[Applies to: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0]

Creating and Managing Marketing Lists

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, marketing lists are groups of 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. filtered by criteria that you specify. You can associate marketing lists with 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., create 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. for the records in one or more marketing lists, and export marketing lists to Microsoft Office Excel.

Note

Marketing lists can contain only one type of record, such as accounts, contacts, or leads.

Adding members to marketing lists

There are several ways you can add members to a marketing list:

• Look up. Add members individually or as a group using the Lookup feature. For example, find and add a specific contact, or add all contacts.
• Advanced Find. Add members that match an Advanced Find A tool used to search for specific records and activities. query. For example, find and add only contacts with addresses in California, Oregon, and Washington.
• Import. Add members when you import accounts, contacts, or leads from an external file. For example, a list of leads from a telesales vendor saved in a Microsoft Office Excel workbook.

Qualifying marketing list members

After you create a marketing list and add members to it, you can further qualify To verify that a record fits specific criteria and should be converted to an opportunity, account, or contact, or be added to a marketing list. list members and remove members that do not match specific criteria:

• Remove members that match an Advanced Find query. For example, find and remove all leads older than two years.
• Remove members that do not match an Advanced Find query. For example, keep only the accounts with no activity in the last six months and remove all others.

Managing marketing lists

In addition to adding marketing lists to campaigns and managing the members of a marketing list, you can also manage the lists themselves:

• Delete marketing lists you no longer need. Deleting a marketing list does not remove the accounts, contacts, or leads that were in that list.
• Merge marketing lists. By copying members of one marketing list to another list, you can merge the two lists.
• Activate or deactivate a marketing list. Inactive marketing lists do not appear in the default view for marketing lists. After you have deactivated a marketing list, you can activate it again if you need to.