Microsoft Dynamics CRM has excellent marketing features including marketing lists. Marketing lists are groups of leads or contacts grouped together for specific marketing purposes. For example if you sell industrial supplies you may have specific marketing lists for certain target markets and specific product or vendor line marketing. Leads and contacts can be added to marketing lists based on any criteria including:
- Products or vendor lines they order (provided you have /line of business system)
- Interests – Fields on the lead/contact that flag interests filled out by a salesperson or even automatically if CRM is integrated with your web site. For example our web site is integrated with . When a prospect visits our site and fills out a contact form the lead is automatically created in CRM. This integration also passes over data to CRM including the search term they used to find our site and what page they visited on our site. This then drives the marketing lists these leads are added to.
- No activity – When a lead or contact has had no activity in X time add them to a specific marketing list
These are just a few examples. The problem with marketing lists is that someone needs to add leads and contacts to these lists and this can be overlooked. To take this to the next level consider having workflow add leads/contacts to marketing lists automatically. Microsoft CRM 2011 makes this possible via a fairly straightforward workflow. The workflow would fire when a lead/contact is entered or updated and would examine the interest fields. It would add the lead/contact to the proper marketing lists based on the interest fields.
This same concept could be used in many other ways. For example if you track the industry that customers/prospects are in, a workflow could add leads/contacts to marketing lists that would be used for industry specific marketing.
Today generic marketing is not very effective. The more targeted the content the better the response rate will be. The concepts discussed here will allow you to keep your marketing lists up to date and allow you to perform more targeted marketing.
If you need help implementing this in your Microsoft CRM system contact us.
Beringer Associates is a in New Jersey
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