A CRM solution is only as powerful as the quality of the data in it. More often than not, the weakest link for a marketer is the data and the lack of rich customer profiles in it. Having rich customer profiles and good customer segmentation allows you to tailor marketing efforts to individuals thus increasing your level of success in your marketing campaigns. That means higher quality leads and more revenue.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 brings in the ability to do rich customer profiling and customer segmentation automatically with the use of Dynamic Marketing Lists. In simple terms, Dynamic marketing lists allow you to set up the rules for adding a customer (business/account or individual/contact) to a list and automatically adding them to the list if they meet the criteria. This is pretty big jump from where you have to manually do the customer segmentation.
As an example, let’s say I wish to segment customers geographically by region and I have different regions, and based on those I create marketing lists. In my example, I have one list called California Customers that will automatically add into the list any customer with a California address. This includes when a customer’s address is updated or when a new customer is added. Let’s walk through this process on the use of Dynamic Marketing Lists in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.
Let’s first create a Marketing List called California Customer Accounts. We specify this as a Dynamics Marketing List.
Dynamic Marketing List created called California Customer Accounts
We then build the rules of adding customers on the list. In the screen below I’ve set the rule up that if the customer has any of its addresses in the State of California, then they will be added to the list automatically.
Configuration of Query for the Dynamic Marketing List
When we go to the list to check the members – it has automatically added all qualifying customers to this list that meet the criteria.
Dynamic Marketing List has automatically added all qualifying customers that meet the query criteria in to the list
To test this Dynamic Marketing List we created, let’s create a customer – [I deleted the extra space between the dash and ABC] ABC Corporation, which has an address in Long Beach, CA. As a side note –that address is where we are moving our new Southern California office to.
Dynamic Marketing Lists will automatically add new records to the list that meets the criteria
And we go to the California Customer Accounts Marketing list and Voila! The customer is automatically on that list.
Member List of the Dynamic Marketing List has been automatically updated to add the new record that we created since it met the query criteria of the list.
Essentially, what used to be a very tedious and error prone task has now gotten automated so that the chances of human error have been eliminated, and you also get accurate demographic and well segmented data that helps you build targeted marketing campaigns.
For any questions on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for your organization, email us at crm@ignify.com.
Sandeep Walia is the CEO of . Ignify is a technology provider of , and , software solutions to businesses and public sector organizations. Ignify has been included as the for 5 years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine and ranked as one of 100 most innovative companies in the world in the Red Herring Global 100 in 2011.
By Ignify, a Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner in California
Thanks for this article. Great starting point for the marketing module.