How Does Client Sense Support Your Campaigns

In this article:

• Short answer
• Why it matters
• What this looks like in practice
• How to do it in Client Sense
• Turning the output into action
• Common pitfalls
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Short answer

Client Sense does not send campaigns. It helps you curate the right audience and reports engagement changes. The sending is done by your CRM or email marketing system, and Client Sense connects to it, providing accurate and enriched contact data going out, and receiving back information such as which contacts have unsubscribed.

Why it matters

Most campaign failures in professional services are audience failures rather than content failures. The message was reasonable and it reached the wrong people, or people whose details were three years out of date, or people who had asked not to hear from the firm.

The underlying reason is that campaign systems are usually manually populated. A CRM depends on manual data entry, and once the data falls behind, the people who were meant to maintain or rely on the data will stop using it or trusting the data. Firms then run campaigns from whatever is in the system, which is an increasingly inaccurate picture of who the firm actually knows.

The fix is not another system to maintain. Using a tool like Client Sense you can curate an accurate audience for every campaign.

What this looks like in practice

Mullins Lawyers, a Brisbane commercial practice, were running HubSpot in isolation before implementing Client Sense. Integrating the two proved a turning point, and the difference they identify is straightforward: the CRM relies heavily on manual data entry while the relationship data is captured automatically, with no partner input at all.

Their marketing and business development team have since moved into segmented reporting on client interactions by practice group and industry, using it to work out where the strongest relationships sit and to direct future marketing effort accordingly. Read the full account in the Mullins Lawyers case study.

A worked example: before a sector campaign, using Client Sense export the contacts your firm has communicated with in that sector over the past two years and compare them against your CRM or marketing platform. Most firms find a meaningful number of active, relevant contacts that were never in the sending system, and a number of contacts in the sending system that nobody has spoken to in years.

How to do it in Client Sense

Know the purpose of each system

Client Sense is not an email sending platform and does not replace one. What it does is keep the picture of who your firm knows accurate, so that the platform doing the sending is working from something current. Connected systems currently documented include HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics 365. See Integrations and Settings for what is available.

Building the audience

Assemble the target audience as a Favourite (Favorite) static or dynamic list, then move it to the CRM or event platform. The External Contacts export under Reports is the best way to identify missing contacts, and two of its columns matter here. The CRM column identifies which contacts also exist in your connected system, which is what lets you isolate the contacts that are missing from it. Steps are in Exporting a list of External Contacts.

Respecting opt-outs

The Do Not Market column shows True where your connected CRM or email marketing system records that contact as unsubscribed. It is worth understanding what this does and does not mean. An unsubscribed contact should not receive marketing email but they may still be entirely engaged with your firm through their lawyer or accountant, so removing them from a mailing is not a reason to treat the relationship as cold.

Seeing whether the campaign increased engagement

Open and click rates belong to your sending platform. What Client Sense adds is whether anything changed in the relationship afterwards. Put the audience in a list and view Engagement across the group, comparing the period before with the period after. Where the campaign was an event, the events module does this directly. See How to view the level of Engagement your firm is having with Key Individuals and Companies and Assessing Event ROI.

Turning the output into action

The steps needed to effectively support a campaign are few and needs to run before every significant campaign.

• Reconcile before you send. Compare the audience against what is in the sending system and in the Client Sense list using reports.
• Strip the opt-outs. Filter on Do Not Market before the file leaves your hands rather than relying on the platform to catch it.
• Look at engagement, not just opens. A campaign that produced three new meetings and no clicks has value. Judge it on the relationship, enagement which is the thing you were trying to change.
• Allow time. Change in engagement typically appears over months rather than days, so a review the following week measures nothing.

Common pitfalls

• Expecting Client Sense to send the campaign. It supplies and measures the audience. The sending happens elsewhere, and confusion on this point wastes a lot of time.
• Using lists from the CRM alone. If the CRM depends on manual entry, its contact list is a record of what people remembered to type, not of who the firm knows.
• Measuring campaigns only on opens and clicks. Those are platform metrics. The question that matters is whether contact with the audience increased.
• Skipping the reconciliation. It is the step that surfaces both the active contacts nobody added and the stale ones nobody removed.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Can we send emails from Client Sense?

No. It is not an email marketing platform. It supplies the audience to the system that does the sending, keeps that audience accurate, and shows what changed in the relationship afterwards.

How do we find contacts who are missing from our marketing system?

Export external contacts with all fields. Where a CRM or email marketing system is connected, one column identifies which contacts also exist there, so the absences can be isolated in a single filter.

What does the Do Not Market column mean?

It is set to True where your connected system records that contact as unsubscribed or do not market. Use it to keep them out of a sending list. It does not indicate that the person has disengaged from your firm.

How do we measure whether a campaign worked?

Opens and clicks come from the sending platform. For whether the campaign changed anything, put the audience into a list and compare engagement before and after. Expect that to take months rather than weeks to show.