Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Feature - Campaign Responses

Louise Alderton, 04 September 2010

In my past three blog posts I have explained the very basics of Campaign features within the Marketing Module of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

To sum up these posts…

Quick Campaigns – Used to create and distribute a singular marketing activity to a defined group.

Marketing Campaigns – Organises all the details for a complete marketing effort including planning tasks and campaign activities.

Campaign Templates – Allows you to design the skeleton of a campaign and save for use in future, similar campaigns.

As I’m sure you are aware, the overall goal of any marketing campaign is to get measurable results. So, in saying that, it is also important to have the tools in place to be able to measure these campaign results. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 contains such a feature to help to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Campaign results are captured as ‘Campaign Responses’.

How does it work?

Once a Campaign is underway (i.e. the campaign activities have been distributed), the target group members will begin to respond.

There are several ways to capture Campaign Responses:

1. Record the response yourself by creating a ‘new campaign response’.

2. Convert an activity, such as a phone call to a Campaign Response.

3. If the marketing campaign was conducted outside your organisation you may import the campaign responses.

4. If the campaign includes the customer responding via email the message will automatically be converted to a Campaign Response.

This is all very well, but I bet you are thinking – so now what do you do with these Campaign Responses? Good question. Once you have gathered the responses to a campaign you can shift focus from an outbound marketing effort to an inbound sales effort.

Options available to you in Dynamics CRM 4.0:

• Convert the Campaign Response to a Lead, Quote, Order or Opportunity.

• Use the Campaign Response to convert an existing lead to become an account, or contact.

• Use the Campaign Responses to measure the effectiveness of the campaign by running various (and customisable) reports.

When you have defined the campaign response you will be able to determine the appropriate follow-up to conduct and, in turn, hopefully convert the response into a sale.