Online Campaigns at Cloud Speed

Executing online campaigns has never been easier using tools in the Cloud. No experience is required and certainly zero technical skills. You can deliver high impact and polished campaigns using a couple of very affordable online solutions.

Let me start by saying I am not receiving any compensation for the tools I am about to talk about in this post. Our client experienced such good success we felt we had to write about it. You can emulate this success quite easily yourself.

These are the steps we took in developing and executing our campaign using tools exclusively in the Cloud:

1. Designed our campaign - First we determined our offers for the campaign and the targets for those offers. In our particular case, we were emailing to a fairly large list of  targets who had expressed an interest in our solution offerings by registering on our website. The contact form on our website links directly to our salesforce.com system and automatically creates leads. The leads we decided to target were essentially leads that had not been converted to opportunities, but were still considered valid, open leads. Our client (Safefreight Technology) provides comprehensive GPS Tracking solutions for everything from large truck fleets and heavy equipment to personal recreational vehicles and automobiles. Knowing the typical person completing the web contact form is either looking for a solution for themselves, or for somebody else, we designed three offers for our campaign - a trade-in credit program for buyers with existing competitive systems, a referral program for those researching solutions on behalf of others, and a newsletter sign-up for those not shopping right now, but who wanted to keep in touch with us through our newsletter.
2. Set  up our mailing list - We used MailChimp to load our list of targets. We downloaded our contacts from salesforce.com after attaching them to a campaign. MailChimp allowed us to easily upload our data. It also has the added advantage of some super reports which our CEO was able to use without any training. He was able to track opens for our offer email and click-throughs. This is very powerful and reduces the need for creating additional campaign reports. MailChimp also integrates with the salesforce.com API and allows results to be written back into salesforce.com. We created our offer letter using the theme and HTML design features of MailChimp. Within the email we detailed our offers and provided the associated links to the related landing pages (more on that in a minute) and to our consumer product (because our target list was B2B buyers, but perhaps some of the list might be interested in our consumer offering).
3. Setup the Landing Pages - While we have control over our website in a CMS, from a time to market perspective we decided to implement our landing pages using Unbounce. This ended up being an excellent move for a few reasons : a) Unbounce provides an easy to use tool for developing landing pages. You can build a page with your offer content and include a form which captures conversions, which are reported in the Unbounce dashboard. You can monitor the number of people viewing your landing pages and the conversions in the dashboard. Unbounce also provides A/B Tests to determine which of your landing pages variants convert better; b) Unbounce integrates with MailChimp, allowing us to record our leads in one place for the CEO to review and also pass data back to salesforce.com; c) The dashboard provides everything you need to know about your landing pages, tracking unique visitors, overall page views and conversions. d) Implementation time is extremely rapid. After our designer gave us a concept and some graphics, we had our three landing pages ready to go in under one day.
4. Monitor and followup - We generated more leads than we expected from the program and are in the process of following up those leads. We also learned a few things which will result in improvements to our next campaign. We have already started to design a campaign which will focus on a specific segment of our market and will execute in the first week of November.

Another overall benefit is cost. We are maintaining an opt-in email list on Mailchimp of around 6,000 contacts at a cost of $75/month and Unbounce costs about $25/month for 1,000 unique visitors per month. Aside from our time and the design work, the costs are minimal for such a broad reach with such effective tools for us to deploy.

Here are the landing pages (if you are coming to this article some time later after writing it is possible the links will no longer work - landing pages only live so long as the offer on them is still valid):

1. The Trade-in Credit offer
2. The Referral offer
3. The Newsletter offer

The CEO of Safefreight, Curtis Serna, is progressive in his approach to marketing and demand generation. His company is the Official Mobile Security Provider for the Indycar Series, and they have engaged JustBusinessResults to streamline their selling and marketing processes using salesforce.com and additional Cloud services to optimize business results. This campaign is one of the projects for which we are providing assistance. We expect to train Safefreight team members to execute all future campaigns in-house using these methods.

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