Salesforce is a springboard for amazing marketing campaigns. It enables you to segment customers by behavior or activity, report on the results of marketing initiatives, or create lists. When your Salesforce Leads and Contacts perform certain activities you think are important — downloading an ebook, for example, or calling a phone number — they will automatically become “members” of associated campaigns that you set up. This is a fantastic way to segment your prospects and customers according to the marketing initiatives they respond to.

Here are some best practices to plan for great marketing campaigns using Salesforce.

1. Set Up a Parent/Child Relationship

As you create campaigns, you’ll want to set up child/parent campaign relationships. This technique can make reporting on many items at once easier. For example, you could have a parent campaign called “All Website Forms” and underneath it, child campaigns for the different types of web submission forms you have on your website.

2. Standardize Naming Conventions

It’s common for marketers to amass hundreds of Salesforce Campaigns over time. Therefore, you’ll also want to standardize your naming conventions. It’ll be far easier to find and organize them later if you use easy naming conventions. For example, “EMAIL [name of email campaign] [date]” for all outbound email campaigns.

Also, remember that Leads and Contacts can be members of multiple campaigns simultaneously. So long as your Salesforce Campaigns reflect behavior that you think is important — such as an app download, or contest participation — each campaign layer associated with a prospect can be used down the road in your marketing efforts.

3. Score Leads and Contacts

Chances are, you’ve heard about “lead scoring” — the process of measuring the engagement your prospects show for your content, apps, sites and even your sales team. However, you're not just scoring leads, but your Contacts as well. Although some of your Contacts may be current customers, many others may have once been prospects that just weren’t quite sales-ready yet. If you nurture them with content, and score their engagement, they’ll stand a better chance of becoming customers in the future.

4. Use Lead Scoring to Benefit Marketing

Varying lead scores can mean different things to marketing teams. For example:

• A zero lead score typically means no engagement at all. That’s usually a sign of either no interest or bad data, such as the wrong email address.
• A slowly ascending lead score can signal promising Leads that might respond to the right promotional offer.
• Quickly rising lead scores can indicate that an immediate hand-off to Sales is needed.
• A rising contact score — if it’s existing customer — could indicate a lead that’s ready to give you a glowing testimonial.

What other ways do you use Salesforce for marketing campaigns?

To learn how small businesses can grow their social marketing presence, visit salesforce.com or download the free e-book.