[Applies to: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0]

Understanding Quick Campaigns

You can use a quick campaign A communication method that creates a single activity for distribution to a group of accounts, contacts, or leads, or to a single marketing list. Contrast with campaigns, which support end-to-end marketing programs that have multiple activities. to communicate with an ad-hoc list of customers (accounts Companies that might do business with your organization., contacts People who represent customers or potential customers, or individuals related to accounts. For example, an individual who purchases products or services for their own use, or an employee of an account. A contact may also be a person involved in a business transaction, such as a supplier or a colleague., or leads Potential customers who must be qualified or disqualified as sales opportunities. If a lead is qualified, it can be converted to an opportunity, account, and/or contact.). More information: Work with Quick Campaigns

Selecting recipients for the quick campaign

There are two ways you can select the list of recipients for your quick campaign:

• Select the accounts, contacts, or leads directly.
• Do a search in Advanced Find A tool used to search for specific records and activities. and create a quick campaign from the resulting list of records.

Creating the quick campaign

When you create your new quick campaign, you can choose whether you want to own the activities Actions to be performed, such as tasks, or communication items that are sent or received, for example, e-mails, phone calls, letters, faxes, and appointments. The status of activities is tracked and the activity history is stored in the system, so users can view the open and closed activities. that you distribute To create campaign activities for each account, contact, or lead in a marketing list associated with a campaign, and then to assign the activities to the specified owners, or to perform the activities automatically (such as sending e-mail messages)., or whether each of the users who own the records in your quick campaign should own the distributed activities. If you use the quick campaign to create and distribute e-mail activities, you can also choose whether you want Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to automatically send the e-mail messages and whether the corresponding e-mail activities should be closed.

After you finish configuring your quick campaign, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online immediately creates and distributes the activity you specified for all of the customers you selected.

Working with the completed quick campaign record

After you have used a quick campaign to quickly distribute activities, you can use the quick campaign record to:

• Collect, view, and take action on campaign responses.
• View the activities created from the quick campaign and the current status on those activities.
• Close one or more open activities created from the quick campaign.
• View the records for the customers who were contacted.
• View the records for customers who could not be contacted and an explanation for why these customers were not included in the quick campaign.

Differences between campaigns and quick campaigns

In contrast to campaigns Marketing programs that use many communication vehicles to accomplish specific results. For example, using advertisements and direct mail to increase market share, introduce new products, or retain customers., quick campaigns Communication methods that create a single activity for distribution to a group of accounts, contacts, or leads, or to a single marketing list. Contrast with campaigns, which support end-to-end marketing programs that have multiple activities. do not include many of the same tracking and reporting features, and support only one type of activity for each quick campaign. However, you can use quick campaigns to distribute a single activity automatically to an ad-hoc selection of marketing lists, accounts, contacts, or leads.

Campaigns can represent an organization's marketing efforts over an extended period of time. The effects of a quick campaign are immediate.

Another key difference between campaigns and quick campaigns is in how marketing lists work with quick campaigns. Using quick campaigns, you can still select one or more marketing lists and create activities for all of the records in those lists. However, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online does not associate the marketing list itself with the quick campaign. Instead, activities are created only for the accounts, contacts, or leads that were included in the marketing list or lists when you selected them.

Additional quick campaign features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for Outlook

Some quick campaign features are available only in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for Outlook:

• Compose personalized e-mail messages using a template.
• Send messages in simple HTML or rich text format with the mail merge feature.