Target the right customers with a marketing list.
You have to complete a variety of tasks for a marketing campaign, including budgeting, creating the campaign, creating the marketing lists, running the campaign, and tracking the marketing information. In this article we will concentrate on a critical component of a successful marketing campaign: the marketing list.
The first thing to do is determine who to target for the campaign. For example, if a campaign promotes a product that appeals to young adults, the marketing list could target customers between the ages of 18 and 25. After you have identified which customers to contact, you can use Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to:
- Create the list
- Add the customers to the list
- Add the list to the campaign
After the campaign is launched, you can monitor responses to the campaign and check orders to see which ones were generated from the campaign. The sections in this article follow a scenario that details these tasks.
Creating a target marketing list
As mentioned previously, a marketing list can be populated with a specific set of customers. The following scenarios are about a fictional company and show you how to create a targeted list and add the list to a campaign.
The marketing department for an organization, which sells bicycle parts and accessories, has created a new e-mail marketing campaign, Upgraded Bike Pads. As an added incentive in the campaign, the organization is offering a twenty-percent discount on the new bike pads for certain existing customers.
Nicole, a marketing staff member, has been working with Julia, the marketing manager, on the e-mail campaign. To target the customers who qualify for the incentive, Julia has asked Nicole to create a marketing list composed of the customers (accounts) who have purchased at least one order of ten thousand dollars or more of the organization's products.
Create the list
The following steps show how to create a marketing list, how to search for accounts to add to the list, and how to add the list of customers, who resulted from the search, to the new marketing list.
- In the Navigation Pane, click Marketing, and then click Marketing Lists.
- On the Actions toolbar, click New.
- On the General tab, type a name, such as 20% discount. Names can be a maximum length of 100 characters.
- In the Member Type list, select Account. For this scenario, we are creating a list of accounts. You could also create lists of contacts and leads.
Owner is automatically populated with the name of the person currently logged on to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.
On this tab, it is often helpful to add a meaningful description, or purpose, for the marketing list so that you can refer to it in the future. In Cost, the value can contain numerals, commas, and decimal points only. Do not enter a currency symbol, such as a dollar sign ($), or you will not be able to save the marketing list.
- If you have any other information about the list, you can add a note. On the Notes tab, click Click here to enter a new note.
- When you finish entering the information about the list, click Save. To continue to the next section, do not click Save and Close.
Search for and add customers to the list
To find the customers, Nicole will search for those who match the criteria Julia requested and add them to the list. The steps below show how to search the organization's list of accounts and add the resulting list of customers to Nicole's marketing list.
- Under Details, click Marketing List Members.
- On the Actions toolbar, click Manage Members.
- In the Manage Members dialog box, select Use Advanced Find to add members, and then click OK.
- In the Add Members dialog box, verify that the Look for box contains Account and that the Use Saved View box contains [new].
- Under the Filter toolbar, click Select, and then in the Related section of the list, select Orders (Customer).
- Under Orders (Customer), click Select, and then on the Fields list, select Total Amount.
- Click Equals and select Is Greater than or Equal to.
- Click Enter Value, and then type 10000.
- Click Find. The customers that match your criteria appear in the Add Members list.
- To add customers to your marketing list, click Add all the members returned by the search to the marketing list, and then click Add to Marketing List.
- In the Marketing List dialog box, click Save and Close.
Adding a target marketing list to a campaign
Now that Nicole has added the customers returned by her query to her targeted marketing list called 20% discount, she can add the list to the e-mail marketing campaign. The steps below show how to add the list to the existing campaign.
- In the Marketing pane, click Campaigns.
- Open a campaign. (You will not have Nicole's campaign Upgraded Bike Pads on your system.) Under Marketing, click Target Marketing Lists.
- On the Actions toolbar, click Add, and then in the Look Up Records dialog box, click Find.
- Under Available records, double-click the 20% marketing list to add it to the Selected records list. Click OK..
- In the Add Marketing Lists to Campaign dialog box, click OK. Your list is added to the campaign.
Note the default option Add marketing lists to all open undistributed campaign activities in the current campaign. For this exercise, you can keep this default.
- Click Save and Close.
Distributing the campaign using campaign activities
Campaigns in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online are launched by creating and distributing campaign activities to the marketing lists associated with a campaign. Activities are actions to be performed, such as a task, or communications sent or received, including e-mails, phone calls, letters, and faxes. The activities cannot be distributed if marketing lists have not been associated with the campaign.
When activities are created, they can be assigned to either the person creating the activity or to the owners of the customers on the marketing list. For example, for the Upgraded Bike Pads campaign, when Nicole creates the e-mail activity, she would designate the owners of the customers, meaning the sales people, rather than herself. When the activity is distributed and the e-mails about the campaign created, the sales people then follow up and send those e-mails to their customers.
Monitoring customer responses and checking orders
Campaign responses can be added in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online in several ways, including:
- Entering campaign responses manually: Sales or marketing staff can add campaign responses using the Campaign Response form.
- Converting campaign activities: E-mail, phone, fax, and letter activities can be converted to campaign responses using Convert to Opportunity.
- Importing campaign responses: Responses can be imported that are saved in a file from a campaign run by an outside vendor.
- Automating campaign responses: Responses can be generated automatically when an e-mail is received from customers of this campaign.
After the campaign is distributed, Julia, the marketing manager, can monitor the customer responses to the campaign, and also check which orders for the upgraded bike pads resulted from customers who were on the targeted marketing list. In the Marketing area of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, she can view campaign responses for the campaign.
One way to find out if the marketing campaign succeeded is to see how many customers, who were targeted, placed orders for the product that was promoted in the campaign. When orders are entered into Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, the details about the orders can include the source marketing-campaign associated with the order.
To find out which customers targeted by the campaign placed orders, Julia can look at any active orders for the upgraded bike pads and verify in the order information that the customer was part of the Upgraded Bike Pads campaign.
You can learn more about creating and distributing marketing campaigns, as well as checking orders, in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Help.
Related Links
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