4 ways to put campaign responses to work for you
Published: September 22, 2006
Your organization may send hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages, faxes, direct mail, and other marketing material each year, hoping to grow your business. Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, you can record or capture responses to various marketing campaign activities.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes four ways to create campaign responses:
| • | Record 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. |
Capturing campaign responses in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 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’ve captured in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can measure the success of specific activities based on their response rates.
Tip
Campaign responses are records of the responses you’ve received from potential customers, not automated responses 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 records the fact that the potential customer responded.
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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 within a Campaign form.
For example, when your company launches a new product, you may set up a full marketing campaign 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.
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.
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 may 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 rep clicks Convert to Opportunity. If the Source Campaign field is completed with the name of your campaign, the telesales rep can select Create a campaign response to generate the campaign response in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
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, one of your salespeople may create a campaign activity using the e-mail channel. The salesperson makes sure that the Parent Campaign field is set to your marketing campaign. When the salesperson distributes the campaign activity, Microsoft Dynamics CRM creates individual e-mail activities, with the Regarding field set to the campaign activity. The salesperson then sends the individual e-mail messages. If the recipient sends an e-mail back to your organization, Microsoft Dynamics CRM will automatically match the incoming message with the appropriate e-mail activity, based on information in the e-mail subject line. Microsoft Dynamics CRM can 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, set the Track e-mail option to Yes on the E-mail Tracking tab on the System Settings dialog box, and verify that Create campaign responses for incoming e-mail is set to Yes on the Marketing tab in this dialog box.
Import campaign responses
In addition to creating campaign responses within 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 reps. 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.
