Registered." Not everyone who registers attends, however, so once a webinar is completed I have to do a manual import to change the status of those who actually did attend. I also have to manually add anyone who bought Mark's book on a site other than ours. 

The next step in this process will be linking Campaign Monitor and Salesforce, so we can add email blasts to our list of campaigns.