When your sales and marketing teams are collecting leads to build the pipeline, the next step is to reach out to those warm leads and qualify them in hopes of converting them into customers. Those efforts are best represented in Salesforce as Campaigns so you can track responses and ROI to your drip campaigns, webinars, whitepapers, etc.

In this post we will learn about the technical execution of how to get your leads linked to your campaigns. But before we get started, it’s always good to have a strategy and plan leading our execution.

Strategy for Campaign and Lead Management

For a more thorough discussion of lead management strategy, I highly encourage you to check out this Dreamforce video: Salesforce Fundamentals: Strategy for Campaign and Lead Management. This is a great co-hosted presentation by such mavens and MVPs as Deepa Patel (@dpcrmguru), Shell Black (@ShellBlack), Maria Belli (@JustAGirlyGeek), and Bryan Boroughf (@BryanBoroughf).

I also highly encourage you to follow Stacey Cogswell (@Stay_Sea_) for best practices around campaign hierarchy and data to collect on your campaigns for ROI reporting. Her presentation at Midwest Dreamin ’16 was AMAZING!

Last but not least, check out Shell Black’s whiteboard video series. He does such a great job breaking down complex concepts and providing practical advice.

8 Ways to Add Leads to Campaigns

1. Campaign Record

For starters, you can manage campaign members directly from the Campaign record page by using the Manage Members button. It will let you search for existing leads that you can add to the campaign. Check out below this video tutorial by David Giller (@DavidGiller), Salesforce MVP and CEO of Brainiate.

Salesforce documentation here.

2. Lead Record

Create a new lead and add them to a campaign in one step! This is a design feature by Salesforce to let users conveniently link new leads to a campaign rather than having to save the record then add the lead in a second step.

For this to work, the Campaign field needs to be added to the page layout. This is a magical field and doesn’t actually exist on the Lead object, but when creating new leads this field will be available on the page layout. Note, when editing an existing lead this lookup field will not display to users despite it being on the page layout. That is because it is a feature designed specifically when leads are being created. Check out the rest of this blog post for other ways to add existing leads to campaigns =)

Salesforce documentation here.

3. Lead List View

Use a list view on the Lead tab to narrow down to specific leads you want to add to a campaign then click the Add to Campaign button. Any leads you’ve selected in the list view will be added to the campaign of your choice when prompted after clicking the button. Check out these instructions by Johan Yu (@simplysfdc), Salesforce MVP.

Salesforce documentation here.

4. Lead Record’s Campaign History Related List

You can add a lead to campaigns by using the Campaign History related list from the lead detail page. Click the Add to Campaign button and you’ll be prompted for the campaign and member status you want to add the lead to. Check out below this video tutorial by Vanessa Mays (@vmays108).

Salesforce documentation here.

5. Data Import Wizard

The Data Import Wizard is a convenient web-based tool built right into Salesforce Setup that lets administrators mass insert/update leads and assign them to campaigns in one step. This is useful when you’ve collected some leads from a trade show or event and you were given the .csv or spreadsheet of the data and now you need to load to Salesforce.

Salesforce documentation here and here.

6. Lead Reports

When we talk about adding leads to campaign from reports we have two options: manual or automatic.

Lead Reports – Manual

This is an out-of-the-box option for any lead report. Create and run a lead report and you’ll see a special Add to Campaign button that can be used to add all the leads in the report to the campaign of your choice. Pretty slick, huh?

Salesforce documentation here.

Lead Reports – Automatic

What if I told you we could automate the process of adding to campaigns the leads that meet your report criteria by running the report on a schedule? I wrote about this specific solution in an earlier blog post which uses Report Subscriptions feature.

Github project here.

7. Web-2-Lead

This solution lets you create an HTML form, embed it on any website, and when the form is submitted then it will create a new lead in your Salesforce org. No login necessary!

Check out these step-by-step instructions by Jitendra Zaa (@JitendraZaa), Salesforce MVP.

Handling Spam
Nothing’s worse than bad lead data than some robot generating hundreds and thousands of more bad data into your marketing database. Ugh!! Check out this question on Salesforce StackExchange about how to prevent spam submissions. Great suggestions by experts Daniel Ballinger (@FishOfPrey), Matt & Neil (@mattandneil), and others. And please vote up this idea on the IdeaExchange.

Salesforce documentation here and here.

8. Process Builder and Flow

This solution is inspired by a question I received from Derek Hays who had reached the max of 5 report subscriptions per solution #6 above and needed another way to automate adding leads to campaigns. We chose a simple, non-code solution involving one custom field, Process Builder, and Flow.

Consider this use case. You’re integrating leads to Salesforce with a third-party app. And based on actions the lead takes on your website (download whitepaper, subscribe to email newsletter, click certain links, make purchase, etc.) you want the lead added to different marketing campaigns.

Ideally, the third-party app you’re using would know how to do this out of the box and add the lead as campaign members appropriately. But if not, then you have to get a little creative.

This solution is on my github repo. Click the Deploy to Salesforce link in the README file there to easily deploy the configuration to your dev org or sandbox to try it out.

Next Steps

Now that you’ve got your lead strategy plan in place, and you’ve got your techniques for how you’re going to add those leads to your campaigns, your next step is to leverage marketing automation like Pardot or Marketing Cloud.

What’s your favorite way to add leads to campaigns? Let me know in the comments below, thanks!