Chapter 8. Working with Marketing

A powerful feature that sets Microsoft Dynamics CRM ahead of its competitors is its ability to build, manage, track, and report on the effectiveness of marketing efforts. When thinking about marketing, consider how you currently market. Do you want to send the same sales literature to potential customers that you would send to existing customers? Probably not. When you’re creating a marketing campaign, you need to consider your audience.

The marketing functionality of Dynamics CRM 2016 has not been improved and enhanced since Dynamics CRM 2013. If you are familiar with the marketing functionality in previous versions of CRM, you won’t find any new features here, but you will find an updated user interface and other enhancements. If you are a new user of Dynamics CRM 2016, this chapter will help you understand the basic marketing features.

Marketing efforts designed to appeal to existing customers usually include incentives to buy more, reestablish buying after a lapse, or purchase in other ways. Marketing efforts designed to appeal to potential customers are usually very different and tend to focus on asking them to start purchasing.

Many books and companies specialize in marketing to potential and existing customers. We’re by no means attempting to explain the best way for your organization to handle its marketing. Instead, this chapter explains in depth the marketing features Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides so that when you want to market your organization, products, or personnel, you have a solid understanding of how Microsoft Dynamics CRM can do help.

This chapter reviews the items specific to marketing found in the Marketing section, such as marketing lists, campaigns, sales literature, and quick campaigns, in addition to other areas in the application that touch on marketing.

For information about the other aspects of the Marketing tab, such as Lead or Product entities, SEE CHAPTER 7, “Working with Sales.” For information about Account and Contact entities, SEE CHAPTER 6, “Working with Customers.”

After you’ve creating marketing lists, you can directly market to their members via a mail merge, a quick campaign, or a campaign.

To create a new marketing list, navigate to the Marketing tab and then select Marketing Lists > New.

You can create a new marketing list by completing the Name and Member Type (Targeted At field), as shown in Figure 8.1, and saving the list. (Note that the only member types allowed are Account, Contact, and Lead.)

Other fields for the marketing list include Source, which can be any free-form value, Currency, Cost, and Locked, which allows you to specify whether new members can be added to the list. In addition, notice in the lower-left corner the status of the marketing list. By default, new marketing lists are Active, but you can easily deactivate them when necessary by selecting Deactivate from the More Actions drop-down menu.

Dynamic marketing lists are great because they are updated as new members meet the defined criteria, and they are available by setting the List Type field to either Static or Dynamic. By default, List Type is set to Static, which means that after the list is created, the members are not updated. If Dynamic is selected, the marketing list members are updated whenever the list is used.

To add members to a marketing list, select Manage Members from the command bar. As with many of the other forms in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, a marketing list must first be saved before you can add members.

When adding members, you have the options shown on Figure 8.2:

Add Using Lookup—Use Lookup to add members.

Add Using Advanced Find—Use Advanced Find to add members.

Remove Using Advanced Find—Use Advanced Find to remove members.

Evaluate Using Advanced Find—Use Advanced Find to evaluate members.

You can select any one of these options and then change it any time if the list has not been locked. This is helpful when you have specific criteria to query on because you can add, remove, or evaluate members before or after they’ve been added to the marketing list to ensure that you are marketing to the correct members.

Figure 8.4 shows how to create a query using Advanced Find to add only Account entities that you own of and that have an address with State equal to California. Note that Advanced Find will have no criteria until you create your query.

You can easily use the Advanced Find features to adjust this query to include contacts that have not placed an order with you in x number of months, have x number of sales with you over the past x number of months, or meet any similar criteria.

When you’ve prepared your query, click the Find button to view members that match your query logic. In the Advanced Find results (see Figure 8.5), you can select individual members from the results or simply add all members returned by the search to the marketing list by selecting the appropriate radio button on the lower-left side and clicking Add to Marketing List. (The Add to Marketing List button is Remove from Marketing List if you’re using Advanced Find to remove members.)

Campaigns can work with multiple marketing lists, whereas quick campaigns can only work with single marketing lists.

Campaigns can have complex activity distribution, whereas a quick campaign can only have a single activity type.

Campaigns can have complex planning and management information, whereas quick campaigns don’t have this capability.

However, both campaigns and quick campaigns can receive campaign responses. A marketing effort can be almost anything—a new product announcement, company exposure at a popular event, or even an effort to convince previous customers to buy products again.

Campaigns allow for the structured creation of tasks related to planning the campaign, activities specific to the campaign, and metrics related to the responses received from a campaign.

This section shows an example of a campaign that involves some simple tasks and activities to illustrate how a campaign might work. Obviously, when creating a campaign for your organization, you want to consider your specific needs related to tasks and activities, but using the example provided here can give you a solid foundation for working with campaigns.

When working with campaigns and campaign templates, you can easily manage which one to work with by navigating to Marketing, campaigns and viewing the All Campaigns and Campaign Templates list (see Figure 8.6).

A campaign template differs from a campaign in that it is the framework on which campaigns can be created (typically multiple times) and then used to record campaign responses.

You can copy a campaign templates as a campaign or as a template from the Navigation menu. A campaign template generally doesn’t include any scheduling data because it a reusable template, and that information is generally populated only when an actual campaign is planned.

To create a new campaign, follow these steps:

1. In the Marketing tab, navigate to Campaigns and select New. For this example, create a campaign without using a template and start in the General section. With most entities in CRM, you should manually save the record after you enter the initial data, and then you can work with additional menu options in the navigation bar, as shown in Figure 8.7.

2. Enter a descriptive name for the campaign and select the status detail for the campaign from the header. In this case, because you’re creating a new campaign, leave it at the default, Proposed. You can enter a code in the Campaign Code field or have the system assign an automatic campaign code to your campaign by leaving it blank; however, after the campaign has been saved, you cannot edit this field. Select an option for the Campaign Type field to tell others the type of campaign it is.

3. Enter the schedule information and description, if desired.

4. Select the Financials section and enter the budget allocated, miscellaneous costs, and estimated revenue (located on the header) for the campaign (see Figure 8.8). The Total Cost field calculates automatically and, if you have no activities yet, equals the miscellaneous costs only. When you add costs to the campaign by adding campaign Activities, costs will automatically be shown here.

5. If desired, add or edit information in the Administration and Notes sections. When you have created this basic framework for the campaign, save the campaign.

6. Add any planning tasks you want to associate with the campaign. Planning activities are simply activities with the Regarding field set to the campaign. Select Planning Activities from the navigation bar and then select Add New Activity to create a planning activity (see Figure 8.9).

For this campaign, you’ll have only one activity. Normally, however, a campaign has several planning activities. If the campaign will be reused, the planning activities likely will be common to the campaign. In that case, it might make sense to copy your campaign to a campaign template from the More Actions drop-down menu when you finish adding the necessary planning tasks.

1. From the navigation menu, select Campaign Activities and then select Add New Campaign Activity. You see a new campaign activity, as shown in Figure 8.10.

2. Make selections in the Channel and Type fields. These are some of the selections to make on this page:

a. The Channel field directly correlates to the distribution of the activity, as explained shortly.

b. The Owner field, by default, is set to the user creating the campaign activity. However, you can change it by clicking the Assign option in the command bar and assigning the campaign activity to another user.

c. To assign an activity to a queue, create it and then select Add to Queue from the command bar.

d. Select any outsource vendors that might be used with this particular task and enter the scheduled start and end dates and any budget allocated.

e. The Anti-Spam field excludes a member from receiving any marketing material by preventing the activity from being distributed to the member for the number of days entered.

3. To add marketing lists, navigate to the Marketing Lists section on the Campaign form and click the + icon. In the Look Up Records dialog that appears (see Figure 8.11), click Add.

4. After you select a marketing list by selecting ‘Select’ and then clicking ‘Add’, you have the option to distribute the campaign activities. For this example, the channel for this campaign activity is set to Email, so you see the New Emails dialog (see Figure 8.12).

5. Either create the email or use a preexisting template, as shown in Figure 8.13.

6. Once you’ve created the campaign activity and associated a marketing list, assign the campaign activities by selecting Distribute, as shown in Figure 8.14. The activities are then assigned to the designated owners and appear as open activities for each member in the marketing list.

7. Complete the actual cost amount of the campaign activity so the correct information rolls up to the total campaign cost on the Campaign Financials tab.

It is important to note that campaign responses are responses received from potential customers in response to a campaign; they are not automated responses sent to your customers as part of your campaign. You can automatically convert campaign activities to campaign responses, or you can manually create them.

You create campaign responses by selecting Campaign Responses from the navigation bar or by navigating to Activities and selecting New Campaign Response. Figure 8.15 shows a newly added and saved campaign response.

Another way to create a campaign response is via email responses if email tracking has been enabled in System Settings. When an email is sent in response to a campaign, the incoming email can be automatically created as a campaign response.

Create a Lead

Convert to an Existing Lead

Create a Quote, Order, or Opportunity for an Account or Contact

Close Response

Although the campaign response functionality described here is applicable to campaigns and quick campaigns, the three campaign reports available in the Reports area (Campaign Activity Status, Campaign Comparison, and Campaign Performance) are applicable only to campaigns by default. These reports are powerful and display campaign information in a manner that is easy to understand and useful for determining metrics on campaigns. We recommend reviewing all of them often when building campaigns and when viewing the status of executed campaigns.

To create a new piece of sales literature, select New and then, as shown in Figure 8.17, enter the title of the literature in the Title field and the subject in the Subject field.

For more information about working with subjects, SEE CHAPTER 17, “Settings.”

Additional optional fields you can set for sales literature include Employee Contact, Type, Expiration Date, and Description.

Sales attachments can have as many pieces of documentation as desired. To create a new sales attachment document, select Add a Sales Attachment from the command bar and then click the + icon. Figure 8.18 shows the new Sales Attachment form that appears.

When working with sales literature, you can add products and identify competitors, which helps to provide context around the literature.

Sales literature can be sent directly from CRM. To make this happen, navigate to Sales Literature, select the sales attachments you want to send, and then click the envelope (Send as Email) icon in the command bar. A new CRM email opens, with the sales literature attached, and you can enter the contact information and then send the material.

The following sections discuss how to create and see the status of quick campaigns.

1. Open Advanced Find and select Contact as the base entity. Then to do a targeted quick campaign for all your contacts in the state of California, choose the settings shown in Figure 8.19 and click Results.

2. From the results screen, select one or more records and then select Quick Campaign > For All Records on All Pages (see Figure 8.20). On the Create a Quick Campaign welcome screen that appears, click Next.

3. Enter the name of the campaign and click Next to continue. On the next screen, shown in Figure 8.21, select the activity type of the quick campaign and who will own the activities. If the Activity Type selection is Email (as shown here), the system can automatically send the emails and close the activities, if selected. Otherwise, the activities will belong to the selected owners as pending and will require action by the owners to be closed out.

After you select Email, you’re prompted to enter the email information shown in Figure 8.22. If you had selected another activity, you would be prompted to complete the appropriate fields for that activity. This example shows a simple email, which has the downside of limited customization. If you were to use the Channel option of Letter via Mail Merge, you could personalize the letter fully and include additional data fields.

4. Click Next to continue and then click Create to create the quick campaign.

The wizard completes, and the activity or activities (if you have more than one contact) are created. The activities then wait for the person to complete them unless it was an email (in which case the email goes out directly).

In the My Quick Campaigns form, you can easily see what the quick campaign was for and who received email messages by selecting Email Messages Created from the form. In addition, you can track any responses to the quick campaign, just as you would for a regular campaign. Finally, you can easily see which contacts received the email and which were excluded and why by examining the details found in each node. (For example, perhaps a contact didn’t have a valid email address.)

Remember that this chapter does not cover Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM) or its related integration components. Instead, consider this chapter as a standalone option on the native marketing functions found within Dynamics CRM.

For more information about Dynamics Marketing, SEE CHAPTER 9.