Understanding Campaign Responses

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, campaign responses are records of the communication you receive from potential customers in response to a specific marketing campaign. You can record or capture responses to various marketing campaign activities to ensure that the right follow-up happens. There are four ways to create campaign responses:

Record campaign responses manually.
Convert an existing activity to a campaign response.
Automatically generate campaign responses.
Import responses from a file, such as a Microsoft Office Excel workbook.

Capturing campaign responses in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online helps to make sure that your team is aware that a customer has responded. Knowing this enables you to follow up appropriately. By running reports that contain the campaign response data that you have captured in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, you can measure the success of specific activities based on their response rates.

Note

Campaign responses are records of the responses you have received from potential customers, not automated responses back to your potential customers. Understanding this difference is especially important when you work with automatically generated campaign responses for e-mail activities. In other words, campaign responses for e-mail activities are not sent back to the people who responded to your e-mail; instead, the campaign response only tracks that the potential customer responded.

Creating New Campaign Responses

Sales and Marketing teams can use Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to manually record customer responses as campaign response records, based on a direct marketing activity. You can create responses manually by first creating an activity and then converting it, or by creating a new campaign response within a campaign record. More information: Work with Campaigns and Campaign Templates

Top of page

Converting Activities to Campaign Responses

When a potential customer responds to an activity created for them as part of a marketing campaign, you can convert the corresponding activity, such as a phone call, e-mail, or appointment, to a campaign response. To convert an activity, it must have been saved and have had no modifications since it was last saved. More information: Campaign Activity Form

Note

You create campaign responses from activities at the same time that you convert an individual activity to an opportunity.

Top of page

Automatically Creating Campaign Responses

For e-mail activities you have included in your campaign, you can also use Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to generate the campaign responses automatically. When customers respond to e-mail activities, you can choose to have Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online create the corresponding campaign response records automatically.

Important

This option is available only if e-mail tracking is enabled. This is a setting your administrator can set. More information: Manage System Settings

Top of page

Importing Campaign Responses

In addition to creating campaign responses within Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, you can also create them outside the system and then import them. By importing campaign responses, you can capture a record of the responses received as part of campaign efforts performed outside Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. For example, instead of hiring additional telesales representatives to handle the temporary increase in call volume during the product launch, you may outsource some of this work to a vendor. When you import the file, you can specify that it contains campaign responses. Each item in the file then becomes a campaign response in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.

Note

The minimum data that you must have to import a campaign response is the name of the parent campaign in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and a subject, such as "E-mail campaign result" or "Ayla Kol wants to place a bulk order".

Top of page