When I began working with BUILD, there had been many failed efforts to establish Salesforce as a tool to manage email distribution lists. Conversations had fizzled. Data was lost. Consultants disappeared.

 

Website analytics were a reflection of the terrible website. Email marketing was irregular, and there was no consistent reporting on what was working, who was opening what emails, etc. Social media was an afterthought, and there were no metrics in place.

 

Without any data measures in place, it was hard to even know where to start. 

 

With a modest budget, I worked with a phenomenal Salesforce consultant who helped me understand the power of the information we had at our fingertips, and the missed opportunities of not maintaining that data. With strong data protocols in place, I can now use Salesforce to tell you how many people have attended more than two BUILD conferences, selected Black/African American for race, and live in California.

 

We now have a Google Analytics Dashboard (excellent tool!); we set, monitor, and meet social media goals; and we use email campaign data to inform all of our email marketing decisions.

 

Data is not my favorite side of marketing and communications, but it is essential. For example, I ran a small paid campaign on LinkedIn that yielded terrible results. I learned that we have high organic traffic to our LinkedIn and that paid campaigns are not only NOT worth the cost, but the clicks it did bring did not "convert."