4 ways to put campaign responses to work for you

Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can track responses to marketing campaign activities, such as e-mail messages, faxes, direct mail, and more.

You can create campaign responses:

Manually.
Convert an existing campaign activity to a campaign response.
Automatically generate responses.
Import campaign responses into Microsoft Dynamics CRM from an external file.

Campaign responses are records of the responses you've received from potential customers, not automated responses to your potential customers. For example, campaign responses for e-mail activities are not sent back to the people who responded to your e-mail; instead, the campaign response only records the fact that the potential customer responded.

You can use reports to evaluate campaign-response data to help measure the success of specific activities based on their response rates.

On This Page

Create a new campaign response manually

Convert an activity to a campaign response

Automate creating campaign responses

Import campaign responses

Create a new campaign response manually

Sales and marketing teams can use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manually record customer responses as campaign response records, based on a direct marketing campaign activity. You can create responses manually by first creating a campaign activity and then converting it, or by creating a new campaign response in a Campaign form.

For example, when your company launches a new product, you may set up a campaign from start to finish in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, with thousands of e-mail activities and hundreds of phone-call activities. As part of your campaign, you may also decide to set up a booth at the county fair to promote this product. You create only one campaign activity for the event itself. You use a printed sign-up sheet on a clipboard to collect contact information from people who are interested in learning more about your product. Back in your office, you can enter each of these potential customers into Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a campaign-response activity associated with the campaign activity for the event.

Only the following activities can be converted to campaign responses:

Appointment
E-mail
Fax
Letter
Phone Call

By opening the Campaign record for your product launch and clicking Campaign Responses under Details, you can see the list of all campaign responses collected to this point. You can then click New to create the campaign response in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and automatically associate it with the parent campaign.

Tip

Although you can create campaign responses manually in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, for situations where you receive contact information outside the system, you may want to consider entering the potential customers as leads instead. You can then convert these leads to opportunities. When you convert a lead to an opportunity, you can also record the fact that the opportunity was generated from a campaign response, as described in the next section.

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Convert an activity to a campaign response

When someone responds to the marketing material you've sent them, you can convert the corresponding campaign activity, such as a phone call, e-mail, or appointment, to a campaign response.

Tip

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you create campaign responses from activities as you convert an individual activity to an opportunity.

For example, to help promote your new product to retailers, you create phone call activities that you distribute to your telesales representatives. One of the retailers on your call list responds favorably to your organization's offer. With the Phone Call activity form open, your telesales representative clicks Convert Activity, and then clicks To Opportunity. Then, the telesales representative locates and selects data for the Customer field and Source Campaign field. By default, the Record a closed campaign response check box is selected, which will automatically generate a campaign response and associated it to the campaign in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

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Automate creating campaign responses

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

For example, from a campaign record, a salesperson creates a campaign activity and chooses e-mail as the channel. Because he's created the activity from within the campaign record, the e-mail activity is automatically associated with the marketing campaign. After selecting a marketing list, the salesperson distributes the activity. Microsoft Dynamics CRM then creates individual e-mail activities with the Regarding field displaying the information that was entered in the Subject field of Campaign Activity form. If the recipient sends an e-mail back to your organization, Microsoft Dynamics CRM will automatically match the incoming message with the needed e-mail activity, based on information in the e-mail subject line. If Microsoft Dynamics CRM finds a match, it then create a corresponding campaign response activity.

Important

This option is available only if e-mail tracking is enabled. This is a setting your administrator can set. If you are an administrator, follow these instructions:

In the Navigation Pane, click Settings, and then click System Settings.
In the System Setting dialog box, click the E-mail tab.
Select the Track e-mails sent between CRM users as two activities check box.
Click the Marketing tab and verify that Create campaign responses for incoming e-mail is set to Yes.
Click OK to save your changes and close the System Setting dialog box.

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Import campaign responses

In addition to creating campaign responses in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, 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.

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. You may not want to provide access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM for these temporary telesales representatives. Therefore, their work is recorded in a file. Every week, your vendor sends you this file, which contains all the campaign responses received during that week. You can then import this file into Microsoft Dynamics CRM. When you import the file, Microsoft Dynamics CRM creates individual campaign responses and associates them with the campaign you specify.

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