Speaker 0: Hey, everyone. Uh, I’m really excited about this session that we have right now. My name is Amber. Um, I’ll be your moderator. I’m from Sercante. Um, we have Pam Carey today and she’s gonna be presenting, So You Want to Revamp Your Campaign Setup. Um, and I wanna give a thanks to all of our sponsors. Without them, we couldn’t do this. So, um, if you could go to the sponsors and resources tab, go check them out, show them some love, um, and yeah. Thank you. Great.

Speaker 1: Thanks, Amber. Thanks, Amber. Hi, everyone. Okay. So, um, most likely, you are at this session because of one of these scenarios, and this is how you’re feeling. Revamping your campaigns can feel really overwhelming, but with the right information and careful planning, it’s very possible. We’ll go over things that I’ve learned along the way, where to start, information and decisions that you need, gotchas to watch out for, and how to execute. A main thing to keep in mind throughout the process is keep it simple. Find areas to kiss the project.

In the first phase, you’ll review and evaluate where things stand right now and use that information to develop a comprehensive plan. As you move through these steps, take the time to document the details along the way to help create the overall plan. Unfortunately, there isn’t a one size fits all format. It’s very dependent on your company’s needs. Some main points to consider are, what is the level of effort for setting up and managing campaigns? Is the current state too complicated for your reporting needs? And, conversely, is there data available to feed your reports? And finally, what do you need for roll up reporting?

I really don’t like hearing the answer of it depends, but that’s where we are. How many hierarchies? That really depends. Remember, it’s not one size fits all. The recommendation is two to four levels. Many companies land on three, but Salesforce does support up to five. The lowest level of the campaign should be the in the individual initiative, the specific ad or email or specific event. The number of levels above this depends on your business and reporting needs. But it’s also good to remember that if you can filter your report or dashboard on an existing data point, such as a date, type, or other field value, you may not need a specific hierarchy level for that.

Explore the pain points that are in your current state and seek opportunities to kiss the structure or processes. At the same time, you don’t want to oversimplify and create opposite pain points, so it is definitely a balance.

The best place to start is at the end. Define what’s important for your reporting and then work backwards. What information is needed at the your top level of reporting or your campaign metrics at a glance? Once you identify what you need at the top, you’ll know what data needs to roll up from lower levels. Continue that balancing act, getting enough data for reporting without too much complexity. Consider what’s needed to slice and dice data in reports and dashboards. Are fields in place to collect this data? Are pick lists set up with the correct supporting values?

Let’s talk about fields. Review and evaluate your current fields for effectiveness, usage, level of complexity, and areas of confusion and errors. Do the current fields provide the right data for your reports? Is data consistently missing? You may need to adjust fields to make them required. Does it seem that users are having trouble selecting or entering, um, the correct information? These values may need to be updated for clarity. Is there incorrect data in fields? This could indicate that users are confused about the expected input. Also, if you find fields that are never used, clean the house. Just plan to remove them. You wanna take a look at existing field dependencies and consider consider if these will be impacted by the project. Also, as you move through the project planning, keep an eye out for new field dependencies that may be needed. Just keep them in the back of your mind.

Record types can add complexity and really shouldn’t be used without a good use case. So what are those good use cases? If you need a segment of campaigns, uh, or if a segment of campaigns don’t need to sync to another system, such as account engagement, maybe you don’t need your sales campaigns to sync over there. If you have campaign groups that need very different data or elements like fields, pick list values, page layouts, um, that could warrant a a a record type. Um, this could apply to sales versus marketing or different products or different lines of business. If you need to allow users access to only a specific kind of campaign, a record type will help you. If you have multiple tools or systems that need to receive different campaign information, example would be account engagement, uh, business units, more than one.

This is the time to ensure campaign members are being added to campaigns consistently. If not, build this into your plan to solve with automations, team training, whatever. An important thing to remember is that campaign members should only be added to the individual initiative campaign at the lowest level of the hierarchy. Adding them to levels above will create duplicate reporting data.

An export of campaign member statuses will likely unveil ways to kiss that information. Combine like values into one simple item, such as attended event, attended webinar, attended trade show. Just put the put them all to attended. Look for statuses with no or low usage and plan to retire or remove them. This is a good time to consider an automation that will add predefined statuses to new campaigns based on type or something else you wanna define. Check to make sure that the correct statuses are marked as responded as they may factor into reporting and campaign influence. Also consider the opposite. Are there statuses marked as responded that should not be? You’ll be able to bulk import new statuses during the execution phase. It’s good to note here that you cannot rename a status if members are currently assigned to it. The best way around this is to create a new status with the new name and move members to that status. If there is a reason to keep the existing status and rename it, you’ll need to move members temporarily to another status, update the original name, and then move the members back.

Creating consistency with a naming convention benefits users and reporting. Kiss the name and keep them as brief and simple as possible. Also, be aware that Salesforce has an 80 character limit for the name field. If you must use a more complex naming convention, which is okay. And if you have difficulty using campaign names in reporting or elsewhere, look to field data to fill that reporting need, and don’t be afraid to create new fields for this purpose. Look to automation to fill the campaign name using other field values. Uh, you can use an automation to basically concatenate field values field value, um, into one string. This would make it easier for users and also, um, ensure consistency.

Okay. It’s decision time. What data will you will be impacted in this project? The complexity of the project and your final plan depend on whether existing data needs to be updated or if the changes will only apply to new campaigns. Create a timeline for this project and account for dates that you may need to work around, like blackout dates, a product launch, company reporting, holidays, vacation schedules, and the like. Think about other systems. If your campaign data syncs to other systems, include this in your plan. If these systems will be impacted, perform testing to fully understand the impact to identify what actions you need to add to your task list and to ensure a smooth rollout. At this point, you’ve likely looped in other members of your team and leadership. But how about sales? Have you connected with them? Host a meeting to review what’s happening and why and outline the changes, uh, that will impact them and their process. Put emphasis on the improvements that pertain to them and how this will make their jobs better or easier. And while you have their ear, you should also discuss contact rule usage if that’s an area that needs improvement.

Let’s spin through some gotchas that you might encounter. Reporting. When communicating the project and rollout dates to others, be sure that they understand that reporting will be impacted while the updates are in progress. I hope this is already part of your repertoire, your reporting repertoire, but include IDs in all of the reports that you pull out for this this project. It’s not only important for this project, but it’s a great habit to build. I really can’t tell you how many times I’ve run a report, made updates in the exported spreadsheet, then realized I couldn’t import or run a v lookup or something else because that essential ID was missing. So now I export every single ID field I can find. If you’re working in both sandbox and production, test to make sure IDs are the same in both environments and make adjustments if not. The recommendation is to execute in production, but this could impact how you build your import lists and test in sandbox.

If you plan to update campaign member statuses, consider these impacts. You may also wanna do some research to on these items to fully understand, uh, what they’re about. This was mentioned earlier, and it’s definitely a gotcha worth mentioning in this section. A campaign member status cannot be renamed if members are already assigned to it. You may need to temporarily assign members to a different status, then put them back after renaming or complete or create a completely new status of the new name and just move members to that. The important callout here is to be aware that date field changes will happen. And there’s an overview of, um, of these impacts on this slide that you could you can review later and dig into more. Similar to renaming, campaign member statuses cannot be removed if members are attached. You may want to work around this, um, to retire statuses by renaming them with something obvious so that users know not to use them.

If a campaign member status didn’t change during the during importing, these are the likely reasons. There may be a still active automation or flow that’s taking action. There could be an unresolved import error, or this one definitely tripped me up. The new status may not have been added to the campaign yet.

If you receive an error message during imports of required fields are missing, yet the field was in your import file, Know this, that the imported data cannot be blank. So you can’t have, um, you know, your required field in place in your file with the header of the column as the required field name, but no no data because you don’t need to change anything. So the workaround for this is to temporarily remove the status of required in the page layout. So edit your page layout, find the field, untick the required box, save your page layout, then you can go back and, uh, complete or rerun the import and then reinstate the requirement, uh, back on the page layout.

While scary, working in production is really the best. You don’t wanna complete all of your work in a sandbox only to realize that some or all of it can’t be pushed over to production by a change set or the IDs are not the same or something else. Definitely lean on Sandbox for your testing, though.

Make some new friends. DataLoader and VLOOKUP. You will likely use both the online dataloader.io and the downloaded DataLoader app during the project. If you don’t have much or any experience with the tool, I highly recommend some research to understand the differences in the functions and learn when to use which one. I also recommend that you practice with each to get comfortable with each feature, the steps involved, and the results. I heavily used Excel’s vlook function, vlookup function to compare and find data in my data prep spreadsheet. Again, practice using it to get comfortable and realize its power. I also often use the concatenate function in Excel to combine IDs with other data to make a solidly unique value for lookups and comparisons.

Why why should you get your plan on paper, which these days is the screen. Right? Um, it’s a resource to share with other stakeholders for review, approval, etcetera. It defines what information will change and how. It could surface some missing steps, lack of detail, or areas of confusion. You can use it to gut check the plan with others. And in the end, it can turn into your ultimate resource resource for execution.

Along the way, you’ve been recording all of the details. But before creating your final task list, think about the order of operations. What needs to happen before something else is done? You know, what what steps are dependent on another one? Between the on paper resource, the details captured along the way, and the order of operations, you should now have a thorough task list. Order the tasks start to finish, add in timelines, assignments, system name, and anything else that will help you stay organized during execution.

Set the future you up for success in case anything doesn’t go according to plan. Export all of your current campaign data with those IDs before starting any changes. Name them specifically with do not edit. Put them in a separate folder. Whatever. If you wanna use those as working files, that’s fine. Make a copy and rename them as working file. You wanna keep those originals, you know, just pristine in case you need to roll back.

Sandbox is a great place to sandbox and test. Yes. It’s extra effort to set some things up in sandbox only to do the same in production, but it will prove to be invaluable. Run through your task list to make sure the order the order is correct, all steps are included, and everything works as you expect. Also, practice using data loader, both versions, for import and export tasks to become comfortable, understand the steps, and confirm your expectations. Leverage automation to reduce user time, avoid errors, and ensure consistency.

Now comes the scary part, putting your plan into action. Keep in mind that the following steps may be different for your unique plan. Pause current automations that impact campaigns, campaign members, member statuses before making any changes. You don’t want them to go through and undo what you’ve already done in the midst of of your updates. Keep in mind that these automations may also exist outside of Salesforce, such as account engagement.

Create new or update existing fields and field related items, such as your pick lists. Import your data with the appropriate tool. This might include updating campaign names, adding data to to new fields, updating existing field data, whatever. Pay attention to the error reports along the way and resolve each before moving on to the next. Perform your imports using the order of operations defined during your planning phase.

Now you can create new campaign member statuses with the data loader insert action. Next, it’s time to use a two step process to update existing campaign member statuses. You’ll need to export the list of statuses, then import. I wanna I wanna call out that the export is very important. The campaign member status ID is not the same across the board for the same single status, but it’s unique to that status on each campaign. So you could have attended on five different campaigns, and they’re gonna have a unique ID for each. Keep in mind the gotcha items that we discussed earlier too.

You can now assign campaign members to a different status. Remember that there are gotcha items here as well, such as date field changes. Be sure to review your errors and spot check. Data loader will give you, um, a success and error report after each process, so be sure you’re checking those errors, correcting things, and reimporting. Also, be sure to spot check the data in in your org to be sure that what you expected to happen did happen. Was new data added? Was current data changed?

Okay. You’re so close to the end. You’ve double checked that all imports are complete. Your errors were resolved, and your data is confirmed before moving on, but you’re not done yet. Now is the time to re deactivate campaign field pick list values that will no longer be used. Next, you can update or create new field dependencies according to your plan. If you paused any automations at the start, evaluate if they should be turned back on. So whether these changed or not, you should review and test to make sure they still work ex as expected before you turn them back on. Build the new automations in your plan and fully test before making them active. After you fully review and test, it’s time to taint train the teammates. Provide an overview of the full project and then explain operations moving forward, such as new processes, automations that make things easier, new updated and retired field values or fields, and campaign member statuses.

Now is the time to do your happy dance, kick back, put your feet up on your desk, go for a run, or whatever is your style. Take the time to celebrate. Also, be sure you spread the word internally. This was a huge endeavor that should be bragged about. Also, don’t forget to add this to your your project. Don’t forget to add this project to your personal list of accomplishments and maybe even your resume if you keep that up to date as you go along. If you’re like me, you forget about things you’ve done, and you have a hard time recreating that. So not to minimize this complex project, but to recap, it’s not impossible. Careful planning is key, and you’re a hero at the end.

So what’s next after this? Well, we don’t have a crystal ball. Right? So, um, so we have some ideas here of of what you can can do for the next steps, including leveling up your campaign influence reporting, embracing your data loader skills to to get set up for the next year with, uh, setting up new campaigns, building new more automations, you know, looking for ways to to help you and your team streamline and simplify. And if you need help, Circante is always there to help you. Thank you so much. I hope this helps you to feel empowered to jump in and execute a successful campaign revamp. Uh, Christina, do we have any questions?

Speaker 2: Um, uh, not at the current well, actually, hang on. Not at the current moment.

Speaker 1: But Okay.

Speaker 2: I this this would actually be an opportunity for people to, uh, throw questions in the chat and the q and a that have any for Pam. So first of all, I wanted to say thank you, Pam. I I I really appreciate you sharing your expertise. And, um, I wanted to just, like, uh, comment on, um, the ending piece there about how you shared celebrating the success at the end of the project and then also sharing, um, what you did internally with your team. I feel like so often this is a step that gets skipped over by a lot of teams. And, um, the reason why it, like, stuck out to me so much is because I was just recently on the afternoon, uh, keynote panel, and one of the speakers said how, um, they take time to celebrate things like this. And, um, and then they talked about how it also just emphasizes to the other teams how you can continue to partner with them to, um, create that much more of a seamless experience for your customers with this, um, optimized campaign process. Um, so with that, actually, we have just received a few questions from the chat, um, and I believe we have time. So, um, Pam, Leah asks, do you have any industry specific examples of how people set up their campaigns? That’s a pretty loaded question for a few minutes. But It

Speaker 1: is it is a it is a loaded question. Um, but I would really go back to, um, not sure that industry matters. Right? It matters to your company and your reporting. And you may, um, you may come across things that that could be, um, an industry specific criteria or or level that that you would want to include.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah. I yeah. Um, and I think too just taking it back to the business to your point, like, it’s not necessarily always about the industry, but about your company and the goals that you’re going after. Um, I think we have time for one more question. Um, Pam, do you have any recommendations for Susan? She’s asking about ways or resources of how to protect campaign member statuses. Um, they use an automated creator, but she needs to update member statuses on campaign types and the automation setup predates, uh, Susan.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So, um, Susan, I think you’re asking how to protect your campaign member statuses so that others don’t go in and change them or add others. Um, I do have a resource not at my fingertips, but I will follow-up with you and, um, and send that along on how to how to get that into place.

Speaker 2: Perfect. Um, and for every for everyone for the for the people in the back, um, the reason why it’s so important to lock down those campaign member statuses is, um, so then that way you have consistency for your reporting. Um, I I I once like, speaking from firsthand experience, I once had, like, one letter off on a campaign member status as as I was yeah. Literally. And and one letter off doesn’t if you’re typing typing it in manually. Exactly. Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1: And and when when you do that initial export of all of the campaign member statuses, you’re probably gonna find something like that.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. For sure. Um, alright. Well, thank you everyone for today’s session. And, Pam, thank you so much for, uh, sharing your expertise with everyone.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Thanks everyone for coming, and thanks, Christina, for for wrapping us up.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Alright. Enjoy the rest of your Emergent, everyone. Bye. Bye.