Creating an Email Campaign in Salesforce
Why use Campaigns
A campaign is a holding place that keeps track of who you contacted and what you said. You’ll still need to record any responses and work Opportunities as you would normally but you will be able to run standard SF reports to get metrics on how many people you contacted and if those became Opptys—and ultimately how many turned into sales.
The Campaign itself is a “container”—it holds together the list of people you reached out to and a copy of what you used to reach them (for example the email template you sent them).
If you like an overview, this video explains this in a general sense
You can also watch this video which walks you through the process (but takes a slightly different sequence of steps—he sets up the email itself before he assembles the list).
Walk-Through
To get started be sure you have access to the Campaign function in SF. If you don’t see that on your quick tab bar you can get there by navigating
Just click on the “Campaigns” link to start
I have a “Test Campaign” you can play with if you’d like to practice. That is here
This is the Campaigns page. To start a new campaign just click the “New” button.
From there you’re just setting up the very high level summary information on the campaign. You only need to fill out the name and campaign type to start but please be sure to fill out the start and end dates. Note that the status at this point should be “Planned”. You will update it once you’ve actually started the campaign. Right before you are ready to send your campaign, change the status to “In Progress”
Who are you reaching out to?
Next you need to tell Salesforce which people you’re going to reach out to. This is both so that SF can send them an email from you and so you can track what happens after you contact them.
Click the “Manage Members” button to add people to your Campaign. Salesforce offers a few options for you to gather up the members you want to reach. Adding members to your campaign can seem complicated breaking it down makes the options clear.
Adding Members—Search
If you know the people are in Salesforce and all share a distinct characteristic (ex. You want to reach everyone who works at a specific company or specific companies).
You can simply use a search to pull up the records for customers who have some characteristic in common. Here is an example of pulling in everyone at a specific college (notice I’ve told SF to look at Contacts)
If you know the people are in SF but they don’t have an easy to pinpoint common characteristic
You may want to either tag contacts you want to include or use a list import. To do this run a report or use the weekly data backup files to get a wide list of contacts that should cover all the people you want to include. Keep the Contact ID and Marketing Tag fields in your list—in the end these are the only 2 fields you need in the end.
Add Members—Import
You’d use this approach if you’re not sure if the contacts are in SF or not.
Tagging/Import
To Tag--Pick a short text string or phrase that is unique to your campaign. For example “Wix0916”. For each contact you want to include put that tag in the Marketing Tag field. Then you can Search on this field to add members to your campaign. Use this method if you need will need to find these people more than once time.
To Import—gather up the Salesforce IDs in a .CSV file and use Add Members—Import File. Use this method if it’s a one-off project.
If you have a list of email addresses in a file or a list of people who are not in Salesforce
If you are using an outside list, or a spreadsheet you’ve worked on you will need to format it so it can be pulled in. Make sure that all records have a valid email address and a company affiliation. Without BOTH of these your records will have significant issues that can disrupt your campaign.
If they do not exist you will import them as leads and then attach them with a tag you can include from the outset.
What are you sending to your campaign members?
While you can tie many different types of sales outreach to a campaign the most often used type is email. You need to set up an email template for your Campaign.
Go to Setup from the top navigation. Search for Email Templates and click on the link.
If you have an existing template your like to use as your base you can select it here or you can start from scratch.
Email Templates
As you see here certain parts of the email template are in brackets-these are fields that can be pulled in from the contact record so that each person in the campaign gets an personalized email. But large parts of it are the same for all the people in the list. You can even include links to webpages if you like (see the blue text here).
To make changes click the “Edit” buttons—HTML and Text.
Adding text and fields to the template
To add text, just type what you’d like to include. Adding fields can be done by selecting what field you want and copying field you need. Just copy it and paste it where you need to put it.
When you have the template set up as you like, save that with a meaningful name. You can also send a test to yourself so you can see exactly what others will see when you get ready to send the email.
Sending Your Mass Email
Now you should have:
1)The people you want to talk
2)The email you want to send to them
Remember, your campaign should be in “In Progress” status.
For this example we’ll use Leads but the steps are identical for Contacts.
To send, go to the main Lead or Contacts page and scroll to the bottom.
Find the link for “Mass Email Leads” or “Mass Email Contacts”. If you have a mix of leads and contacts in a mailing you’ll need to kick off the send on one and then repeat that on the other. This is necessary because SF thinks of these two things as separate concepts.
Once you are on the “Mass Email” page you’ll need to tell SF which Campaign you want to use. You do that by clicking the drop down and finding “Corp Sales Campaign Search”
You will see this screen. Click the search box (see the arrow in this picture). From here you just need to select the name of the campaign you want to send.
Then click SAVE.
This will pop up a screen that lists the people in your campaign. The purpose of this is for you to have a quick look at the number again to see if that makes sense. You should not need to do a lot of hand editing at this point.
When you’re happy with the review click “NEXT”
Now pick the email template you want to use (and set up earlier in the process).
When you are done, click NEXT.
Now you will select:
- If you want to be BCC’ed
- What you want to call this email when it appears as an Activity (which is just like a Task) attached to the contact
- When to send the email
Once this is complete click SEND