Maintenance Connection | Campaign
Custom Lead Attribution Through Pardot and Salesforce
Overview
SmartAcre® worked with our client, Maintenance Connection, to build an automated and customized attribution program in one month.
Challenge
Maintenance Connection brought SmartAcre on board to not only accelerate their marketing campaigns but also gain a deeper understanding of the effectiveness and impact of their lead nurturing efforts.
After hearing this challenge, and attending a number of cross-team brainstorming sessions, SmartAcre worked with Maintenance Connection to build a process within Pardot and Salesforce that allows Maintenance Connection to connect the influence of marketing activity to the movement of leads through the pipeline and report on it. Because Maintenance Connection’s marketing engine relies heavily on email nurtures, the top priority was to gather tracking information on these efforts.
Approach
To ensure that Maintenance Connection’s marketing email nurtures could be tracked, SmartAcre delivered and built a strategic roadmap to enhance Maintenance Connection’s existing nurturing processes. The most important task was the initial need to standardize the use of Pardot and its integration with Salesforce, which helped to ensure that marketing nurtures could be accurately attributed to converted leads. This strategic shift recommended and implemented by SmartAcre included:
- Custom fields and field mapping
- Engagement Studio programs
- The buildout of Salesforce workflow actions and rules
- Nurture mapping
- Reporting
Setup
At the outset of the project, SmartAcre built a map of an ideal, full-funnel nurture program to fuel Maintenance Connection’s marketing engine. This included both high-performing nurtures already in place and net-new nurtures to fill the gaps in Maintenance Connection’s efforts to push leads through the buyer’s journey.
We then identified how to best tie the data from the nurture programs running in Pardot to Salesforce. To do this, SmartAcre recommended the implementation of two new fields that would map across Pardot and Salesforce.
Current Nurture Status
This field was created to populate at the beginning of every active Engagement Studio program with the name of the respective program. This ensured that anyone in the program would have a “Current Nurture Status” field. At the end of each nurture Engagement Studio program, this field is cleared.
Nurture Status at MQL Conversion Point, Nurture Status at SQL Conversion Point, and Nurture Status at Customer Conversion Point
These three fields were created to capture the value in the “Current Nurture Status” field at the time a lead converts to the appropriate lifecycle stage.
To implement this, SmartAcre built a Salesforce workflow rule based on the “Lead Status” field to update the conversion point. Once a lead status changed, the appropriate Lifecycle Stage (MQL, SQL, Customer) was assigned. For example, at the point in time when the Lifecycle Stage changes to MQL, the “MQL Conversion Point” field is populated with the current value in the “Current Nurture Status” field. Once populated, this field is locked and will never change.
Reporting and Tracking
Once the technical set-up was complete, SmartAcre worked with Maintenance Connection to build custom reporting out of Salesforce. The goal was to ensure that Maintenance Connection had full visibility of the impact of marketing nurtures and campaigns on business results and the progression of a lead’s lifecycle.
Outcomes
60%
of leads had an attributed nurture status after 1 month of implementation
100%
of leads who were in a nurture had an attributed nurture status after 1 month of implementation
100%
of leads had an automated nurture status attribution
Post-Project Success
By optimizing the current nurture process and ensuring that existing nurtures could be mapped to leads in Salesforce, we set up Maintenance Connection to successfully track their leads. We created custom fields in Pardot that would better track a customer throughout the funnel, assigning them a status that would change with each step in the customer journey. Finally, we set up a Salesforce report that could easily provide Maintenance Connection with a better understanding of the impact of their marketing campaigns on business. With insight into how their nurturing efforts impact the bottom line, Maintenance Connection is enabled to make data-based adjustments to their marketing mix, messaging, and goals.
Where We Start
Book a strategy session and we will discuss your unique challenges. For free. Maybe one day you will have a success story to add to this page.