Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Marketing Automation

The features supported in MA for Microsoft CRM 3.0 are:

• List Management
  
• Quick Campaigns
  
• Full Campaigns
  
  
  
  • Campaign Activities
  
  
• Campaign Responses
  
• Campaign Templates
  
• Campaign Reports

These MA features cater to some broad marketing scenarios. In this post let’s take the List Management functionality and dive deeper.

List Management in MA

This post is broadly divided in

Purpose of List Management

How to Create Lists

Other Functionality provided by Marketing Lists

Purpose/Usage:

CRM 3.0 Marketing Lists may be used for different purposes.

• One may track her “My Best Customers” as a list. This list could then be used to launch campaigns against, or send direct mail to or just to create a set of activities that the salesperson desires to have for the customers in the list. In summary the Marketing Lists could actually be used as a salesperson’s personal management tool.
  
• Sales and Marketing people may choose to distribute the Lists to external vendors for running campaigns.
  
• The lists could be created by using specific qualification criteria and the telemarketers could then use these lists to target to a specific set of customers/leads.
  
• The other way would be a more traditional way – using the Marketing lists to do List Management for the Marketing Campaigns (Quick campaign or Full Campaign) wherein a suitable list (or a set of lists) would be created to use in different campaigns.

Creating Lists:

Lists (or Marketing Lists) are a collection of one of the following entities:

• Accounts
  
• Contacts
  
• Leads

The same Marketing List cannot contain a mix of the above entities.

Marketing lists may be created in different ways.

• Via Grids:
  
  
  
  • Select Entities from the grid view of Accounts/Contacts/Leads
    
  • More Actions à Add to Marketing List
  
  
• 
  
   Via Advanced Find:
  
  
  
  
  • Select the advanced find view or create your own query
    
  • More Actions à Add to Marketing Lis 
  
  
• Via Import:
  
  
  
  • ToolsàImport…
    
  • Select the CSV File
    
  • Select the type of entities to import to
    
  • Select a marketing list (or create a new one) to import to –

Figure 1

• Directly via “Marketing” section:

Figure 2

Other Functionality provided by Lists:

• Common MSCRM functionality: This is a list of functionality that is provided by List just like other Microsoft CRM 3.0 entities –
  
  
  
  • Export to Excel
    
  • Bulk Edit
    
  • Activate/Deactivate
    
  • Sharing
    
  • Apply Rule
    
  • Add a note
    
  • Attach a file
    
  • Delete
    
  • Assign
    
  • Advanced Find – out-of-the-box views are
    
    
    
    • Marketing lists used within last 6 months
      
    • Unused Lists
  
  
• 
  
   Create Quick Campaign:

A marketing list can be used to directly launch a quick campaign by using “Create Quick Campaign” button on the Marketing List form.

• Manage Members:

Helps manage the members of a marketing list. There are multiple ways of adding/removing members to/from the marketing list. These methods can be used to qualify the marketing list members further by specifying match criteria. For example, “add all contacts that responded to campaigns in last 6 months” or “remove contacts that were part of a campaign in last 30 days”.

                                                                  Figure 3

• Copy To:

Allows copying the selected members or all members from one marketing list to another (existing or new).

Add selected members to another marketing list:

Figure 4

Copying the entire list to another list:

                                                Figure 5

• Add to Campaign:

Adds the selected marketing Lists to a campaign. Accessible via Marketing List grid view’s More Actionsà Add to Campaign. (See Figure 5)

• Create Opportunities…:

Creates opportunities for selected members in a marketing list of Account or Contact type. This feature could be used to create Opportunities directly after applying specific criteria to “Qualify” the marketing list members through “Manage Members”. The menu is accessible via “Marketing List Members” grid on a marketing list of type Accounts or Contacts (See Figure 4)

Fill in the opportunity details –

Figure 6

• Convert lead:

Convert leads from the marketing lists of type Leads. This feature could be used to convert the qualified leads. The menu is accessible via “Marketing List Members” grid of a Marketing List of type Leads (Similar to Figure 4)

Fill in the Convert details –

Figure 7

• Customization:

Marketing List is a customizable entity. Forms, views, attributes, relationships for Lists are customizable.

List Management in MA provides a set of features that can be used for different purposes. Please note that these posts are purely my view of the functionality and by no means should limit the users from using the features the way they see fit. If you have found some interesting use of these features or have found some blocking issues while using the functionality, please feel free to post comments here. I look forward to making this an interactive experience. I intend to write more posts around the other marketing features and functionality in Microsoft CRM 3.0. My next post will be “Comparing Direct Mail, Quick Campaign, and Full Campaign”. Please feel free to comment if you’d like any specific MA functionality area covered!