How to Use Outreach Source Codes for Marketing Cloud

Revenue attribution is a crucial aspect of digital marketing that helps businesses understand the impact of their efforts on revenue generation. By assigning credit to various touchpoints, marketers can move beyond guesswork to see exactly which channels and campaigns are contributing to the bottom line.

Understanding the precise impact of each interaction isn’t always “out of the box” with Marketing Cloud. That's where Outreach Source Codes comes in.

This guide will help you to understand how to use Outreach Source Codes for effective campaign management - so that you have all your data accessible for optimising campaigns and budgets.

Customer journeys allow businesses to understand the buying stages of a customer. By mapping the customer's experience as a visual tool, businesses can understand their emotions and actions during the buying journey. This helps to identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and areas where they can add value to the customer experience. This holistic view of customer interactions helps in creating more personalised and effective marketing strategies, ensuring that every touchpoint is optimised for maximum engagement and conversion. 

Customer journeys refer to the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or service throughout their buying journey. Understanding customer journeys is crucial for businesses to gain valuable insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and pain points. By analysing customer journeys, businesses can identify areas for improvement, optimise their marketing efforts, and ultimately drive growth and increased revenue. A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer’s experience, highlighting touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for improvement. In the context of revenue attribution, understanding customer journeys helps businesses assign credit to multiple channels and touchpoints, providing a deeper understanding of revenue generation. This comprehensive view allows businesses to make more informed decisions, ensuring that every marketing effort is strategically aligned to drive growth and enhance the customer experience.

Customer journey mapping is a process that involves creating a visual representation of the customer’s experience across all touchpoints and interactions with a brand to evaluate their satisfaction and engagement. This can often require breaking down the process into multiple sessions to thoroughly understand and analyse each stage of the customer journey. This can include everything from initial awareness and consideration to purchase and post-purchase support. 

By mapping out the customer journey, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviours. This valuable insight can then be used to inform marketing strategies, improve customer engagement, and enhance the overall customer experience. 

Effective customer journey mapping helps in identifying key moments of truth and potential drop-off points, allowing businesses to proactively address issues and optimise their outreach efforts to enhance customer experiences.

The journey mapping process involves collaboration between multiple teams and different functions to create a visual representation of the customer’s experience. This collaborative effort ensures that all perspectives are considered, leading to a more comprehensive and accurate map. The process includes identifying key touchpoints where the customer interacts with the brand, as well as pain points and opportunities for improvement. Analysing the customer’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours throughout their buying journey provides deeper insights into their experience.

By using journey mapping, businesses can identify areas for improvement, optimise their marketing efforts, and ultimately drive customer loyalty and increased revenue. Journey mapping can be used with revenue attribution models, such as multi-touch attribution models, to assign credit to multiple channels and touchpoints. This gives a deeper understanding of revenue generation and allows businesses to make more informed decisions about their marketing strategies. By integrating journey mapping with revenue attribution models, businesses can ensure that their marketing efforts are effectively driving growth and enhancing the customer experience.

While understanding and mapping the customer journey provides these invaluable insights for optimising touchpoints and personalising experiences, a significant hurdle often remains: accurately measuring the direct financial impact of these efforts. Knowing what works conceptually is one thing; proving which specific interactions drive revenue is another. This brings us directly to the revenue attribution challenge.

Journey mapping is a critical component of revenue attribution, as it provides a visual representation of the customer’s experience across multiple channels and touchpoints. By creating a customer journey map, businesses can identify pain points, areas for improvement, and opportunities to enhance the customer experience. Journey mapping also helps companies understand customer behaviour, preferences, and motivations, enabling them to develop targeted marketing strategies that drive engagement and revenue. For example, a journey map can reveal that customers often drop off at a particular stage, allowing businesses to address the issue and improve the overall experience. By leveraging journey mapping, businesses can ensure that their marketing efforts are aligned with customer needs, leading to better engagement, increased revenue, and stronger customer loyalty.

Many marketers face the challenge of connecting marketing efforts to tangible revenue results. Without a clear attribution model, it’s difficult to optimise digital marketing campaigns, personalise experiences, and allocate budgets effectively, making accounting for the entire customer journey crucial. Last touch attribution, for instance, evaluates marketing effectiveness by giving credit to the final interaction before a conversion. How do you truly know which emails, journeys, or campaigns are contributing to your bottom line? U-shaped attribution allocates significant credit to the first engagement and lead creation, helping to understand the effectiveness of initial marketing efforts. Time decay attribution, on the other hand, attributes more credit to recent interactions, making it suitable for longer sales cycles. W-shaped attribution allocates equal credit to three main touchpoints: the initial contact, lead creation, and opportunity creation, providing a nuanced view of key interactions.

Despite its importance, revenue attribution can be challenging to implement, especially for businesses with complex sales cycles and multiple marketing channels. Common challenges include data integration, assigning credit to touchpoints, and selecting the right attribution model. Additionally, companies may struggle to align their sales and marketing teams, making it difficult to track the customer journey and attribute revenue accurately. Data integration issues can arise when different systems and platforms are not seamlessly connected, leading to gaps in the customer journey. Assigning credit to touchpoints can also be complex, as it requires a deep understanding of the customer’s interactions across various channels. Selecting the right attribution model is crucial, as the wrong model can lead to inaccurate insights and suboptimal decision-making. Overcoming these challenges requires a strategic approach, robust data management, and close collaboration between sales and marketing teams.

The answer lies in leveraging custom source codes to provide a detailed view of your customers’ journey at the account level, allowing you to trace revenue back to specific marketing activities and outreach methods. This is a custom process that must be set up within your Salesforce org. But how do you bridge the gap between these tracking codes and actual revenue? By seamlessly integrating these codes throughout your customer journeys, you create a clear, traceable path from initial engagement to final purchase. This integration allows you to move beyond guesswork and truly understand which marketing efforts are driving conversions, empowering you to refine your strategies and maximise ROI. Let’s dive into the practical steps of setting up and utilising these tracking codes to unlock this level of insight.

• The outreach source code will need to be added to a campaign, so first create a new campaign or open an existing
• Click the dropdown arrow within the campaign page and select new outreach source codes and click new
• Enter the details for the outreach source code such as a name and enter the unique code you want for that particular campaign (Automatic Source code generation can be added with additional configuration)
• Ensure your code follows an easily identifiable structure which is replicated across all codes. This will ensure that you can easily link the code back to the relevant campaign source . For example: CampaignName_Channel_YYYYMMDD_Identifier.
• In Campaign, search for and choose the campaign the code is linked to
• Set the source code as active
• Enter the number of contacts within the audience within the audience count field and click save

Integrating with Marketing Cloud:

• Verify that your Salesforce Marketing Cloud connector is correctly configured and actively syncing data. Check the connector's status within Marketing Cloud's Setup.
• In Marketing Cloud, under Contact Builder > Data Sources > Synchronised Data Extensions, Ensure that the campaign synchronised data extension is enabled. Verify that the field storing the outreach source code is syncing also
• Be mindful of the synchronisation schedule; updates to Salesforce data may not immediately reflect in Marketing Cloud.

Implementing AMPscript for Dynamic Tracking:

• First ensure your outreach source code is correctly populating within your source DE you are going to use for the send, This may require some SQL to ensure this is populated against each subscriber based on the relevant campaign.
• In your Marketing Cloud email content, use AMPscript to dynamically append the 'Outreach Source Code' to your links. Always test AMPscript thoroughly in a test environment before deploying to production.
• Here's the AMPscript code with added robustness:

Explanation:

• AttributeValue('Outreach_Source_Code__c') retrieves the value of the 'Outreach Source Code' field from the data extension.
• SET @linkURL sets your base URL with a query parameter 'source='.
• IF NOT EMPTY(@sourceCode) checks if the source code is not empty. If empty, a default value can be set to prevent errors. Or logging of the error can be done. Logging requires use of server side javascript. Write('error')
• URLEncode(@sourceCode) ensures special characters are properly encoded for URL parameters, preventing issues.
• CONCAT appends the source code to the base URL.
• %%=v(@linkURL)=%% outputs the dynamically generated URL.

Place this AMPscript code within your email content, ensuring it is correctly integrated with your links. Be aware that Marketing Cloud will wrap the final URL in a tracking domain. Test each link.

Analysing Data and Creating Reports:

• Create Salesforce reports and dashboards to track revenue and opportunity creation attributed to specific source codes. Utilise Salesforce campaign influence to accurately attribute revenue to marketing campaigns.
• Use Marketing Cloud tracking to analyse email-specific metrics (open rates, click-through rates) associated with specific source codes. Combine data from Salesforce and Marketing Cloud for a comprehensive view.
• Create reports that show:
  • Revenue generated by each source code.
  • Click-through rates and open rates for emails with specific source codes.
  • Lead conversion rates per source code.
  • Opportunity creation per source code.
• Consider multi-touch attribution models to understand the impact of multiple touchpoints on the customer journey.
• If using Data Cloud, utilise it to combine and analyse data from various sources for a unified view.
   

Testing:

• Thoroughly test the entire process, including AMPscript, Salesforce-Marketing Cloud integration, and reporting, in a test environment before deploying to production. Verify that data is accurately captured and reported.

By implementing and analysing these codes, you can transform your marketing efforts into a well-oiled machine.

If you'd like help setting up Outreach Source Codes, then contact us today and start integrating Outreach Source Codes, and watch your strategy flourish.