Conversion Conversations

– [Lucy] Thank you. Thanks, Rose, for the intro. I wish I was in California. I’m in London, as you may be able to tell from my accent. Actually, luckily, we’ve just come out of national lockdown, so things are looking up for us. But nevertheless, I’ve been really looking forward to joining you all today and I just want to echo Rose’s welcome.

Thank you for joining. I’m honestly honored to kick off the celebration of email marketing. So without further ado, let’s get started. So today I’m going to talk about using the full power of Salesforce to make marketing more effective, which is something I think about a great deal.

In the past, in my past roles, I’ve been tasked with some pretty thorny challenges to do with email and Salesforce, which is how I found my passion to this perfect pairing. You know, in times of challenges I really manage to get my teeth in and understand a lot. So this event is called Conversion Conversations, as you know by this point.

So I thought about unpacking this. This word would be a good place to start. So what is a conversion? A conversion in marketing can mean many different things. It’s open to interpretation, and I’m sure you agree it’s a topic or a concept that could easily balloon into a vast-reaching conversation.

And this is something I wanted to frame here. Get it all on the table as such. These are some definitions of conversion that I could think of when I sat down to think about it. It’s likely you’ll use some in your teams, some of you will use more than others.

You may have these conversion checkpoints, but refer to them with different names. Or you may even have them sourced in a different order. Scan your eyes from left to right. As you can see, some are more obvious than others, but I would argue that every point pinned on this generic diagram of a customer journey could be counted as a conversion.

And we don’t often think beyond the initial sale all the way through to your customer converting into an advocate of your brand and converting into another follow-up sales opportunity. Marketing kind of needs to be all over this lifecycle. “Showing up.”

Like, marketing is not just focused on the top of funnel anymore as was traditionally the case and sometimes is still perceived as that. But let’s not blink ourselves. Marketing is expected to do more. There’s high expectations as I’m sure we’re all aware. Everyone’s trying to get more mileage out their marketing.

While we do have the tech, there’s often too much technology and we’re not leveraging what we do have in the most efficient way. But email marketing is timeless. It’s a timeless effective communication channel which I’ll come back to later. So there’s pressure for marketing show their value, show how marketing activities are having tangible impacts across the opportunity pipeline.

But how is that possible? How is it possible to make that link? There’s so many things one could say here, but it could just boil down to one word. Data. Actually, more specifically, the opportunity, account, lead, contact, any other data that’s housed in your CRM in Salesforce.

So, yes, I’m going to touch on everyone’s favorite topic, data. But don’t roll your eyes. Just stay with me on this one. I review a lot of posts on data and I know it can be sometimes a bit of a tricky topic or one that doesn’t seem that interesting, but honestly, the organizations who are harnessing the correct data are the ones getting ahead and data doesn’t have to be boring.

It doesn’t have to be taxing. It can help make your marketing more relevant and all in all, make your marketing automation platforms work for you. Honestly, this is one of the biggest roadblocks I’ve seen when I was doing marketing automation consulting, was people not engaging with that data and taking ownership of that.

So it’s actually quite funny. We’ve gone from fighting to accumulate data, you know, paying so much money to enrich our databases, to store it because storage is often expensive. I mean, in the Salesforce context, it is.

And the time and energy and sometimes budgets processes as well. We now have the opposite problem. Picking out the right data points. These should be the data points that are meaningful to teams across your organization, and then there’s the added challenge of leveraging these selected data points at the right time for each individual lead or customer that comes through your doors.

So you get by this point that it makes sense to integrate your CRM with your email service provider, your ESP. You have Salesforce. By some sources, it’s the most popular CRM on the planet.

It’s flexible, it’s powerful, it is your source of truth for customer data. Like, no one’s suggesting you change that. Then you have your ESP. In all the organizations I’ve worked for or consulted at, email is the foundation of marketing strategies or at least a major component.

So as I said, you can see now how your email service provider and CRM need to be connected. Like, this is really foundational. And while this perfect pairing makes sense, there’s a lot of value here that I think gets missed often in the conversation.

So hopefully if you don’t already have them connected, then you’re going to add that to the top of your to-do list. So what you need from your ESP connected to Salesforce is for it to be easy, effective at delivering results, and efficient. So in other words, alleviating your workload.

So now let’s whip around eight reasons I think are most compelling. Right, so the first three reasons can be grouped as it’s easy. I said it before, I’ll say it again, email isn’t dead, it’s not going away. While digital marketing is always evolving and moving towards bigger, better, faster tech, unlike a lot of marketing channels that have come and gone, email’s been persistent over the past couple of decades.

And I can just share a few statistics to back that up. 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI, and another source found that emails generate $38 per every $1 spent on average. That’s huge.

You can really win so much value out of email marketing. So need I say more? It doesn’t need to be expensive. It’s very affordable to make this move. Again, you already have Salesforce, you already have an ESP, you’ve made those big investments. Connecting to the two is actually usually very low cost, sometimes even free depending on what you want to get set up.

And funny, there’s little or no learning curve. Marketers can work in their email marketing platform. Salesforce users stay in Salesforce. Everyone is working where they’re most comfortable in those interfaces. However, everyone is reading from the same page because they’re shared insights across both platforms. Most connectors can be administered from a simple interface, so most of the heavy lifting is taken care of for you.

You know, you don’t have to build your own integrations and amend them. There’s no coding, no importing or exporting data, and any other horror stories from marketing data management you may be carrying around or have heard. So similar to the interface you see here, some connectors can have very clear and easy setups. Right.

Let’s move on to how it’s effective. So tap into the possibilities that your CRM database offers. Use CRM data not just on the individual level, so in Salesforce talk that’s the lead in the contact, but at the account level from opportunities, products, and other custom objects your organization could be using as a result of tailoring Salesforce for your company bespoke to your organization.

For example, when a lead turns into an opportunity, you can change up your marketing messaging that’s going out in emails. When an opportunity goes from the top of the funnel, so it could be before a proposal goes out into the final negotiation stages.

That’s another turning point for the prospect. When they should move from one segment to the other. Of course, an obvious one when a contact becomes a customer, you should put them on an onboarding campaign, to welcome them as a customer. And what about which campaign you want them to be included in after they’ve been a happy customer for some time?

Of course, you’d want some automated due diligence to segment out any people who may have an open case. A case meaning a Salesforce case which suggests they have a complaint in progress, or maybe are not too satisfied with some aspect to your product or service. But anyway, that source of truth for all that data is Salesforce.

As well as segmentation, you can use this wealth of data, but just better personalization overall, and also optimizing the timing of each interaction so it’s meaningful and it’s not going to get the trust straight away from your recipient’s inbox. So now this one’s quite chunky point.

Recording lead or contact engagement with a specific email campaign is the way that you’re going to build a picture of the journey your prospects and customers have gone through over time. Imagine each touchpoint your campaigns make is a step on that journey. So it’s that all-important proof that your email campaigns are being effective.

You see the date this person engaged with the email and to what extent they engaged with it. And with making these connections, you can achieve something called marketing attribution. It’s a term you may have heard been flung around and it sounds quite intimidating, but all it really is, well, nailing marketing attribution is considered, like, the Holy Grail of marketing reporting.

And in Salesforce speak, you’ll hear this referred to as campaign influence. In other words, showing how campaigns are linked to sales opportunities in Salesforce. And this validates the value of marketing’s campaigns in driving opportunity pipeline, and therefore revenue for the company.

But the first step to that is really ensuring that your email marketing is hooked into your CRM to build that rich data picture. That first hook will hook all of the other connections together. Those golden links; that’s going to match your email campaign to one revenue. So this is pretty self-explanatory.

Reducing workload. I mentioned data management horror stories earlier. But I want you to think about your organization’s relationship with data. Is it working for you or are you working for it? I see all the time, there are time-struck marketers and business leaders, yes, business leaders chipping in to help with data management.

And even in large organizations with have lots of marketing resource, it seems like the more data you have, oftentimes it can cause a lot of clutter and technical debt rather than just being very clear and handled with effective sync.

You know, you don’t want to be running into trouble transferring data between platforms, certainly not importing and exporting. You don’t want to be jumping through hoops of IT to get access or reformatting data. It’s just honestly a waste of time.

So it would just be nice, I guess, for people who are bogged down with these things to stay focused on the important things that actually need their attention. Yeah. Aligning with sales. There are use cases where the behavioral data that is generated from email marketing is intel for the sales team.

A quality connector can sync data very fast, so marketing are able to send across prospects who are hand-raisers. So they’re making a lot of activity, they’re making a lot of engagement, and they should be put on the sales team’s radar. As a result, this will help how the sales team are working.

They can work more effectively, prioritizing the sales leads that are sales-ready rather than knocking on everyone’s door and getting ignored. A couple of other examples on how the data generated from email campaigns can enhance user on the CRM side, their experience, could be when an inactive lead clicks on an email.

So someone Sales may have thought unqualified, redundant, they suddenly come back to life. Or when someone who’s part of a key account has opened, say, five emails in the past five days or something along those lines.

Maybe you’re not sending that many emails, but they open X number of emails in X days or weeks, that’s a great use case as well. So, yeah, with the reliable connector from email to Salesforce, syncing that data, you can also create dashboards using Salesforce standard reports and dashboards, which will go so far increasing the visibility of your efforts and get sales users on board and collaborating, even, you know, interacting with your reports because they would be used to Salesforce reports and dashboards rather than having to either screenshot a separate platform and put it in slides or have them log into another system.

So here’s what it looks like once you integrate. You have your various data sources feeding data in Salesforce. Remember, your source of truth. That fits right into your ESP passing over real-time information that informs your campaigns.

In turn, your email platform is sharing back engagement data, that’s the all-important behavioral data that’s going to help you see the digital footprint of your prospects and customers. Yes, it’s simple when you look at it like this.

Obviously, the details of getting everything connected, working properly with your specific Salesforce data model, you may have industry-specific quirks that, you know, you would need to address. But while the journey can be a little more complex, it’s definitely rewarding and definitely worth it. And that’s what this event is all about really.

Guiding you through the process, helping you where you may get stuck, and all in all, just helping you get on to that next level if you’re already doing something like this. So wrapping up here, I want to say, again, just think about your organization’s relationship with data and think, is it working for you or are you working for it?

So I’ll hand it back over.

– [Rose] Thank you so much, Lucy. That was awesome. I’m really grateful for you guiding us through, A, the buyer’s journey, like, really starting from the first step, illustrating why email is an essential marketing channel for connecting with these buyers, and then onto some of the fundamentals. I really can’t stress enough that it’s all about getting your data in order.

Personally, from my interactions with the customers that we help, it’s always been 80% just working out where the data lives, what’s critical, and then actually getting it into systems has been the easy part. So, you know, this is really what Conversion Conversations is all about.

We want you to basically get all the pieces connected and I’m very grateful for your help with that, Lucy. So what’s coming up next right after this, we’re going to be joined by Ross Layton. Ross is the founder of Beaufort 12, provider of some of the best Salesforce integrations on-the-app exchange and that is no lie.

Go check out the reviews for yourself. And we’re going to be having a fireside chat and Q&A session. So keep the questions coming. They’ve been really excellent. We actually have quite a bit to talk about today. So very, very grateful for you all just adding your questions to the panel in GoToWebinar. And then after our fireside chat and Q&A, we’re going to be heading into a special session just for non-profits on how you can integrate Salesforce with your ESP and use that to engage your volunteers, and of course, increase donations.

So, Ross, it’s great to see you. It’s actually always great to see you. I know we have a couple of times zones between us and, of course, you too, Lucy. But are you ready to bite off some of these great questions?

– [Ross] Yeah, I am. Thank you so much, Rose, and thank you, for everyone that’s watching right now. It’s a pleasure to be on here. Great keynote, Lucy. Thank you for that. As Rose said, I’m one of the founders of Beaufort 12 and you’ll, unfortunately, be hearing from me over the next few days. I’m covering a few sessions.

Also, as Rose mentioned, we had all the questions. So when guys signed up, you did have the possibility of asking questions. So we’ve captured those and we’ve collated them and we’ll try our best to go through them. And we’ll also go through any questions that we’re going to Q&A. we’re getting a few of those as well, so we’ll try our best there. So let’s move on to the very first question.

I’ll just read that out now. So, Lucy, what are some of the biggest opportunities you see for people combining their CRM and ESP?

– Sure. Great to see you again, Ross. And I was just laughing to myself, had a bit of a chuckle because you said, unfortunately, you’re going to hear from me in the next few days. I’m just like, that is so British of you to say that. Apologizing for your great presence.

I guess with the fireside chat as well, I always just imagined a fireplace and a crackling fire, so, yeah, we should have maybe arranged something like that. I don’t have one handy. But pubs are open now, so.

– [inaudible] with this weather.

– Yeah. So back to opportunities for combining CRM and ESPs. So, yeah, just to reiterate what I covered in my talk, I gave eight reasons, but, you know, I’m not going to flog a dead horse here. I think, you know there was a lot of information there, but the two that I wanted to pick out especially was the rich segmentation just tapping into that CRM data to not only improve personalization on your marketing assets, so your emails basically, but also the timing.

So many customer journey timestamps can be determined by your customer data when you think about it. Even if you don’t have date fields set up and dedicated in Salesforce already, you can create them and start collecting those timestamps from today.

The second one, as you can probably guess, is the marketing-driven conversions. Keeping all that subscriber activity and engagement stored in Salesforce campaigns to paint that picture of how your prospects and customers are reacting to email activity and providing those magic links between sales opportunities and marketing spend.

– Yeah. That makes total sense. And I guess from our side and we do see a number of businesses kind of asking why they should use the integration. And I’d have to say one of the biggest things that we see or I’d say is a benefit is automation. So many, and you touched on in your keynote, so many companies, particularly small companies, have somebody effectively downloading from Salesforce into Excel formatting, uploading the information that then gets it into their ESP, but they’re not seeing that data back in Salesforce.

So I think one of the biggest things that we see is automation. Let an integration automate that for you. It can do it reliably. It can take off a mundane job for somebody. And if it’s syncing data back and, again, you just touched on that, you get to see that information right in Salesforce, against your Salesforce records kind of on when you came forward.

So thank you for that.

– Totally. And you’d be shocked at what some people are doing in 2021 with data, you know, it’s not fun. That’s not what email marketing is about.

– There’s plenty of opportunities to automate that. And we had a question, apologies. I think my eyes are glancing because we are getting some questions in. The question we just had in from one of the participants is a question from Mary. And she says, “In our business, the migrated data we have in Salesforce is quite messy and I’m told it’s required a major cleanup to make the connection.”

So what would you say on that? I’ve got some thoughts. What would you say on that, Lucy?

– Well, I’d say first stage is deduplication, and honestly, this is one of my least favorite topics because deduplication is so essential. Especially, you don’t want to have duplicate records and then having some marketing engagement on one record and then some on another, and then one record progresses through the opportunity pipeline and the other one doesn’t.

So that would be my first step. And then I suppose standardizing data for personalization so fields that you know you’re going to use in personalization, getting those standardized. But what are your thoughts, Ross?

– Yeah, I mean, I tend to agree. I mean, the problem is data is king and if data is not great, it’s always going to make it that much harder. You touched on it, Lucy, when I’ve done this as a consultant, you know, we’ve used various techniques using Salesforce reports, deduping tools, there’s quite a few of those on the app exchange, enrichment tools, things like Clearbit to kind of clean up the data.

One of the nice things on the side of Campaign Monitor, and I know we’re talking quite generically, but on the Campaign Monitor side, when you upload records to a subscriber list, it’s going to look at unique records. So a lot of questions we get and a lot of concerns that we get is if I upload my entire database, will I have thousands of duplicates? Will I have thousands of duplicates?

And the simple answer is no. The way that the system would work is it would deduplicate. It would stop those email addresses being added. The [inaudible] then comes into what are you looking to do further? And for me, it always comes down to your requirements.

So if you would want to send out mass emails to all your contacts, you’re probably good to go because your data’s in there. Your email addresses are deduplicate. That, it’s fine. Where the problem will come in is if you’re looking to use custom data or segmentation information. Then you can’t reliably then rely on that data because it could have been duplicate, it could have come from a different record.

And that’s where your cleaning up might come from. So I think the first step I would say is try to understand what you’re trying to do. And if it’s simply just to send out emails, we have very little customization to them, then you could use something like Campaign Monitor as a way to deduplicate those email addresses. But if you are looking for cleaning up your data, then there are quite a few tools on the Salesforce app exchange that you might want to have a look at that might help out there.

I’ll move on to the next question. And my apologies, I am moving a little bit of a pace just because we are getting so many questions through. So the next question… – Wow. [crosstalk]

– We have a few in the queue. I will take one again from the ones that were asked earlier. So, “What are the biggest mistakes you see people making with their CRM and ESP?” Again, sorry, Lucy. I’ll pass it to you first and I’ll chip in.

– Can I go on about campaign influence again? Yeah, I would say not using Salesforce campaigns and as a result, not using campaign influence, and that maybe, or probably is because marketing engagement isn’t being synced to Salesforce campaigns automatically.

So, yeah, it’s just that, I think, is a huge mistake. And another mistake could be marketers not understanding what happens to leads and opportunities that fall out of the pipeline.

So if they’ve been disqualified or opportunities being closed/lost. So often in Salesforce you have, like, the closed/lost reason field. Is that being enforced? What reasons are in there? Which do you consider marketable? It’s honestly low-hanging fruit for you.

– Yeah, I tend to agree. And, again, from my side, very development focused, but everything for me kind of comes to good requirements. And so, some of the biggest mistakes I see is people just not thinking about what they want to do. I like to reverse engineer things, so if I want to send out an email campaign, for example, and I know it’s going to need some custom data in there, I’ll analyze and find out what that data is.

Do we have good coverage of that data? You know, are we actually able to do what we want to do? Do we need to look an enrichment tool, again, something like Clearbit to effectively garner some data for our records to make them a bit better on the sending out? So I think the biggest mistake I see is people just not really looking at what they’re trying to do and then kind of reverse engineer it backwards to put the best possible solution and almost hoping that if you put an application in, it will do the hard work.

And, you know, after 20 years, it just unfortunately isn’t that way. There is a little bit of legwork to be done, unfortunately.

– Yeah. And you could also apply that to getting results from, you know, based on your previous campaigns experience. You know, you need to send an email to 100 people in order to get two conversions and then so on and so on sales and it’s, yeah. Just not just setting yourself up for success in that respect.

– Yeah. Exactly. Next question I have here is, and this is again another live question. So, “What is the advantage of seeing campaign analytics in Campaign Monitor for Salesforce rather than using an analytics tool within Campaign Monitor itself? Is the data replicated in both places?” And I can probably quickly fill that one.

So the data that you see in Campaign Monitor is pretty good because you get to see it within context, and as Campaign Monitor is a mass email tool, what you’re seeing is very relevant reports, very relevant UI in that way. Now, what we do, and is we take a copy of that data and we put it into Salesforce into your contacts and leads. So you can see it in a very real way against a contact and lead.

You could create Salesforce reports. Part of Lucy’s presentation talked about campaign influence. So you could, if you wanted to, have an integration tool like ours, create Salesforce campaigns, which would have campaign members and off the back of that, use influence to create opportunities off there. So there is a pretty good use case for having the data, first and foremost, in Campaign Monitor, and then secondly, in an integration like ours, like Campaign Monitor for Salesforce.

It is, again, worth noting that this is all very optional. So if you only want to see the information in Campaign Monitor in the case of our integration and other integrations, you can generally restrict that or turn it off so you just simply view it in the ESP. Why that’s important, and again, Lucy touched on it earlier is that storage is a premium, Salesforce storage is quite expensive.

So if you’ve got a lot of tracking data, you might want to choose to keep only a bit of that or you might want to keep all the information within Campaign Monitor and use that to view email tracking. To that point, Lucy, we’ve recently, and I’m sure you guys have crossed it, started to surface data using lightning components so that it’s actually surfaced in real-time rather than stored for Salesforce reports.

Is that something you’ve seen on the Pardot side, the other side that you guys work with?

– It’s stored in lightning components, yes. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve seen that. I think that’s the way it’s going, you know, you want to have that lightning component to move around all the pages and stick it where people want it because that’s the way lightning is going, that user satisfaction.

You know, we have such optimized apps in our life as consumers that users expect the same nice look and feel and convenience in lightning components.

– Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Apology for keeping glancing left as the questions come thick and fast. So I will move on to the next kind of question that we got in via the initial registration process. So the question is, “What are some of the most valuable ways that a business can use Salesforce to automate processes or alternatively, what are the key processes that Salesforce can help you automate?”

Give me your thoughts on that, Lucy.

– Yeah. Because this came through before and I had some time to think about it. I even sat down and wrote a blog post on what I thought in terms of marketing, what the most valuable processes are. So I think my favorite out of the 10 that I covered previously was lead keys. So in keys in Salesforce, like, basically help users prioritize incoming records, distribute them.

It’s almost like a holding area in your CRM, so users can wait to pick them up. But you can assign needs to a team so that whoever has the capacity can pick them up almost rather than getting assigned to one person and if they’re busy, the lead doesn’t get seen to. Or you can even route these leads away from sales and put them in like a marketing nurture queue or something like that so that they’re not seen to immediately.

And I think that’s really valuable. Another one was customer lifetime value, like, calculating the total amount of all the past opportunities for an account and seeing who your loyal customers are. You may be able to, with a bit of tinkering in Salesforce, be able to see, okay, which customers have referred us to most business.

And that’s great for segmentation.

– I agree. I mean, the one that we get asked a lot, which is a very basic example, I think we’re going to cover it in one of the demos a little bit later over the next couple of days’ sessions is, it’s kind of a very simple Salesforce web to leads. It amazes me how many companies use that or use something like form assembly just to get that web to lead traffic.

Again, it was part of your presentation. You had the website showing data flowing into Salesforce. On our side, what we’ve seen is people want to automate the whole flow. They want the web to lead to come into Salesforce. They want that lead then to be passed on to the ESP and for that ESP to have some automated journeys on there. So that’s the automation I tend to get a lot of questions on or see a lot on it. And it’s something that we do cover in a few sessions here.

I do have a Pardot question here, Lucy. So I know you’re actually on Pardot, so I’ll pass this over to you. So, is Pardot an ESP or an automation? Is there really a difference? We have Pardot/Salesforce, is this considered the kind of integration Lucy spoke to?

– Yeah. I mean, it’s a similar, one part of that is email marketing, right? So with Pardot, there are some differences. You do get extra features but it obviously is dependent on the budget that you can spend as a company. Oftentimes, sorry, my cat’s just joined us. Oftentimes… As soon as I said Pardot he just comes running.

So I think, you know, it just depends on your budget and oftentimes you may not use all the features, right? So it just depends on what’s going to work for you. As I said, email marketing is like the cornerstone of most marketing strategies. So it just depends on what we need.

– That makes sense. There’s another question that’s kind of come in again live and just to give you a bit of a break there, Lucy, it’s more on my side. So what if you’re using Salesforce campaigns for donations versus email tracking, can you do both? And the simple answer is yes. There are a couple of ways that you could do this. You could have a type on your campaign, or if the fields were very different, then you could do something like record types and have different page layouts.

But the short answer is yes, you could have Salesforce campaigns with donations for donation tracking, and you could have campaigns for email tracking and just separating those two by using types. Record types is a good way if you want to change up the page layout there. Now, I know you’ve written a blog on this one, Lucy, because I read it a few days back. We heard of a question from Megan regarding campaign influence.

It’s a bit of mystery. “Does it require someone to engage in an email or does it simply give a campaign influence on an opportunity if it was the last campaign the subscriber received prior to the conversation?” Are you able just to give a little bit of color to what campaign influence means? Just, I know it’s quite a broad subject.

– Yeah, sure. I think to answer the first part of that question, the level of engagement that the campaign considers, right? So you have different campaign member statuses and some of those statuses you say, “Yup, that was a meaningful engagement,” and other ones you say, “No, that was nothing to us.” So yeah, you can determine that by those status values, and that’s kind of what we’re talking about, Campaign Monitor syncing, or your email marketing platform syncing.

Then the second part of that, can you just repeat the second part of that question it was to do with it the opportunity, right?

– So, “or does simply give a campaign influence on an opportunity if it was the last campaign the subscriber received prior to the conversation?” Conversion rather. To the conversion. Pardon me.

– Yeah. So the campaign that they last interacted with before an opportunity closed, I believe, or before, I always forget. It’s either before a lead is converted or before an opportunity is closed is considered, like, the last touch. And how the Salesforce model works is that it normally looks at the first touchpoint, but you can build custom models to say, okay, I want to weight the last touch point as the most important, or I want to give like a 30, 70 split or even distribution across them all.

So there are ways you can build custom models to do that.

– Cool. I know that you’ve done quite a bit on that. So if anybody wants to look at that a little bit further, there’s actually a very good blog post that Lucy’s done on that. It’s worth a read. It’s very good.

– And that was written just by me getting very confused and trying to demystify it for myself. So I hope it’s helpful.

– I find the best blog post is one that you’ve actually had a…I’ve written a few blog posts, and it’s generally where I’ve had a problem, and I just, for the life of me, could not find a really good answer. And then after a lot of searching or a lot of work with Salesforce support or one of the Salesforce community people, I’ve got a decent answer and then I’ve written a post on it because it’s just, you know, I wish I had that post in the first place.

– Yeah. Yeah. And that’s how the drop started, you know, documenting the undocumented.

– Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And there were so many gray areas. Exactly. And a very quick question here which is more my side, “Is the integration of Salesforce free?” So what we do is we do offer a free version.

It is quite limited. Then we offer a version that’s, like, a premium version that is paid for. And our pricing is all based on the number of subscribers that you have. We do link off to our website and there are resources there so you can take a look at pricing. But there is a free version, you can try the product completely free 14 days, and that’s the premium version of the product so you can try it and make sure it works for you.

But the free version, I would say that is quite limited. So some of the automations that we cover within the sessions that you’ll see a bit later, we tend to use something called the Import Wizard, which is probably one of the most popular tools, that is a paid-for feature. But we do offer a free version and we do offer a 14-day free trial so you can make sure it works for you.

I’m just going to hop back now to the document. So next question. “What would you say are the top three reports every business should use?”

– Okay. Okay. So I guess maybe it’s coming at it from a consultant’s point of view, but when I want to understand, like, the health of a marketing pipeline, the health of an opportunity pipeline, I don’t just look at the successes.

I look at the failures, the bottlenecks as well. So as I mentioned before, disqualified leads and whatnot. There is one called the opportunity trends report, which is a standard Salesforce report type which shows you where opportunity is getting stuck, because it shows you, okay, this opportunity is like 100 days old and it’s been in this stage for 40 days.

And you can really start to see, oh, actually, things are getting caught here. Is there something that Marketing can be doing to help that? Or if that is genuinely how long the stage takes or should take, is there anything that Marketing can do to keep that warm? I don’t like talking idealistically.

I know it’s easier said than done. But I like that as a pulse check. Another one is obviously the influence pipeline reports. You can look at campaigns that have influenced opportunities and opportunities that have influenced campaigns. So from two viewpoints, which is quite cool.

– Yeah. I tend to agree. I think Salesforce do a pretty good job on providing sort of some pre-packaged reports. And these days, you know, the AppExchange itself, you can download various reports and dashboard packs that are free. For me, I don’t really have, I would say three top reports that I like. The things I would always, we got a lot of questions on when you’re importing data, what things should you do your report?

And for me, it’s all about efficiency. And as a developer, you want the process to be as efficient as possible. And generally, the best way to do that is just to make sure that you’re filtering correctly. And that could be as simple as if you’re uploading all of your contacts, apply one very simple filter to check to make sure there’s an email address.

There’s no point sending up a list of all contacts you want to email to If half of them don’t have email addresses. So applying a very simple filter means that not only is your report much more efficient, but it’s a great way to check the data. If you’ve got 1000 records and you’ve got 1000 records now in Campaign Monitor, you know that’s true because you’ve got the source on there.

But if you’ve got, say, 2000 records in Salesforce but you only see 1000 in Campaign Monitor, one of the most popular reasons is there wasn’t an email address in the first place. So things like filters I think are a good thing. I think things like making sure that you only add the columns that you really need within your ESP. Again, a lot of times, and Lucy’s mentioned this, we used sample reports.

And those sample reports might have 20, 30 columns, and all you’re sending over is a person’s name and email address. Well, again, from efficiency perspective, very easy to clone a report. And then once you’ve cloned that report, you can simply remove the columns that you don’t need. Really just focusing on the ones that you’re actually going to work with.

So I don’t really have, I would say like a top report. I think Salesforce do a very good job on the reports that they provide. But filters, definitely. And the other thing, I know we’re all pressed for time but I will be quite quick, cross object filters. They are incredibly powerful. So if you haven’t come across those, I think they’re probably one of the most understated report features in Salesforce.

They are very handy. A typical use case we have on our side is that if somebody wants to update all the records that are in Campaign Monitor, what we do is when we add a contact to Campaign Monitor, we create what’s called a subscriber list membership record, it shows you that contact is on a list. Now, with Salesforce, you can create a very standard contact report. You can use a cross object filter that looks at this child relationship and says, do they have a list membership record?

And if you combine those two things in there, very quickly, you’ve got a very dynamic report that shows you every record that’s in Campaign Monitor. You can also filter on the state for example, and you can use that as a way to update records. Now, we do have more questions and I think as Rose says, we will circle back on those. Apologies for everybody that we didn’t get to.

There were a few questions left, but we’ll try and get back to those questions in a different mechanism. And I will now hand back over to Rose.

– Thank you so much, both of you. Actually, Lucy, Ross, it has been terrific. Seriously, learning from your real-world experiences as Salesforce professionals, as people that are developing the tools that we use today. And of course, getting our questions answered live was just simply fabulous. So, personally, I thought it was really great to hear about the reports in particular and about where we can find insights and how to improve the buyer’s journey, especially with the bottlenecks that you’ve been talking about, Lucy, and yeah, the pre-packaged reports are really a good starting point.

So before I say goodbye to you both for just the short period, Lucy, we had your blog mentioned numerous times, and really, congratulations on your community of over 25,000 Salesforce users. Just before we wrap up, can you remind everyone where to find your blog?

– Sure. So we cover Salesforce marketing automation, so often things to do with best practices for using Salesforce as a marketer. It’s part of salesforceben.com, which is I think the largest independent blog. So the domain is, you know, salesforceben.com/thedrip, or you can just Google “The DRIP” Salesforce and it should come up.

– Awesome. Thank you so much. I just want to make sure we got a proper shout out in there for you.

– Thank you. Appreciate it. That’s good. Good. And also, I’d want people’s feedback on what they want to see and what they want to learn as well. So please, any inspiration, hand it across.

– That’s great. Thank you. And then Ross, before we go on break, I know we’re going to talk a lot more about Campaign Monitor for Salesforce. That’s great. We have some awesome opportunities for people to learn more and ask questions. Just quickly. Shout out on your side.

You mentioned the free version and the 14-day trial, where do you recommend people go to find out more about that?

– The best spot to go to is our website. So if you go to beaufort12.com, off there you’ll see our products. So we have integrations for Campaign Monitor. We also have integrations for Emma, which is the sister company of Campaign Monitor and Eventbrite. By clicking on those links, you’ll be able to learn more about the products, but beaufort12.com is the best way.

– Great. Thank you, Lucy. Thank you, Ross.

Thanks so much. Hi, everyone. I’m Barbara Christensen. I have been working in the nonprofit world for about 25 years from development to organizing and communications, and in big organizations like the Gates Foundation all the way down to my favorite, the scrappy little social justice and environmental organizations. I am a Salesforce MVP and a certified Salesforce admin and app builder and nonprofit cloud consultant. When I’m not at work, I’m also an erstwhile soil scientist, a modern dancer, and a huge nerd for bats.

Yes, the animal, not the baseball. But when I’m not at…when I am at work, my nerd is in a little bit different sphere. I really, really love thinking and design…thinking about and designing fully integrated engagement systems, you know, that magic place where the petition signers and your email subscribers and your donors and all the folks in your universe are in your CRM.

Well, at Percolator, I actually get to make that happen, which is all kinds of awesome. So thanks for joining me today. Today, we’re going to talk about a couple of things. The first thing we’re going to talk about is what makes a good integration between your CRM and your ESP. I will stop using three-letter acronyms in a moment and we will learn what those mean.

The next thing we are going to talk about is the tools you might already have to create targeted and personalized emails. And finally, how to plan your data model for improving engagement. So let’s get started. First question of the day is, “How does your nonprofit engage more supporters?” Well, your goal is not just to engage more supporters, you want to engage the right supporters in the numbers you need to meet your mission, from volunteers to donors to committee members to board members, activists to ambassadors.

In an ideal world, you’d have all the relevant information about each supporter and the value they bring to your organization right at your fingertips and they would understand the value you offer them as well and be inspired to get more involved because you sent them the right message at the right time. I know you have invested in using technology effectively to manage or reach all these supporters.

So let’s look at how integrating your email platform and your CRM can supercharge those engagement efforts. Just so we’re all on the same page, let’s talk about those three-letter acronyms. CRM is your constituent relationship management system. As you all know, engagement is about relationships but humans can only hold about 150 relationships in our brain.

If you can accomplish your mission with 150 people, then great. Enjoy never having to do data entry again. However, for the rest of us, a CRM like Salesforce is designed to track and manage your work to engage all the people you need to. And an ESP is an email service provider like Campaign Monitor. But please, let’s know this now.

This is more than just sending email. This should be a platform that should let you target your sends, design engaging and beautiful emails, and help automate your supporters’ journey to getting more involved. With an integration between your CRM and your email platform, all you know about your supporters in Salesforce can drive how you communicate with them.

This makes for more effective and personalized journeys for every supporter. But there are many flavors of integrations out there, so what makes a good integration because we don’t want to waste money? Well, the right integration will do a few things. First, it should streamline your workflow. I don’t want you uploading and downloading lists every time you want to send an email or segment an email.

Your goal should be spending less time managing your technology and more time leveraging it to meet your mission. With the right integration, you should be able to easily create the best supporter experience and that experience should drive gifts and event RSVPs, volunteer signups, actions, and more. Every email should have an action that a person can take, even a simple one.

And the best part is it shouldn’t be difficult. The right integration will be dependable, trustworthy, easy to implement, and activate. Pie in the sky dreams it may sound like, but not really. Most nonprofits out there, probably all of you, are using NPSP, the Nonprofit Success Pack. This is a free application developed by salesforce.org to make Salesforce serves the most common nonprofit business practices from fundraising to volunteer and program management.

It’s just one part but I’d argue, the most important part of the nonprofit cloud in Salesforce. So this right email integration we’re talking about, it should also work well with NPSP, especially NPSP’s household account data model. This is where contacts are tracked both individually and with their household members.

With this model, you know not only what each person is contributing from volunteer hours to online actions to emails interacted with but also, how each household is contributing as a whole so you understand capacity. I have some good news, Beaufort 12’s Campaign Monitor for Salesforce app, which I work with a ton, works really well with NPSP out of the box and we’ll get a little tour of that later today.

One of the superpowers of NPSP is a package of reports and dashboards to support tracking engagement. There are more than, I think it’s 70 reports that track donations, key performance metrics on campaigns and relationships and giving trends and you can customize the out of the box reports and build your own.

I know dozens and dozens of nonprofits I’ve worked with and none of them are ever exactly the same in their business process but NPSP has done a really good job of finding the sort of central way of most nonprofits work and giving you a platform on which to build from. So, for example, in this customization, you could pull a list of people who have both volunteered in the past and given a small gift and then invite them to join your monthly giving program because volunteers are often prime monthly givers.

You could send highly relevant content at the precise moment that the message is needed to make the most out of your email marketing. A good integration will use the power of Salesforce reports. For example, we’ll see this later, Campaign Monitor for Salesforce, you can import subscribers to Campaign Monitor directly from any report that includes an email address, it doesn’t even have to be a contact report, and you can even run it on a schedule to keep automated emails populated with the most relevant data.

No more, you know, pulling the report right before it’s time to send, getting it up there with an export and import. It should happen in a pretty automated fashion in a good integration. Another important feature of a good email integration is the ability to use that data from Salesforce, your CRM, right inside the email platform, not only to filter segments and pull the right list but to customize what each recipient sees.

This needs to be a personalized experience. For example, things I’ve done with the Campaign Monitor integration, we’ve built a fundraising email campaign that segments subscribers by their total giving and we use that to create dynamic content based on a giving level. We separated things out into levels. You can create a module in Campaign Monitor that will show different content based on that giving level the person is in.

We’ve done things like thanking donors when they hit a certain level during a day of giving campaign. Invite donors who are just at the top of coming in to the next level to give a little bit more or for the folks who have already fulfilled your wish for them for the year or for that campaign, you thank them and let them know what a certain amount has already accomplished. So you should be able to use that data from Salesforce inside of Campaign Monitor and use it in emails.

So you really can get a lot out of taking the things you know about your supporters and showing it in your emails. And it’s not just about serving your needs, it actually makes supporters feel seen when you respond appropriately to their interests and their recent engagement points.

So we’ve thought about what makes a good integration, we have some ideas of how to evaluate the integration we have in front of us but that’s just the first step. You’ve got the technology, now, what do you do and how do you plan to best integrate this new integration… sorry, to best leverage this new integration?

You’ll hear that word, integrate, a lot today. So let’s dive into that. You could technically keep an exact copy of every person in your database in your marketing platform, and there are a few marketing platforms out there that kind of do that. You need a coder on staff, they are a bear to manage, I don’t recommend them very often, but that’d be it.

You know, it’s a ton of setup and maintenance and likely introduces complications that you don’t really need and complexity you don’t need to manage. So what you want to do is make sure you have the right data in your CRM. I always recommend starting with what you already have.

So you probably already have engagement strategy or even marketing and donor engagement plans. Start with those. Comb through those and ask yourself, what data points are going to allow you to send the targeted emails you want to send? Do you have a campaign to increase monthly donors in the next quarter?

Pull data about someone’s regular giving. Have they given multiple gifts in a year? Are they a regular volunteer? Do they meet some other criteria that makes you think that they might become a monthly donor? Make sure that’s in the email platform. Ask yourself what data will help you send personalized messaging as well.

It can be data about the supporter themselves or their giving or their program participation or their volunteering. What do your supporters need to see to feel seen and heard in the emails you send to them? In short, you want to use your marketing automation to build stronger relationships with your supporters and the data in your email platform should support that.

Don’t bring in data just to bring in data. So planning, of course, is thinking one step ahead. Just to give you some ideas, here are some of the things that my clients have collected in their email platform to segment and personalize their emails. Things like location, so you can only send emails to people near an event or birthday or their age.

Their mission interests, what have they expressed an interest in knowing about your work or getting involved in your work and make sure that is in an email. Have a module that will separate out people who have asked for certain types of content. Their years of involvement with your org, their donation amounts or their last donation date. So you’re asking at appropriate times and for appropriate amounts, and their total volunteering.

But honestly, a good integration should not force you to do all this thinking ahead and never get to change. There are platforms out there that require a coder and can keep Salesforce in sync in really complicated ways but a good one is going to make it easy. One of the things I like best about Campaign Monitor for Salesforce is it’s just a couple of clicks to add a contact field and have it show up on my email subscriber record in Campaign Monitor so that I can do experiments.

I really like to experiment with engagement and by that, I mean ask yourself a question. What will happen if I invite all of our volunteers to donate to the capital campaign to finish repainting the visitor center where they all volunteer regularly? And if you can get your volunteer data and where they volunteered last into your email, you can segment your list and reach them.

Your CRM administrator, of course, can help you define how to collect and store each data point in Salesforce in a way that email platform can access it and use it. In just a sec, Ross will walk us through what that looks like in Campaign Monitor for Salesforce in particular. So that’s data going from your CRM to your email platform.

What about the other way? When you’re in an email platform, you most definitely should have access to data about how well your emails are performing, not just on the email campaign level but potentially for each email subscriber.

Ask yourself, would that data help you in your CRM? I will say, right now, I have plenty of clients who do not bring email clicks and email opens and data like that into Salesforce because they don’t have a plan to use it but if knowing which supporters engaged with your emails could be useful to you for future segmentation and customized messaging, well, that’s worth setting up.

That’s worth thinking about and planning for. For example, you could set up journeys based on interaction with a first email in a drip campaign and combine that data with donations made. Like, if that’s a journey that you might build, you’re going to want to bring that data over from the email platform into Salesforce.

And, of course, there’s probably, you know, you’ve planned this data you need in Salesforce, this data you need in your email platform to get the right message to the right supporter, you may find you have some holes. There’s things you want to be able to segment on or personalize on that just don’t exist yet in your universe of data.

This is where webforms really come in handy. Using a webform that is well designed and integrates with your web platform can help you collect data about your supporters. Honestly, that’s a whole topic for a whole other presentation. Give me a call if you have a place for me to make that. It’s also one of my favorite topics. But some of the webforms I have built for nonprofits to help improve their 360-degree view of supporters include things like preference centers.

And this isn’t just what email list I want to belong to, which sort of static subscription of yours I want to belong to, this is about telling you my preference about how I like to be contacted, what I like to know about your organization, what types of topics I’m interested in. I mean, it can be that deep into preferences if you have something to do with that data when it comes to segmenting.

Don’t ask people preferences and questions about themselves you have no plan to use. It’s more invasive than it needs to be and may sour your relationship. So definitely, always only ask what you think you might need. There are generic email signup forms, most platforms can handle those but that’s a really common thing people use webforms for where the data goes straight to Salesforce and then Salesforce becomes the brain of their email operation, which is how Campaign Monitor for Salesforce works as well.

New member surveys are really great. People are never more engaged than when they first give you that first donation or became a member. That is the time to ask them the things that will help you manage your relationship with them later. If you are an organization that deals in policy or science or you have expertise that people are interested in hearing, it is definitely worth it to consider making white papers or filming presentations like this and putting them behind a webform that collects information.

It doesn’t have to be a big lift. Most people are willing to give an email in order to receive valuable information that they are interested in having, so consider lead generation forms behind white paper downloads. And finally, if you are an organization that has communities, definitely encourage and have a flow that puts people in front of their community profile and asks them information about that and make sure that data gets back into Salesforce.

Again, only ask information you really need to…you will really use as data. It just helps keep that relationship smooth. And, of course, please consider things like being appropriate when asking for people’s gender, for their name. Please use the most recent technology and ethics behind those kinds of questions. So let’s wrap up.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you have helped think through things like the way to maximize donation and retain volunteers by crafting personalized emails that resonate with every individual on your list. The key, of course, is to show your supporters that you know and you value them. This would be a large ask if you had to go through every single person in your database and craft a personal message, but it’s just like building any other relationship.

Just because the relationship is digital first doesn’t mean the principles of being a good partner don’t apply. If you have planned with data you need to integrate and what integration will best serve your need, you are already on this journey to send more targeted emails while spending fewer resources and saving time. Thank you all so much.

Greeting you again is Ros Hodgekiss, and I am the Customer Experience Programs Manager at Campaign Monitor. I’ve been listed as a top email marketing thought leader, and currently, I guide a global training and strategy team principally to coach Campaign Monitor customers at how they can get the best results out of their email marketing. And if you want to follow me on Instagram, you can, @yarrcat.

So we’re going to get started today by talking about your audience and your people. It really goes without saying that without your people you really wouldn’t have a brand or a business. Making connections with your people, being your customers, your donors or supporters takes care.

It also takes empathy. But ultimately, it takes time and resources. And when you have limited time and resources, which is pretty much all of us, sometimes you have to find ways to connect authentically, yes, but at scale. Now, you know what’s coming. I’m going to tell you that email marketing is a great way to communicate one-to-one, and deliver personal experiences from anywhere to anyone.

Not only can mass email be used to instantly reach out to your audience, but in a personal and very authentic way. That said, one of the main advantages of email is in its ability to send timely messages, and you can’t be assured of that timeliness unless your data is totally up to date.

Integrating your customer relationship management platform, or CRM, with your email service provider, or ESP, is essential to providing this timeliness. Not only can you be assured that you’re sending messages based on the most current data and conditions, but setting up an integration will save you time and effort as well.

Plus, a solid integration is silent, and set and forget. Once you’ve connected your business apps, you should be able to step away knowing that a little effort in setting up a sync will save you hours of manual data work in the future. But before we get around to setting up a connector, let’s talk about data. The thing is, how we like to think about working with data is in working backwards.

And really, one of the best ways to structure Salesforce data in particular is to ask yourselves all the hard questions about, what are you going to do with it? Where’s it going to go? If we want to talk about sending emails in particular, you know, we do need to think about data and in the context of, you know, what data are going to need to send targeted emails or include personalized messaging in your emails as well?

Also, there’s a question of, you know, once you’ve sent your emails, what are you going to do with all that tracking data that you’ve collected too, the opens, the clicks, the interactions that have happened afterwards as well? You should also be thinking about what kind of emails are going to help you build stronger relationships with your customers and donors.

And how are you going to get that 360 view of the people you’re reaching out to? I always like to think about it as, think of the outcomes you want to reach, and then think about the steps leading up to those outcomes. Working backwards is often a key way to do this. But, the thing is you do have to think one step ahead. You know, at the end of the day it all comes down to data, thinking about what data do you need, yes, and what data do you need to capture and how you’re going to capture that.

But then, you know, what emails are most likely going to be beneficial to your organization? Should you be collecting, you know, information on where the customer lives, their state or geography in order to send a targeted email that, for instance, is very much specialized for people that may be around a place where there’s been an event?

You know, it could be a donor outreach email during a, you know, a recent event in Texas or similar. These are all things that you need to think about, like, what is really going to make an impact with your audience? You might also want to think a step ahead to, maybe you want to do special outreach when somebody’s birthday is coming up as well.

How are you going to collect that birthday or age information without sounding, you know, a little too, like you’re really to find out too much about your audience? What part of your mission do you want, say, donors to be involved in? For instance, do you have information on how long your audience has, individuals in your audience have been involved with your organization or donations amounts that they’ve given in the past?

This is all information which, yes, it can live in your email marketing platform, but it can also live alongside, say, Salesforce contact and lead records as well. You know, where is this data going to go once you’ve collected it? You really need to be thinking one step ahead, and having these answers before you go down the adventure of setting up a connector.

And now we can talk about the fun bit, which is of course capturing data. You know, now you know what you need, let’s look at how we can get that data from existing contacts and new ones as well. One way, and perhaps the simplest way to get information, and particularly from new contacts, is using web forms.

Web forms are a simple and effective way to capture, you know, most evidently subscribers for your email marketing platform, if not leads for Salesforce as well. These public-facing forms can live on your website, landing page or maybe you can even use a form on a tablet device, you know, like an iPad to collect information from visitors to a physical location or store.

You know, we’ve got a couple tips around this though. First of all, it’s, if you can imagine what it’s like, or if you’ve used a tablet in a physical location or store, you’ll know that, you know, for instance, typing in text fields can be a real pain. You know, for instance, we mentioned collecting geographic information such as, you know, so we can target people in California, typing out California can be a little bit cumbersome.

So, think about it, you know. You might just want to have a drop-down form that has CA to avoid this, you know, spelling mistakes and a lot of scrolling around. Ultimately, you want to find ways to just make it super easy for people to fill in the web forms and also make sure that those web forms do give you error-free information.

So, you know, using drop-down menus and drop-down fields is, you know, often a good way to do that. Keeping in mind too that, as I mentioned, web forms are generally public-facing and they can expose your database to both innocent data entry mistakes like misspelling California, but also bad actors as well.

If you are concerned about collecting invalid email addresses or other erroneous information, I would say consider protecting your web forms using CAPTCHA or a confirmed opt-in method where, for instance, a confirmation email goes out after the form is completed. And this can save you a lot of tedious data cleaning, you know, down the line, even more serious, you know, potential email delivery issues or even legal issues around how that data being collected is being used down the line.

So, do think very hard about how you’re using web forms, how they’re displayed, and how that data is being validated before it hits your email marketing platform or CRM like Salesforce. Now, you can be pretty creative about how you collect data from new and existing people as well. You know, there are some great things that you can do.

You can create contests and challenges. These are always worth reading into to make sure that you’re doing them in a way that abides by your state’s laws of course, but, you know, they can be very effective and often go viral. For the more professional set, you might want to offer a white paper report to download in exchange for, you know, name, company email, something like that. You might want to ask existing people to complete a profile.

When we say web forms, you know, filling in a profile is a similar experience. And, last but not least, make sure that you do have a clear opt-in, for example, a check box that say, “Yes, I would like to receive email.” This is super important because you do want to abide the laws in your region regarding the collection and use of personal data.

You know, for instance, if you have ever decided to read CAN-SPAM or any of the GDPR legislation out there, you’ll see that they’re pretty serious about getting people’s consent when using their data. Now we’re going to talk a little bit about reports. It’s always a good idea to have your reports set up so that you do have visibility over your audience, over the people that you do want to end up emailing.

You know, these might be people that have made purchases, you know, that have filled in their profiles, completed promotions and more. Ultimately, these reports help you keep track of key data points, and really, the right report is integral to making sure that you’re making the most of Salesforce without spending endless hours fishing around your data for the right contact record or similar.

Ultimately, you know, if you were paying attention during the working backwards bit, we talked about sending these, sort of, personalized messages, and one thing to say about that is that you’re going to be hearing a lot about segments. Segments are groups of, like, contacts or subscribers in your email marketing platform, and you will not believe how much more effective it is when you’re actually sending emails to very specific segments.

Using segments in particular allows you to send highly relevant content at the precise moment when a message is needed, and it’s really the key to making the most out of email marketing as a channel. Now, in the context of this presentation, having reports is key to making sure that you have a current group of people that you can then funnel into your email service provider and ultimately make sure that you’re sending bespoke messages to them each time.

You know, the thing is about these reports is that you’ll want to have, for instance, you know, a list of people, yes, but you’ll want to also have customer data that’s relevant to your email marketing. For instance, in Campaign Monitor we talk about custom fields. Custom fields can have things like company names or amount of revenue for each individual contact.

You know, if you do have this information, you can basically create one email and then, for instance, if we’re using revenue field as an example here, you know, create and present dynamic content or, you know, tailor pieces of content in the email that are displayed according to, say, what revenue band that customer is in.

So, that’s actually really cool. We’ve seen quite a few examples where people have showed specific email content based on things like total spend amount and revenue. It’s a great way to, for instance, congratulate your VIP customers, all those big spenders out there, invite them to, you know, a special promotion or an event, and, or, you know, get them to provide some good reviews.

You know, it’s always a great idea not just to think about the communication side and pushing sales and things to people if you’re in e-commerce, but potentially how you can maximize your most valuable and your most loyal customers by inviting them to take part in special promotions or to say a good word for you.

So, to wrap up, I hope this presentation has given you an overview of the big questions you should be asking in regards to the collection of data and using it. For instance, what data should you be collecting? What kind of emails should you be sending? How are you going to collect the data to power these emails? And finally, using your reports, how can you have not just visibility over your contact and lead data, but zoom into segments that will allow you to send targeted and personalized email messages?

Next up, Ross Leedham will be putting all this in practice by connecting Salesforce and Campaign Monitor to send a personalized email message. Let’s take it away, Ross.

– [Ross] I’m Ross Layton. I’ve been working now on the Salesforce platform for over 20 years. A little over 10 years ago, I co-founded Beaufort 12, and it was at that same time we started working with the Campaign Monitor team. Now, Beaufort 12 is a Salesforce integration specialist, which is a fancy way of saying we build products on the Salesforce platform to interact and move data around with other applications. To date, we’ve built integrations for Campaign Monitor, Dropbox, Emma, and most recently, Eventbrite.

As we mentioned in the keynote, Salesforce can be a single source of truth for your data. So when we built Campaign Monitor for Salesforce, we took the decision to make it a native Salesforce application. This just means it lives in Salesforce and makes use of its look and feel. It also gives access to the data stored in your Salesforce org and allows us to write our own objects to store your Campaign Monitor data.

It helps to provide that 360-degree view we keep mentioning. I’m going to start by showing you the fundamental steps on how to work with data over the next few screens. Then, we’ll actually do a demo in Salesforce to show you how the process works end to end. I’ll be using Campaign Monitor for Salesforce for that demo and for these screenshots. Now, to send out an email campaign, you will need a list of email addresses.

In our integration, we provide a helpful wizard to get your data out of Salesforce and into Campaign Monitor as easily and quickly as we possibly can. Now, the import wizard works with a few different sources, but the most popular option is Salesforce reports. Salesforce reports are a great option as they are easy to use and they contain some pre-built examples.

Now, if you’re not familiar with Salesforce reports, Salesforce themselves have a great module within their Trailhead platform, and we’ll provide a link to that within this presentation. So now that we have our data source in the form of a Salesforce Report, we need a spot to put that information in Campaign Monitor.

Now, Campaign Monitor uses terminology called subscriber list, and ESPs have various other similar names like audiences, groups, address books. But effectively, it’s the same thing. It’s a spot where you can gather a group of email addresses and then use that group of email addresses to send an email campaign to.

Now, with our integration, you can create a list within Salesforce or you can create it in Campaign Monitor, and it will be reflected back in Salesforce. That’s kind of the first step after you have your data source. So now that we have our Salesforce report and we also have our list within Campaign Monitor, which is reflected in Salesforce, we’re going to use a tool called the import wizard.

Now, the import wizard works at the list level. So we’d, first of all, go to the subscriber list, and then we’d select the import wizard option. There are three pretty easy screens to navigate through. The first here is simply saying what source would you like to use, and so we’ve selected Report. We’re going to find that report and then move on to step two.

So on the second step, it’s really about mapping fields from your Salesforce report over to Campaign Monitor. Now, we really just need the email address here, but if you wanted to include additional information from Salesforce perhaps to either segment your data or to personalize it, you can on this screen map the data. And we’ll cover this in the demo shortly.

Now, we do go into a lot of more detail on mappings and segmentation within the advanced track, so it’s definitely worth tuning into that if you’re interested. But for now, we’re just going to just cover the basics here. So the next step is step three. So the final step is just to actually click the Import key and have that data go from Salesforce into Campaign Monitor.

Now, there are a few things on this screen here that you can do. Some of them, again, we’ll be covering in the advanced track, but things that would be useful would be scheduling. So you could, for example, have the import wizard run every day. And the way that would work is that it would be looking at the source, so in this example, the Salesforce report we saw earlier, checking that, and effectively loading in the data.

And it’d be doing two things at that point. It’d be loading in new records that are part of that report, and if I’ve mapped across any fields like a person’s name, for example, and that had changed, maybe their surname had changed, that update would also be sent across to Campaign Monitor.

So it really, really helps to keep your information up to date so you’ve got every record in Campaign Monitor for when you want to send out your email campaign. And if you’re using personalization or segmentation, it makes sure that the data is up to date. Now, the next thing I’d like to do is just actually show you sort of an end-to-end demo.

So we’ve gotten through the screens together. Hopefully, that makes sense. But sometimes actually seeing the demo itself just helps to reinforce what we’ve gone through. Okay. So this part of the presentation will just cover the screens that we’ve gone through, the principles that we’ve just discussed but in an end-to-end demo.

It’s going to be quite quick, and it’s going to be focusing on the basics, but it should just help kind of reinforce what we showed earlier. So first step, our data source, and that’s the Salesforce report. I’m going to basically just go to the app launcher here and type in the word report. If I click that, this little tab over here is going to appear.

Now, I’m going to go ahead and create a brand new report and a very basic one. I’m going to base it on the Contacts & Accounts object. You can use any object as long as it has an email address. Now, Salesforce will be helpful in loading a load of columns and some filters. As I mentioned earlier, you really just need the email address, but we’ll go ahead and send over some additional data.

I’m going to remove some data we don’t need. So I don’t need any of this information here. I simply want to have a person’s name, the company they work for, and the email address. And then you’ll notice in the top right-hand corner here with the Filter, I’m going to change that from just my information to everything that’s in Salesforce. And finally, I’m going to change this filter from specific records, again, to all records.

Now, there are a couple of filters you might want to consider adding. First is checking for an email filter. Now, we’ll do this anyway when you’re doing an import, but it just keeps the report itself nice and efficient. So I’m simply going to say the email mustn’t be blank. Nice.

So if you’re using Salesforce’s standard email opt-out field, you can have that as a filter as well. So you’re going to simply say that the email opt-out is false. And again, very much up to you whether you use those examples. Now, lastly, just on the filter here, I’m just going to press Run. And now that we’ve got that data back, we can see some sample records here.

So this is the information that’s going to go across. There are 111 records in total. Finally, I’m just going to click the drop-down arrow, click the Save key. We’re going to call this New Contacts & Accounts Report. We’re going to put this into the Public Folder just to make it accessible. You can put it in any folder that you’d like.

And then hit the Save key. And so now I have my data source. Now, on the Campaign Monitor side, again, if you’re not familiar with that, we just type in campaign monitor, select the Campaign Monitor app. This would give this menu system across the top. And we’re going to choose Subscriber List.

Now, again, we mentioned earlier in the demo that you can create a subscriber list within Salesforce or Campaign Monitor. If you created them in Campaign Monitor, like these two guys here, you’ll see them and be able to work with them. I’m going to click on this list here, the webinar list. So if we click on Members here, we’ll see there are no records currently. And now, we’re going to go to the import wizard and start a new import.

Now, the first thing it’s going to ask me is what I want to use, and as I mentioned earlier, we can work with lists, reports, campaigns, or SOQL, report being the most popular. Here, we’re going to select the report. So it was in public and it was called New Contacts & Accounts. Here, we can map Salesforce fields to Campaign Monitor fields, and we can also create them if they don’t exist.

But we do have the person’s name field. And in this example, we already have the account name in there. Email address will always be auto-mapped for you, although you can change it if you have more than one email field. So on this final screen, we can click the Import Now button, and the data will go across as a one-time thing, or we can also schedule.

So we could say we want it to run every day at midnight, or we can add a few extra times on there. We could take out weekends. But it’s very much up to you how you configure this. Now, there is an Advanced Settings section, which we go through on the advanced track. But as long as you’re happy…and I’ll just change that over just to import, simply click the button and the information will start to pass over to Campaign Monitor.

Now, this is only 100 or so records, so it’ll run very, very quickly. And you can see, that is completed within a few seconds. If I wanted to, I could click the drop-down arrow and Run Now if I wanted to run it again, maybe I change the Salesforce report, or I can edit it and make some changes. So for example, I could put in scheduling if I wanted to.

So that concludes the demo portion of the import wizard, and as you can see, it’s very easy for you to take a Salesforce report and add that to Campaign Monitor via the import wizard. There is a lot of detail and a lot more things that we could go into and we will go into in some of the advanced tracks, but essentially, now, the data would be in Campaign Monitor.

And I’ll hand it over so that we can show you what you can do with that data once it’s there, and then I’ll rejoin the presentation in a few slides just to show you what information passes back from Campaign Monitor into Salesforce.

– [Woman] So now, we have data being successfully synced with Salesforce. I’m going to show you the end-to-end process of taking those contacts that have been synced over and then creating an email campaign and sending it to them. So we’re going to jump into a fresh Campaign Monitor account here, and as you can see, I haven’t created a campaign yet.

First of all, we’re going to have a look at the Lists & Subscribers tab up here, and you’re going to see the Master List, which you should now be familiar with after we created it earlier. So if we click on Master List, we’re going to see email addresses here in the list. So these will be our email recipients.

Now, to create a campaign, I’m going to click on the Campaigns tab up here, and we’re going to click on Create a new campaign. Now, just for the purpose of this demo, we’ll keep it super simple. I’m simply going to call this “First campaign,” although I do encourage you to put a lot of thought into your subject line and preheader, which is the piece of text that displays under in the inbox.

And then I’m just going to be sending it from my own email address. Simply click Next. And we’re going to be launching the email builder. Now, this screen that you see here is a collection of email builder templates. These are templates that have been created by Campaign Monitor, which you can customize to your heart’s content with your own brand colors, logos, social media links, and more.

So I do encourage you to jump in and browse around, but for now, we’re going to get straight to the point. I’m going to click on the Announcements category here, and I think I really like this email template here, the Wooly Wears.

So I’m going to click on this, and this will be our starting point. So if you explore the email builder, you’ll notice that we have some great tools for editing images, changing sections, changing backgrounds, and more. It’s a really versatile environment to create and edit email campaigns.

You might have noticed here we have this square bracket, what we call personalization tag, and this is where you can add and personalize your email campaigns using information that you’ve synced over from Salesforce. So you can see, by default, we’ve already got this first name field.

But how about we want to add the account name that was synced over as well? Why don’t we go to this thank you message down here, and we’re going to say, “Thank you, account name, for being a valuable Wooly Wears customer.” And so you don’t have to go around and research which personalization tags to use, you can simply click Insert here, click Custom fields, you’re going to click the Master List, and then you can click on Account Name.

You can also specify a fallback. So in this case, we can say friend. So now, we have a very simple personalized email. Let’s see how this looks in the real world. We’re going to go up here and click Preview. And then you can see here, we both have the desktop version and the mobile version of the email campaign.

Now, if we click on Define recipients, we’re going to see the list that we created here, Master List, click Next, and we’ll come back to the campaign snapshot, which is an overview of the campaign that we’ve created. So for instance, we can actually preview using the personalized content that’s been added to the newsletter already.

We can choose a random recipient, and then we can click Preview. And by viewing this, we can see that the personalization tag has now pulled in this Vicon Corporation name from Salesforce and, of course, your subscriber list. So now, to send, it’s super simple.

Simply click Schedule delivery, and you’ll have the option of sending it now or scheduling the campaign for a specific time. We can click Send it now, double-check the email address the confirmation email will go to, and simply click Send campaign now. And that’s it.

We’ve managed to take our data from Salesforce and create a personalized campaign in Campaign Monitor.

– So earlier, we showed how you could get your data from Salesforce into Campaign Monitor, and now, we’ve covered how you would create your campaigns and send them out. We also push data from Campaign Monitor back into Salesforce. So as you can see on the screenshot on the left-hand side, we’re showing what list the person belongs to and their current state.

So it could be that you’ve sent out to an email to a number of people, and you might have had some bounces and unsubscribes. And so what you would expect on that screen is the subscriber membership state would change from active to bounced or unsubscribed. So you could see that. And in addition, we can show the email tracking statistics back in Salesforce against the contact lead records and displayed on the pages there.

As there are records, you can also build Salesforce reports or dashboards if you wanted to go follow that data within Salesforce.

I’m Ross Layton, and I’ve been working now on the Salesforce platform for over 20 years. A little over 10 years ago, I co-founded Beaufort 12. And it was at that same time we started working with a Campaign Monitor team. Now, Beaufort 12 is a Salesforce integration specialist, which is a fancy way of saying, we build products on the Salesforce platform that interact and move data around with our applications. To date, we’ve built integrations for Campaign Monitor, Dropbox, Emma, and most recently, Eventbrite.

So, a quick overview of what to expect coming up. This is a special session for organizations who already have their Salesforce integrated with their ESPs, or at least those of you who are familiar with the process and are planning on doing so soon. We’ll show some ideas in action, and give you a real example of how you can put them to work.

And then afterwards, you’re all invited to an open office hour Zoom forum, where you can ask questions, share your experiences, and get ideas from other advanced users. By now you’ve got a good understanding of what your ESP and CRM can do for you, both independently and together. I want to walk you through a few advanced use cases, which are a little on the complex side. But once you understand how they work, you can put them into practice and also adapt them for your own use cases.

Now, we’ll be using Campaign Monitor and the Salesforce integration, so you get a real hands-on understanding of what we’re talking about. But as long as you’ve got a good ESP and a good integration, a lot of these things we discuss should still be possible. And this really builds on the beginner session we had yesterday. So, if you missed that, or maybe you’re a little lost, it might be worth checking out the basic session first.

Now, we’ll be sending out all of the recordings so you have reference to them, and you can use them whenever you need. As with the beginner session, we’ll cover the theory with some screenshots. Then we’ll jump into a demo to show the actual process. A question we get asked a lot is, can you work with any Salesforce object?

Now, for our integration, the answer is yes. It’s true, most customers use contacts or leads and the standard email field. But if you’ve added custom email field addresses in Salesforce, or you want to work with custom objects, then you can use our integration to pass that data to Campaign Monitor. As we said in the basic session, everything starts with data source.

If you can create a Salesforce report, list view, a Salesforce campaign, or even a SOQL statement on the information you want to capture, and you can hook that up to the Import Wizard and send the data over to Campaign Monitor. Now, later on in the demo, we’re going to be covering the following elements. Firstly, working with standard filters and some use cases there.

Then working with cross-object filters, which are very useful, and to be honest, quite an understated feature of Salesforce. One of the last modified date filter can be very important. And finally, what you can do with Salesforce contact or lead IDs to help when information is returned back into Salesforce from Campaign Monitor.

By using these advanced techniques, you can better segment your data and personalize your email content. So, subscriber list. We covered those yesterday, and it’s worth just doing a very quick recap and highlighting a couple of advanced points. So a subscriber list in Campaign Monitor, much like your other ESP tools, is a collection of email addresses and custom data.

So you might have an email address and a person’s first and last name. What’s nice about subscriber list, and depending on your use case is that you could have one or more based on particular examples. So, one great example where you might have, say, a dedicated list is if you’re collecting information from your website which then feeds into Salesforce, perhaps using Web-to-Lead.

Now, from there, you can have that information ported across to Campaign Monitor using the Import Wizard. And then in Campaign Monitor on that list, you could have an automated journey. So it’ll be a very nice way to have a sequence that starts by a person signing up on the website, their data being added to Salesforce, then being added to Campaign Monitor, and then an email going out to that person via an automation.

And you’d be able to see all that data back in Salesforce via the integration. So you’d see the fact that they were a member of that list, and that they had received a welcome email, you know, and they had interacted with it. So, a subscriber list, again, we’ll cover this in the demo, but it’s worth noting that you can have more for specific purposes.

Next, and kind of before we move on to the demo, I’d like to touch on the Import Wizard. And again, this was covered in some detail in yesterday’s session. Now, the Import Wizard is a very powerful tool, and it allows you to effectively select data, map custom fields, and schedule it.

So, it kind of does three steps in one. So let’s first start with the data source. So, you can work with Salesforce reports, list views, campaigns and campaign members, and you can even write custom SOQL if you’ve got a pretty complicated use case. Now, once you import that data, you will be taken to the mapping screen, which simply will show you the fields that are in your source, i.e., your report, your SOQL statement, and allow you to map that to Campaign Monitor.

A couple of interesting points on that screen, and we already said we’ll cover them in the demo. The first is that you can create fields in Campaign Monitor from that screen on the fly. So, if you haven’t gone into Campaign Monitor and set up a custom field for say something like lead source, but it is in your Salesforce report, you don’t have to stop the wizard, go into Campaign Monitor, create it and come back again, what you can do is you can simply ask the wizard to create a new field.

Now, when we create a new field, we detect the data type. So, in a lead source example, the data type would be a picklist. So we’ll go ahead and create that picklist data type in Campaign Monitor. We’ll even send across the underlying values. The other thing that’s worth noting, and I said we’ll cover this, is the contact and lead IDs.

Sometimes in your Salesforce org, you’ll have duplicate records. And by duplicate I mean a contact or a lead that has the same email address. Now, if you want to work with very specific records, you can obviously filter your report, your list view, your SOQL to isolate particular records. So they’re the records that you want to work with.

Now, when we add the data, we create records back in Salesforce called subscriber list membership records, and they simply show that a person is on a list and their current state. So, if you went to a contact record, for example, you’d see a list membership record saying that I’m on the master list, and I currently have a state of active.

The important thing is this, that record is linked to a contact or lead based on email address. And if we find duplicates, we use the most recently modified email address. But if you include the Salesforce contact or lead ID in your import, that is what we’ll use when mapping data back from Campaign Monitor to Salesforce.

So it’s a very clear way of identifying the records that you want to work with back in Salesforce. So, that’s the mapping screen. And then, finally, we’ve got the scheduling screen, which has the scheduling and some advanced options. And again, we’ll take a look at those. Scheduling is incredibly useful if you want a process to be automated.

So, earlier, I talked about the Import Wizard working with a Web-to-Lead, so you’ve got new leads coming in via the web, and you want those to receive a welcome email. So you could have the Import Wizard scheduled so that it would add new records to Campaign Monitor and kick off a journey, so, that’s quite a good use case of scheduling.

It might be that you just want, every time your contacts are updated, or new contacts are added, you might have a report for that, and you want that to go across to Campaign Monitor. So, again, you would schedule it to run. Some of the other advanced options, which we’ll show shortly, are working with the Replace feature, which basically means that when we detect a record is active in Campaign Monitor but is not in the source, we can set its status to deleted.

So it’s a great way of making sure your lists are as clean and as efficient as possible. If you had a report with a specific set of filters, you added 100 records, then the next time it ran there were only 99 records in there, we would change the state of that record from active to deleted.

And there’s also a secondary option, if you would like, that allows us to make the person active again if they reenter the report. So, with that in mind, I’m now going to switch to the demo and go through some of the more advanced tactics that I’ve just talked through. This is the report we worked on yesterday within the basic track.

And as you can see, it is pretty basic. It’s got the person’s name, company, and email address. Now, the first thing is, we talked about using the Salesforce contact ID. Contact ID being useful is if you want the data that we create, i.e., subscriber list membership records and email tracking history to be linked back to a specific person, i.e., the person that’s in a report.

Now, we’ll actually have a few more steps to do on the Import Wizard. But the first step to be doing that here is making sure the ID is in the report itself. The next thing is all about filters. So the first thing to point out is that, we currently have a filter based on the last modified date that says all time.

Now, if you’re doing an import, say every hour, and it’s simply to make sure that new records are added or updated, you can actually make this report far more efficient by changing the last modified date to something like today or the last two days. So I’m just going to put today here, I won’t press apply because it will remove all the records.

But effectively, if you have a report set up that’s only looking at records that are changed, and you have the Import Wizard scheduled to run very frequently, every hour or every few hours a day, then it makes sense to make the report as efficient as possible to only contain the records that have been modified.

And modified is kind of two things. One, they’ve been changed, and therefore, some of the custom field data might have been updated that you’re mapping. And two, they may have only been created today. So, with the last modified date, it’s kind of also saying, well, these are records that were last modified/created today. So, it just makes the whole process very, very efficient.

The other thing I want talk about, which is quite understated, is the cross-object filter. Really useful if you want to isolate particular records. And there are two great use cases here. First, I want to work with records that are in Campaign Monitor. So, this is our custom object, it’s called Subscriber List Membership records.

And what that does is it effectively shows that a contact or a lead is on a list with a particular state. So, just by applying this filter, I’m effectively saying, only show me records that I know are in Campaign Monitor. I can apply a secondary filter. So I could say in here, I actually want to work with the state field, and I want to only work with active record.

So, Salesforce contacts that have a record in Campaign Monitor where the state is active, or it could be suppressed, balanced, unsubscribed, but in this example, active. And so, you’re really filtering a particular set of records to work with. You can, which we see a lot, do the inverse of that. So you could say, I want to see all contacts that don’t have subscribe list membership records, i.e., are not in Campaign Monitor.

That’s really useful if you want to try and plug some gaps and make sure that, you know, your data that’s in Salesforce is also reflected in Campaign Monitor. So a typical use case might be that you have a master list, and that should contain all Salesforce records that are eligible, i.e., records that haven’t opted out or have an email address.

If you’re not sure that they’re all across, this is a great way to build a report that allows you to see what data isn’t there, and then you could hook it up to the Import Wizard and send it over. You could then rerun this same report to see where the gaps are. It might be that you’re left with records that have invalid email addresses that are opted out, a variety of different reasons.

But it’s a nice way of working with data. Cross-object filters have quite a few applications. So, you don’t have to just work with our objects, you could work with things like campaign history, identifying records that were part of a particular campaign, for example. So working with standard filters, cross-object filters, using the contact ID are all advanced tips that you can build into your Salesforce report and then use with the Import Wizard.

Let’s now move on to the Import Wizard itself. So I’m just going to go ahead and, let’s go ahead and just save that first. So now we’ve got that report saved and actually what we will do very quickly, let’s just add one final field. And I’m going to go ahead and hit Save here and go back to subscriber list, and we’re going to choose our webinar.

Now, from yesterday, we have that import there. It’s a once off, so we can leave it there if we want to. We could delete it if we wanted to. I will do that just to make it very clear what we’re doing here. So let’s just go ahead and get rid of that guy. I’m going to start a new import. So, first thing is, you could have multiple imports on this screen.

So, I could have, you know, quite a lot of imports running, they could have different sources, they could run at different times. So you’re not just limited to one import into the one list, you can have many. And you can also use imports as a way to supplement data. And what I mean by that is, you can have one report that looks at, say, the contact object, and another report that looks at different object, maybe campaign members.

Now, they’ve got additional fields in them, fields that you wouldn’t find in either object. So you could actually enhance the records that are in Campaign Monitor from two different data sources. So, if I had an email address in both those reports but different custom fields I was mapping, they would all go into the one record in Campaign Monitor, allowing my subscriber membership record to have more data on it, and be updated by the import.

Now, I’m going to go ahead and choose the report that we selected earlier. And that was in the public folder. And it was the contacts and accounts report there. Now, we can see those additional fields that we added earlier. So I’m just going to go ahead and map back first and last name, the account name, and our Salesforce ID.

So we mentioned about adding that earlier. And just a recap on what that does. If you’ve mapped the contact ID to this very special Salesforce ID, which appears here, this means we’ll be using the ID as a way to map data back from Campaign Monitor to Salesforce instead of the email address.

So it’s a great way to make sure that we’re working with the records that are contained in your report, particularly if you have duplicates. The reason that I kind of step back and edit the account source is that I know it doesn’t exist currently in this list. So we can, as I mentioned earlier, create a field on the fly. So we don’t have to jump out of Salesforce into Campaign Monitor and create a field, we can create it right here by clicking on this option.

And it’s going to do a couple of things. It’s going to create a field in this list, it’s going to check the data type, the data type being a list view, a picklist, and that picklist will have underlying values. So it’s going to send over the field, the data type, a picklist, and the underlying values that are in that picklist.

So now I’m going to click next. Scheduling, we covered a little bit of this yesterday, but scheduling is effectively the ability to schedule and have this import run multiple times, and that’s based on days and hours. So we could have it run every day, we could have it run a particular hour, we could have it indeed run at every hour, very much up to you.

Advanced Settings. There are a couple of key things here. First is, clear blank values, and it’s pretty much what it says on the tin. So, by standard, we will not send over blank values to update Campaign Monitor so they don’t overwrite any data. But in some use cases, you actually want a field that’s got blank data to overwrite a value in Campaign Monitor.

And if that applies, it’s as simple as checking this box here. So, this import, if it detects blank values in Salesforce on a mapped field, it’ll update Campaign Monitor and blank that data out. The feature here replaces a very powerful feature, definitely one to know about. But you should, you know, kind of have a lot of caution when using it.

So, by default, anything we do is additive, so we’ll add and update records in Campaign Monitor. The replace option is slightly different. So, what it will do is it will look at the list and see what records are active there. Then it will compare it against the import. And if you’ve got scheduled imports, it will compare it every time it runs.

And it’s simply looking at the different, it’s looking to see whether the source in Salesforce marries up to Campaign Monitor. And if it doesn’t, if there’s a record that’s missing, then it will set the state in Campaign Monitor to deleted. So, as an example, if you do an import with 100 records, then when the report is run again, it’s only got 99 records.

When the Import Wizard runs, that one record will be set to deleted, not unsubscribed or bounced, but deleted in Campaign Monitor. Deleted is a nice way of taking somebody off a list because it’s easier to add them back again. And indeed, within our general options in the settings of our product, there is a re-subscribe option. And the way that works is, if it’s enabled, any time you have an Import Wizard run and a record is in a deleted state but is part of an import, it can be added back, and it can be changed from deleted to active.

Now, that only works on deleted, it will not work on bounces and unsubscribes. Now, hopefully, that gives you a lot of additional information on the basics that we covered yesterday on getting data from Salesforce into Campaign Monitor via the Import Wizard. But as you can see, using more advanced reports and filters, and using some advanced techniques within the Wizard itself, you can actually build up some incredibly powerful automation.

Hope that proved useful. And thank you for watching this part of the demo.

Thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here. My name is Amy. I work for Multiple Sclerosis Limited. We’re a charity based in Australia. We’re here to support people with multiple sclerosis, which is a neurological condition. Around 25,000 people live with MS and we provide support and services to help them throughout their journey, so from diagnosis through to everyday living.

Our supports and services, they range, so we provide them sort of information and advice as well as emotional support, symptom management, help with employment, all sorts of services. And these are funded by our donors and our wonderful fundraisers that take part in our fundraising events. So we’re basically here so that no one has to face MS alone and our services are for people with MS, their carers, and their family members.

We run a variety of fundraising events and my role is to work on a small amount of them. So we have the MS Walk Run Roll, which takes place in all four states, we have the Melbourne Run and Ride Festival and the MS Gong Ride, which goes from Sydney to Wollongong, it’s like an iconic coastal ride, it’s gorgeous, and the MS Mega Challenge group of events.

So that’s a whole bunch of sporting events where people come together as a team, they compete for 24 hours in these endurance events to raise money for people with MS. So the types of people that participate in these events are very broad-ranging. We have toddlers that will swim in the pool through to elderly people and people of all sort of ages and abilities come and take part.

In terms of motivation, a lot of people have a strong connection to MS and that’s why they want to participate. They either have a loved one that lives with MS or they themselves are living with MS but we do have people participate for the challenge of the event or also just to make a difference. They want to do a fundraising event and they choose us because we’re a reputable charity. So my role is to help recruit these participants to these fundraising events and also, like, support them along their fundraising journey.

So when it comes to Campaign Monitor, we have started moving to Campaign Monitor away from Marketing Cloud, and our journey so far has been for that suite of events, recruit our participants and help them with their fundraising while we’re also sort of experimenting with the use of dynamic content and then moving towards automation more and more.

This has been really successful last year so we are actually seeing the whole business move towards Campaign Monitor as well. So today, I want to share with you a little bit about where we’re up to, some examples of where I’ve been using dynamic content to create highly targeted personalized campaigns, and then also share with you where we’re at on our automation journey and what’s sort of next for us.

So I wanted to start with just a really simple email. This is something we would send out prior to an event launching. So we know that the event is coming up and we want to share that with our participants. On the left, we’ve got an example where we’re reaching out to somebody that participated in 2020, which, as we all know, was a very difficult and unique year.

We had to switch our events to virtual. So people, part of our [inaudible] is the coming together of the multiple sclerosis community and everybody moving together as one and sort of battling that isolation that some people do feel living with multiple sclerosis. So during 2020, we weren’t able to have face-to-face events and so switching to virtual was very new for this community but people obviously got behind it and participated and we saw all sorts of photos and people shared their journey.

So the message for those past participants is different. It’s sort of acknowledging that they were with us last year and we couldn’t wait to get moving with them in person. So you can see the message at the bottom there, it sort of tweaks like compared to the message on the right where we’re acknowledging that we were all virtual last year, we haven’t been together but we can’t wait to get back together again and we’re also naming their team by name to add that personal element.

So these are just very simple ways that we can acknowledge our participants on a personal level and it contributes towards that relationship management. On the right, we have a participant that didn’t take part in 2020. So they weren’t part of that conversion to virtual, you know.

We want to acknowledge that we haven’t seen them during the last year and it was challenging and also use the opportunity to promote awareness of multiple sclerosis and its impacts. So touching on how isolating it was but also, we didn’t want to sort of amplify that fear around COVID that people naturally have.

So we sort of said that we can’t wait to get outdoors together and enjoy the scenic course as a way of sort of playing on the fresh air concept of, like, we’re all moving outdoors together so it’s safer, it’s going to be great. So those are just some simple ways. And this email performed around the industry benchmarks so a little bit lower on open rates and a little bit higher on the click-through rate but that’s kind of typical for just something that’s a standard recruitment email for this type of event.

Then, we’ve sort of really got into the targeting. Once we had some people who had attempted to sign up and then abandoned their registration partway through, we end up collecting all this information that they’ve given during the process, even though they haven’t completed their registration. And this is all within one campaign in Campaign Monitor.

I was able to use the information to make highly targeted emails that encourage them to finish their registration. So on the left, we have a participant that has a connection to MS, so they have a loved one, it could be a friend, a family member, or a colleague, someone they know who lives with multiple sclerosis.

So we’ve acknowledged that in the open, that they’d be moving in support of their loved one, they have a very strong connection, whereas other participants might just be participating for the great day or the challenge. So if they were telling us that they’re participating for the challenge of the event, you know, they want to take part an do a five-kilometer run and they want to raise some money for MS, then their imagery and their introduction would be very different.

They’d have someone that’s like running with effort and a bit of sweat at the top and then it would be like a sort of challenge message in the introduction. So these are very simple changes that I was able to make to really acknowledge the person that we’re talking to rather than the group. And on the right, you can see that we’ve got a client or a person living with MS, they might not be a client of ours but they have identified themselves as living with MS during the registration process.

So it wouldn’t be appropriate for us to share the fact with them, that every five minutes, someone in the world is diagnosed with MS. That’s not really appropriate to share with them in that circumstance. We want them to come together with us and with the MS community to battle that isolation. So we talked about moving together in solidarity on World MS Day, which is all about connection this year. So it’s very different messaging that’s more appropriate to that person and touches on their personal motivation for taking part.

And this is all within one campaign. So based on the combination of things that someone’s told us, they might want to take part for the challenge but also be a person living with MS, so their picture at the top might be someone really putting an effort and then their message in the middle would be about joining for solidarity and connection. So from there, we’ve also got some difference in the messaging around cost.

So a person living with MS gets free entry to our events. So we don’t want to promote to them the saving on registration, it’s also not relevant. But they do often have some concerns around health and safety around COVID because of the way that treatment can make them immunocompromised or could put them at higher risk of complications depending on the individual.

So we really wanted that COVID messaging for someone that’s identified that they live with MS to be more front and center. We also experimented with some stuff around teams. So we know that Megan on the right, her team took part and they haven’t signed up yet, they haven’t raised any money but she’s written the team name in during registration or they’ve already signed up.

So we’ve got that little tidbit of information there. So we can share that this team needs her to either get started or to join. And so it’s adding that personalized messaging as well because…I went to a conference recently and I learned that in the digital age, people actually expect a high level of personalization because they know you have so much data about them.

So if they’ve filled out all this information and then you’re showing them something that’s really irrelevant, it’s actually subtly sort of has a negative impact on the relationship. So I’ve tried to take that and apply that as much as possible and that’s why Campaign Monitor has really allowed me to do that and experiment. On the left, we can see that Walk of Hope, their team has already raised over $1800 for people living with MS.

So that team did sign up, they’re already going but Luke hasn’t joined them yet. So these are just examples with example data. So it’s sort of that way of saying, we know you want to take part as an individual and how can we sort of use the information that you’ve provided to encourage you to participate further. So the way that the first sort of save the date email went, which is the last one on the right there that you’re seeing, you know, around the average sort of open rates for not-for-profits, you can see it’s sort of sitting at that average mark but when we go into the highly targeted people, they are more interested, generally because they’ve already attempted to sign up but we’re getting really successful open rates and click through rates.

And on the latter one, we had, I think it was around 80 people who were sent that email and of that, maybe 32 signed up or 32 opened and 28 signed up. So it ended up being quite a good conversion rate and it’s something that we could tweak. So we can see where people are engaging with that email, how the personalized content is working for them, and then easily just use the dynamic blocks and settings to put in more personalization.

So the next part of our journey that we’ve been working on is automation. So eventually, that abandoned registration process will become automated. So if somebody attempts to sign up, we have all that information about them and we can target them.

That would eventually be a less manual process whereas now, I’m sort of in that experimenting phase and figuring out what’s going to work best. So once we get sign it’s working really well, we’ll automate that process and then it’s just sort of set and then jump in and assess as we need to. Where we have made some progress with automation already is the MS Mega Challenge.

So that’s, again, our endurance events. There’s over 20 or 30 events around the states that we operate in and a few different sports. So people take part for 24 hours, they raise money for people with MS, they’re very community-based funds for all ages, all abilities events. We have a set sort of fundraising journey.

So somebody signs up and we have a suite of 14 emails that we want them to receive. And that would include like their resources, their team captains, content. We have local stories. So one event that takes part in regional Victoria, we wouldn’t want them to get a story from Sydney, we want them to have a story of somebody within their local community that’s living with MS that’s been awarded a scholarship to fulfill a dream, which is what they fundraise money for.

We want them to know that it’s having an impact within their local community. So the automation allows us to give them this set of emails that’s really relevant to them and helps them achieve their fundraising goals but then also, we can slot in very easily, highly localized content as well.

So there might be incentives like competitions or these really highly localized stories to sort of connect them with their community. So you can see, this particular event had only just begun when I took this screenshot. So of the emails that have been sent, it’s performing really well but, you know, that does change.

We do have some fluctuation between the performance because some events are sort of less engaged than others. But across the board, the automation does allow us to sort of easily communicate that set content and then tweak it where possible to make it highly localized. So that’s been fantastic to get up and running and something that we’ve looked to use more throughout the other events that I’m running but also throughout the organization.

So our journey so far with Campaign Monitor has been really fantastic. So it all began with this sort of simple recruitment and fundraising emails that we were creating and then we had the full integration set up from Salesforce to Campaign Monitor with the API. So that enabled us real automation around our data management, so regular uploads on its own, we can fully control and design the reports within Salesforce and then have that imported into Campaign Monitor, and then use segmenting.

And with this full oversight around our data, we’re then able to be in the mindset of how can we now use this knowing exactly what’s in there to create these really highly targeted campaigns. So in creating the dynamic content and creating the automation, it’s all for the same purpose, to recruit our fundraisers and get them on their journey and have them raising money for people with MS and that’s been working really well so far.

So with Campaign Monitor and the Salesforce integration, we’re just sort of on a journey of using it more and more and more to get more highly targeted and more automation and then we can take a more strategic sort of bird’s eye view of how things are going and tweak when necessary. So the next step for us is integrating that with run growth of SMS. So we’d be looking at conversational style SMS but also, just sort of shout-outs and getting more cut through by using that method as well as our email and social media and relationship management calls.

So it’s a holistic approach. And then the other part to that is our organization has a number of other fundraising events and also other communication activities. So they’re in the current process of moving over to Campaign Monitor as well. And the way that the Salesforce integration helps us with that is basically, we know that everyone has the same uniform lists and then we’ll be able to understand who’s targeting who and when and reduce any sort of crossover without communications where it might conflict.

So going out to someone from sort of three different teams on one day is obviously not ideal. So we’ll be able to have a bit more oversight into who’s targeting what sort of groups and when and then how can we optimize that and work in a way for everyone’s benefit. So yeah, there’s some really exciting stuff happening for us here at MS involving Campaign Monitor and the Salesforce integration.

So yeah, if you had any questions at all, feel free to reach out to me or the Campaign Monitor team and thank you for having me.