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About Campaigns

A campaign is the vehicle or project in which you convey a marketing message to one or more groups of people. Typically, campaigns deliver a promotional offer across channels of communication to retain current customers or to acquire new customers. The goal is to generate additional interest in company products and services, ultimately driving additional revenue.

Using campaigns allows you to:

  • Store campaign information such as budgeted costs compared with actual costs, targeted leads, and marketing material (for example, brochures and artwork) in one place.
  • Share views of campaigns with the entire marketing team and share consistent campaign information with your sales team from the same location in real time.
  • See your campaign results by viewing leads and opportunities generated by the campaign.
  • Use prebuilt reports to measure the results and determine the return on investment of your campaign activities in real time.
  • Make historical comparisons between current and past campaigns to identify trends.

Sales and marketing managers can import leads and link them to an existing campaign. Lead information must first be formatted in a comma-separated value (.csv) file.

Campaigns, Leads, Opportunities, and Contacts

In the course of a campaign, you can generate multiple leads that are linked to the campaign. If you convert some of those leads to opportunities or contacts, the link to the campaign is carried over from the originating leads to the converted opportunities and contacts.

For example, Campaign A creates 100 leads L1 through L100. You link each of these leads to Campaign A. Leads L1 through L90 never show promise of producing revenue. Leads L91 through L100 do show revenue potential, so you convert them to opportunities O1 through O10. Each of these opportunities is automatically linked to Campaign A by way of its originating lead.

Several months later, you want to review the effectiveness of Campaign A. You view the Campaign A record and see that there are 100 leads and 10 opportunities linked to it. You can compare these results to past campaigns or to your expectations for this campaign, and make adjustments accordingly.

NOTE: If your administrator adds custom fields for leads, those fields are not carried over to the opportunity records when the lead is converted to an opportunity or contact. An exception occurs if your company administrator sets up additional mapping through the Lead Conversion Mapping feature. For more information about mapping lead fields, see Mapping Additional Fields During Lead Conversion.


Published May 2008