10.             Marketing

Marketing is designed to aid the progression of converting leads to opportunities by running a series of campaigns which schedule the appropriate campaign activities designed to fulfil processes such as the mailing of a newsletter or the making of an outbound sales call to the lead. Marketing Lists can also be maintained around Contacts and Accounts for customer retention campaigns focussed around existing prospects or customers.

Campaigns can be monitored and their success measured by noting the number and type of campaign responses generated for a campaign.

Marketing Lists form an important organisational feature of CRM which can be applied to many different business processes. These lists are a collection of Leads, Accounts, or Contacts that can created manually or according to any possible filter criteria. Marketing lists can be used to run a campaign and also to mail merge to Word 2007.

10.1.           Marketing Lists

Marketing Lists can be used to generate successive campaigns or control business processes such as regular mailings or courtesy calls made to customers. Marketing lists are defined for Leads, Accounts, or Contacts and consist of little information really other that the list of members.

Members can be managed from the marketing list form by selecting the Manage List Members form and clicking on the Manage Members button which provides several options to manage members using the features of advanced find:

·        Lookup allows individual members to be selected by browsing the appropriate entity list.

·        Add members adds all the members found with the required query.

·        Remove members from an existing list according to the required query.

·        Evaluate keeps only those members already in the marketing list that satisfy the query.

Note:    Remember that a filter can be complex and include related entities so that customers (accounts or contacts) can be filtered according to which products they have shown an interest in for example.

Marketing Lists can also be created automatically when performing a bulk import from a spreadsheet file to create a marketing list for a tradeshow for example. The contact, account, and lead forms also allow individual records to be added or removed from marketing lists.

Marketing Lists can be useful in situations where there is no appropriate data representation of a categorisation that is required to filter data with the advanced find feature. In this case, a marketing list can be created manually with the entity occurrences required and used to determine the filter selection.

10.2.           Mail Merge to Word 2007

Marketing lists have a Mail Merge on List Members wizard available from the menu bar. You may specify a letter, fax, email, or label merge type and optionally choose an existing Word template document stored in CRM.

CRM defaults the list of fields exported to Word but allows you to select the fields you required from the appropriate entity together with access to data from related (many to one) entities if required.

The mail merge process will open a Word 2007 document on your machine and you may need to select the Add Ins menu at the top of the windows and click on the CRM Mail Merge macro. You may also need to enable macros on your copy of word when prompted.

Once this process is complete you can perform the mail merge as usual within Word by adding the address block and greeting block and creating the merged word document. Word also allows you to create envelopes, labels, directory type listings, and email messages as well as letter mail merge.

10.3.           Word Templates

Word Templates are added into the system from the Settings-Templates-Mail Merge Templates form and can be uploaded from your hard drive.

10.4.           Campaigns

Campaigns are used to help plan and organise marketing campaigns and keep track of costs and return on investment. A campaign is created from the Marketing-Campaigns work area and specifies basic campaign details including the price list, the proposed and actual start and end dates, and a budget and estimated revenue (on the financials page).

The Expected Response refers to the percentage of campaign responses expected from the activities performed. The Target Products and Sales Literature panes are for reference only and allow Users quick access to relevant information when dealing with a campaign response. Related Campaigns may also be of interest to the Marketing department (perhaps for reporting purposes).

The planning tasks pane is a quick method of adding tasks to the current campaign to represent the planning and preparation process. This is convenient for the Owner of the campaign to view all the various tasks assigned to different owners relating to the project.

10.5.           Quick Campaigns

Campaigns can be built quickly from Account, Contact, and Lead Views by control-clicking to select the required records and selecting the Create Quick Campaign button.

10.6.           Campaign Activities

Campaign Activities represent a set of activities related to a campaign involving costs and outsourced vendors (external suppliers). The budget and actual costs of the activity can be specified here and are added automatically to the financial data of the campaign once the activity is completed.

Note:    The Anti-Spam Setting excludes records that have been contacted within the specified number of days.

You can save time by defining a campaign template if you are running a series of similar campaigns. An existing campaign can be copied to a template or copied as a new campaign from the action menu when looking at the campaign form.

The channel is the most important setting on the campaign activity and is used to generate activities according to the marketing lists attached to the campaign. The available channels comprise:

·        Phone.

·        Appointment.

·        Letter.

·        Letter via Mal Merge which uses the mal merge wizard to control Word 2007.

·        Fax.

·        Fax by Mal Merge.

·        Email.

·        Email via Mail Merge.

·        Other.

Once the template has been defined, press the Distribute Campaign Activities button to bring up a form template to create the appropriate activity record for each entity occurrence in the campaign marketing lists. You can control the ownership of the created activities

Note:    There does not seem to be a facility here to create tasks.

10.7.           Campaign Responses

Campaign Responses are used to monitor the activity resulting from a campaign.

Activities created with a campaign have a Promote to Response option on the actions menu (this should really be more prominent). Selecting this brings up the campaign response form which can be used to record additional details required by the marketing department and also drives the reporting to measure the success of the campaign.

Campaign responses can also be created as a new activity to cope with incoming calls in response to a campaign. Here the Received from New Customer details are filled in after the appropriate parent campaign has been selected (this does not create a lead record until the response is converted). Campaign Responses can also be created form a bulk import or automatically from incoming email if email tracking is enabled.

Once a campaign response has been saved, the Convert Campaign Response option is made available which allows the campaign response to be closed and details converted to a new Lead (for new details), or for an existing lead to be converted to an Account or Contact, or for a new Quote, Order, or Opportunity to be created for an existing customer.