Using Marketing Lists in Dynamics CRM 2011

Mark Bradman, 03 June 2012

In my previous blog, I used the example of following up leads from a Trade Show by turning the “next to useless” method of maintaining them in Excel spreadsheets…

 

… into a Valuable Asset available centrally to everyone within your organisation by importing them directly into Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011…

 

So let’s start by setting a goal of sending each person an email to thank them for taking the time to visit our stand and to remind them of your products and services.

We can do this by setting up a Marketing List in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 which will send a bulk email to everyone who provided you with their contact details.

Creating a Marketing List

Creating a Marketing List in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is easy.  Here is a road map:

 1. Click the following to open the Marketing List form:  
• Marketing on the site map
• Marketing Lists on the sub-menus 
• New in the Records group on the Marketing Lists tab

2. Enter the following into the Marketing form & click Save:
• Trade Show – May 2012” in the Name field
 – or any other name you might prefer to use
• Lead in the Member Type field
– you could choose Account or Contact if we were intending to market to existing customers or contact people, but in our example our records denote Leads
• Static in the Type field
– a Dynamic list is one that is updated automatically in real time based on a query you specify by which members are included in the list; let’s keep things simple for now by creating a Static list you will periodically maintain yourself
• There are numerous other fields available in Marketing Lists but this is all we’ll need for our example.

3. You have now created a Marketing List. To add members, click on the following:
• Marketing List Members in the Common section of the left navigation area
• Manage Members in the Actions section of the Marketing List tab
• Use Lookup to add members button on the Manage Members dialog box
• OK to continue.

The final step is to select the specific members you want in this list, which you can achieve in numerous ways including:

– You could select them all by checking the box alongside Name on the headings bar

OR

– You could use the Search field In the Look Up Records to narrow your member list.

4. For our example, let’s just check 3 of them for now as follows:
• Select the members,
• Click Add to move them to the Selected records box.
• Click OK

5. Let’s now view the member list:
• Click Marketing  on the site map
• Click Marketing Lists in the left navigation area
• Double click on the Marketing List 
• Click Marketing List Members in the Common section, of the Marketing List tab.

  

6. Alternatively, we could enter the same Leads into our Marketing List directly from the Lead sections of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 as follows:
• Click Sales  on the site map
• Click Leads in the left navigation area
• Select them all this time by checking the box alongside Name on the headings line
• Click Marketing List Members in the Common section, of the Marketing List tab
Marketing List
• Click OK

  

7. View the result by repeating step 5 above to notice that Microsoft Dynamics is smart enough to recognise that the 3 leads we added previously didn’t need to be added again:

How cool is that?

In my next blog, I’ll take this example further by using the Marketing List just created to achieve the goal of contacting all leads the following morning after the Trade Show through the use of an Email Template.