Using SalesForce.com to Improve, Automate and Track Your Marketing

Would your business benefit from:

1.       More sales and higher conversion rates

2.       Optimizing your marketing budget

3.       Eliminating poor performing marketing campaigns

4.       Instant access to your marketing data

5.       The resources to deliver better marketing results

Well, if your organization uses SalesForce.com as its CRM system, consider these 5 SalesForce marketing tips.

Drip Marketing

If you are not using drip marketing campaigns, you should consider doing so. When used effectively, drip marketing campaigns lift conversion rates and boost sales. In addition to bottom line benefits, you will establish a regular communication stream with your prospects.

Whether you choose SalesForce or another CRM marketing system, ongoing drip marketing communication boosts sales.

If your business runs SalesForce’s Enterprise edition or higher, then you have access to workflow automation. Workflow automation is a powerful SalesForce marketing tool and is the foundation for automating your marketing.

If you are interested in reducing costs and freeing up resources while improving sales and conversions – strongly consider using workflow automation to automate your marketing and sales processes.

Schedule follow up calls, send a series of emails based on prospect behavior, schedule tasks and more with this SalesForce marketing tool – you’ll love it and so will your sales team.

SalesForce for Google AdWords

If your business calls for paid search advertising you are likely using Google AdWords. Through an alliance between Google and SalesForce you have access to a powerful marketing tool.

SalesForce for Google AdWords provides the ability to tie in the front end advertising expense and performance to the back end sales and revenue data. This SalesForce marketing tool is the missing link in the chain between marketing performance and sales results. This allows your marketing department to calculate ROI, test more effectively and optimize your business’ marketing budget by eliminating poor performing campaigns and investing more in the winners.

If you are familiar with Google Analytics, SalesForce for Google AdWords operates in a similar manner – using a java script snippet and categorizing how a prospect came to your contact form (i.e. organic search, AdWords, web direct, etc.). If the lead came through Google AdWords, data is synched so you can identify the search term, ad version and more.  A powerful SalesForce marketing tool.

SalesForce Marketing Campaigns

In order to evolve your marketing efforts, you need to test different marketing strategies, tactics and channels. In order to evaluate your marketing efforts, you need to define the costs and the revenue (or marketing benefit) and quantify whether you should invest more or fewer marketing dollars, based on ROI.

SalesForce marketing campaigns allows your marketing department to automatically assign prospects to a marketing campaign and analyze cost, performance and ROI.

Consider this; you are hosting a webinar, your SalesForce marketing resource ensured:

• Prospects sign up on your website and are automatically assigned to the webinar campaign
• An email is automatically sent providing webinar details
• Attendance details are tracked and synched with SalesForce
• Revenue and ROI are calculated
• Resources are diverted from underperforming webinars
• Profitable webinars are expanded

SalesForce Marketing Reports

SalesForce offers a wide array of marketing and other reports. Plus, you can create custom reports – which also need not be limited to marketing.

However, if you are not doing so already, your management team should consider identifying your business’ KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators.  Once your top metrics are established you’ll find SalesForce has outstanding marketing reporting capabilities. These report s can also be summarized and displayed graphically on custom dashboards.

SalesForce Marketing Resources

If the concept of marketing automation, tracking and optimization appeals to you, the next question is how you acquire the resources to implement and manage this.

Basically there are three options:

1.       Do it yourself

2.       Hire a SalesForce Marketing Consultant

3.       Hire an employee skilled in SalesForce marketing

There are a number of SalesForce consultants out there, consider a consultant with marketing and sales background rather than a “techie”.

The SalesForce AppExchange is a good place to look for qualified service providers.

Marketing Practicality also provides CRM marketing solutions

If your business warrants it, you may also want to consider a full time SalesForce marketing resource.

Here are some 5 email marketing tips to better interpret, test and analyze your email marketing campaigns.

Email Marketing Tip #1: Interpreting the Open Rate

After reviewing your email marketing metrics, you notice one person opened your email 30 times. You think, “Wow! What a hot prospect!”. Not so fast. If you sent HTML email and your recipient uses Outlook with the reading pane, your results can be skewed. If someone uses a reading pane and scrolls over your email using the up or down arrow keys, the email is opened in the reading pane. That counts as an open, even though the intent was nothing more than quickly scrolling past your email to get to a different email. So interpret this metric carefully.

Email Marketing Tip #2: Test, test, test!

If your email marketing list is large enough, you should segment and test your list every time you start an email marketing campaign. Common and useful things to test in your email marketing efforts include:

• Subject line – this is critical
• Email Offer or Call to Action
• List Segmentation – including: geography, age of leads, previous buyers vs. prospects, etc.
• Landing Page
• Creative

Email Marketing Tip #3: Use Website Analytics

If an email generates a click to your website, then what? Use your Web Analytics program to understand what happens next. Depending on your call to action, your Analytics program can tie in the performance of your email marketing campaign to the actual result.

Email Marketing Tip #4: Send HTML and Text Versions

Most email marketing service providers allow you to send an HTML version as well as a text only version of your email. Nowadays, most people use HTML as their default – but many people intentionally or not, only accept text based emails. Make sure you use both.

Email Marketing Tip #5: Follow Up with Qualified Leads

Prospects that opened up your email message multiple times or clicked through to your website, identified themselves as interested. Your next step should be to follow up directly with that prospect.

Email Marketing Service Providers

There are many email marketing service providers out there. Two of the most commonly used are iContact and Constant Contact. My personal preference is iContact but I use both depending on the client. If you have a small business and are looking for a quality email marketing service provider, you be satisfied with either of those two.

Email Marketing Tips Wrap Up

These are some basic email marketing tips. Email marketing can be as sophisticated as you want. But most importantly, your email marketing efforts should continually improve and yield a better marketing ROI. Contact Marketing Practicality for expert email marketing help with your small business.

If you are a small business and looking for an affordable way to reach out to your prospects, email marketing is a great channel. Most email marketing service providers have built in analysis and reporting so you can view your email marketing metrics in an almost real-time environment. But do you fully understand what the reports are telling you? Here are some email marketing tips to help you better understand email marketing metrics.

Overview of Email Marketing Metrics

Most email marketing services provide the following common metrics:

• Bounces – A bounced is mail didn’t get delivered to the intended recipient. This could be for a host of reasons – the email address was spelled incorrectly, the address no longer exists, the email was blocked by a firewall, etc.
• Released (sent) – Released emails were sent and delivered to the recipient.
• Unsubscribes – The email was delivered and the recipient unsubscribed from your email service – basically they have removed themselves from your email list.
• Opens – The email was opened (more on this later)
• Clicks – If there are links in your HTML email, any clicks are tracked.
• Forwards – The recipient used your email marketing service provider’s forwarding feature to send your email on to another person.
• Complaints or Spam – Complaints are registered when an email recipient reports your email as spam to their ISP (Internet Service Provider). It is usually done by clicking a Report Spam button in their email client.

The Most Important Email Marketing Metrics

The three most important email marketing metrics. When analyzing a campaign I initially focus on three key email marketing metrics:

Bounce Rate: the bounce rate is an indicator of the quality of your list. If you are emailing an in-house prospect list and you experience a high bounce rate, it’s time to perform some database hygiene and get your email addresses updated

Open Rate: The higher the better. If your email isn’t opened, your message is not conveyed. A good open rate is influenced by crafting a great subject line and how familiar the recipient is with your email address and company. It also indicates the relative level quality of your list; better prospects will yield a higher open rate. Interpreting the open rate can be tricky though, see my email marketing tips post.

Click Rate: These recipients are even more engaged than those who just opened your email and deserve special handling.

Email Marketing Metrics Wrap Up

Once you have a good grasp on email marketing metrics, you’ll be much better prepared to interpret the results of your email marketing campaign. Next step is to understand the basic nuances of email marketing which can be found under my 5 email marketing tips. Contact Marketing Practicality for expert email marketing help with your small business.

Tracking marketing metrics is a key element of successfully managing your marketing process.

Of course tracking a bunch of numbers does nothing for your business (except consume resources – if you are not tracking the right marketing metrics.  Also, you need to act on your metrics – tracking data is pointless if it doesn’t lead to action.

Which Marketing Metrics are Right for Your Business

This of course depends on your business model, but let’s say your business relies on new leads (as well as existing ones) to generate sales.

The first thing I recommend you do is ask yourself – what a the three pieces of information to run my business (or marketing department).

I prefer to know what the quantity of new leads are, as well as the quality.  You can learn a lot by tracking those two things over time.

In marketing metric format, this could be represented as:

New Leads – the number of leads coming in per day (quantity of leads)

Cost per Lead – the specific cost associated with acquiring these leads (always track costs)

Conversion Rate – What percent of these leads translate into sales (quality of leads)

What Gets Measured Gets Managed

It’s true.  If you discipline yourself to track these metrics on a daily basis and evaluate the trends over time you will gain significant insight of your small business’ performance (month over month, year over year, etc.).

You can also place parameters around them once a baseline is established – for example if your marketing metrics vary +/- 5% over the previous month and take appropriate action.

This also allows you to better manage marketing expense and control cost as well as increase profitability.

Tracking essential marketing metrics can be done as simply as using a spread sheet or you can use a CRM system to help automate the process.  But keep the metric data visible!  You need to watch, review, analyze and take action upon what you are seeing.