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ROI Supported Web & Search Marketing Integration with CRM

By Paul Harris

Enterprise CRM and Google Adwords campaigns to drive traffic and lead integration with Salesforce

Challenge:

1. •Digital Lightwave - a pioneer in mobile fiber optical test and measurement equipment - wanted to test search advertising and required precise metrics to justify expenses in unknown areas.
   

2. •Sales and marketing depended on an Access database to manage customer and prospect contacts, making it difficult to share information between departments.
   

3. •One corporate acquisition and another carve-out business acquisition produced thousands of new contacts overnight.
   

4. •All areas of the company required visibility into customer data, and individual sales pipelines required a high level of security.
   

5. •Investors required detailed progress reports on acquisition integration and demand generation initiatives.
   

Solution:

1. •Corporate marketing evaluated on-demand and client-server CRM solutions and selected Salesforce.com to meet the many requirements of the company and its investors.
   

2. •Search advertising campaigns were created, using the Salesforce for Google Adwords application to track keyword effectiveness, click thru rates, take rates on marketing offers, fulfillment, and cost per lead.
   

3. •Country and world region segmentation and unique advertising to drive prospects to unique, personal landing page of a respective sales rep or country/region manager.
   

4. •Acquired customer contacts were merged with legacy customer data, and Salesforce was leveraged to send email newsletters and one-to-one relationship marketing messages.*
   

5. •Custom reports and dashboards were produced, providing executive management with real-time visibility into sales pipeline, with detailed attribution to source  of all opportunities.
   

6. •All corporate website forms integrated directly into Salesforce.
   

Results:

1. •Greatest ROI was derived from niche, obscure keywords unique to fiber optic test and measurement, where overall click thru numbers were low, but take rate on marketing offers was consistently greater than 60%.
   

2. •Constant flow of new leads increases feedback from sales, helping marketing make decisions on which keywords to increase impressions, and which to cut.
   

3. •More than 2,500 leads produced in first year, resulting in 65 qualified opportunities in long sales-cycle deals.
   

4. •Both traditional and online marketing programs tracked, providing better visibility into marketing spend, and more knowledgeable decisions at budget time.
   
   

5. *This case study predates Salesforce.com AppExchange, which enabled stand-alone solution providers to integrate with Salesforce for more robust email campaign management. Solutions such as Vertical Response have since been implemented by the author for large scale, multi-language email programs.