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CRM Campaign Member Status and Campaign Response Best Practices

Any CRM administrator will tell you they have to walk a fine line between what the business needs for reporting purposes and how users want a system to work to make their jobs easier. It's also normal for the business requirements to evolve as a company matures, so that line is a moving target. It applies to all objects and end users touching the CRM; campaigns are no exception.

Whether marketers use CRM campaigns or just use their MAS, how they've decided to structure their CRM campaigns, and how careful they are about maintaining the data may seem inconsequential at first. The minute we start talking about attribution, a lack of structure can make reporting almost impossible. Attribution, funnels, engagement, and campaign responses are critically linked.

We must also balance reporting needs with what end users require to do their jobs well.

In order to get the campaign data structure "right," we need to discuss how the components of a campaign are linked to concepts like funnels, engagement, and attribution. Once your business understands how vital these components are to uncovering insights in their data later, we find that they're much more willing to go through the process of agreeing on data definitions.

This article encompasses campaign member status and response best practices. For more campaign best practices in your CRM, check out this KB article and an interview with our attribution onboarding expert.

Why Care About Campaign Member Statuses?

Campaigns help us track marketing efforts to further the brand. The campaign member object in your CRM is how we link campaigns to the person involved. Member statuses are meant to help us understand exactly what they did with the campaign.

How someone interacts with a campaign is so important because it helps us track a potential buyer's intent or engagement AND flags that information for sales.

Campaign Members help us understand what is eligible for "qualified lead" status or a meaningful moment demonstrating some intent to buy -- or, at the very least, a willingness to have a conversation. The Member Status helps sales understand exactly what they did with the campaign. A message from a salesperson should look different when we're targeting someone who registered for a webinar but failed to show up versus someone who attended and was highly engaged.

A lack of rigor around which statuses are used by campaign type can create confusion among marketers and salespeople. When we agree to consistently use the same statuses, the sales team has less to think through when they see a campaign engagement on a contact's record. It also helps the marketing team by giving them one less thing to worry about during campaign execution.

CRM Campaign Member Status Best Practices

We recommend sitting down with your department and discussing the possible interactions with prospects marketers would like to track. We also recommend investigating different apps on the AppExchange that allow marketers to automatically apply a list of statuses (and whether or not they are a response) to a campaign. These statuses are linked to the Type field.

For those of you looking for a starting point for your organization, the following is a list of common campaign types and descriptive member statuses that can help sales cater outreach. When we felt something needed more explanation, we added context that we would not include in our CRM field label between these symbols: <>.

Content Download:

  • Form Fill
  • Ungated <if you are able to de-anonymize traffic and track ungated assets>

Content Syndication:

  • Form Fill
  • Email Click
  • Ungated

Demo Signup:

  • Form Fill
  • Chat Request

Direct Mail:

  • Sent
  • Received
  • Not Received (Error)

Email:

  • Sent
  • Opened
  • Clicked
  • Bounced <you may want to differentiate between soft and hard bounces>

In-Person Event:

  • Invited
  • Registered
  • Attended
  • Registered - No Show

Paid Social:

  • In-App Form Fill

Referral Program:

  • Referral (verbal)
  • Form Fill

Tradeshow:

  • On List <on a purchased list from the organization hosting the event - these people have not interacted directly with your brand>
  • Invited
  • Booth Scan <also consider giving people a SWAG grab option on your scan tool if you're incentivizing visits from people who may not be in-market for your product>
  • Meeting Set <if you have an inside sales motion you leverage for major events>
  • Meeting Held
  • Meeting Set - No Show

Webinar:

  • Invited
  • Registered
  • Attended
  • Registered - No Show
Looking for channels like Organic Social, Paid Search, and others? We recommend tracking form fills in your CRM and appending the UTM parameters associated with the form fill on the campaign member record if possible. Or using CaliberMind to assist with this.

These options are meant to be used as a starting point. If you have advanced signals with, for example, your webinar, you can add statuses that help sales understand how engaged someone was during the webinar. We also recommend referring to our Campaign Best Practices article for more information on how we suggest grouping major initiatives or events.

Why Care About Campaign Responses?

As someone who has helped marketers report on the return of their marketing investments for many years, I would argue the campaign response is just as important, if not more so, than the Member Status. The Member Status has a lot of cross-functional utility. It communicates what someone did with the campaign so sales can respond appropriately. The Response checkbox helps the system understand whether the campaign interaction should be considered for qualification. The Response Date helps us understand where that interaction fell in a sequence of events.

For example, a Demo Request Form Fill is likely going to flag a person as qualified or interested in speaking with sales. The Response Date helps us understand if that Demo Request happened immediately before an opportunity was created or after the account was engaged in the selling cycle through another contact at the prospect account.

We also rely heavily on the Response indicator in attribution and engagement modeling. We assume that a Response is a meaningful interaction with your brand. If a marketer sets up statuses but forgets to check the Response box, member statuses may have a mixture of responses and non-responses. This makes reporting very confusing and may result in your sales team being unaware of some critical events!

Campaign Response Best Practices

We recommend limiting responses to an event that could signal someone is ready to talk to sales.

This seems like a cut-and-dry statement, but there are nuances. For example, some companies may only consider people who are highly engaged in a webinar and watched 75% or more to be engaged or a response. Other companies may consider a registration a response. Neither company is wrong.

The stage and needs of the company must drive your definition of a response.

Smaller organizations with less awareness and lead volume may consider a Registration a response because the person filling out the registration knows that sharing their data is inevitably going to lead to outreach from a salesperson. It's an expected outcome.

On the other hand, more mature organizations may know exactly who fits into their ideal customer profile and have the lead volume that warrants holding specific interactions back. If your company isn't at the tipping point where salespeople have more lead volume than they can adequately follow up with, we recommend the subset from above be considered responses:

Content Download:

  • Form Fill

Demo Signup:

  • Form Fill
  • Chat Request

Direct Mail:

  • Received

In-Person Event:

  • Registered
  • Attended
  • Registered - No Show

Paid Social:

  • In-App Form Fill

Referral Program:

  • Referral (verbal)
  • Form Fill

Tradeshow:

  • Booth Scan
  • Meeting Set
  • Meeting Held
  • Meeting Set - No Show

Webinar:

  • Registered
  • Attended
  • Registered - No Show

We understand these statuses won't be ideal responses for all companies. Your team will need to talk through what makes sense from a business perspective as a response. What does your team think warrants follow-up from sales? You'll also want to speak with your sales team and get buy-in from management.

Getting sign-off on a definition of a response will reduce friction with sales!

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