Microsoft CRM - Quick Campaigns and Campaigns

Introduction
This article provides a high-level overview of the Quick Campaign and Campaign features of Microsoft CRM.

The purpose of both types of campaign is to track outgoing marketing activity and customer responses in a single record.

For example, a salesperson might want to e-mail all his customers with details of a special offer. By using a Quick Campaign or Campaign to create the e-mails the salesperson can easily see who was targetted for that particular campaign and the customer responses (positive or otherwise).

Key Differences between Quick Campaigns and Campaigns

Quick Campaigns and Campaigns are both used to bulk create activity records for a a set of records. However, with Quick Campaigns only a single activity can be created for a set of records - hence the reference to Quick .

Campaigns are used for longer term marketing activity, such as managing an event or a product launch, where there may be many interactions with customers. For example, for an event, you may send an initial invitation, a reminder e-mail and make post-event follow up phone calls.  The interactions can be created ahead of time so that the overall picture for the campaign is recorded and each interaction is created (or distributed as CRM refers to it) at the appropriate time. All the interactions appear under the campaign record.

Campaigns also allow you to record planning activities (as tasks) and to track financial costs. This is particulary interesting because campaign responses may be converted to leads, opportunities or orders. By tracking the orders that resulted from a campaign and the associated costs, returns on investments can be reported.

Record Types for Quick Campaigns and Campaigns

Both types of campaigns can be used to target Account, Contact and Lead records. For a Quick Campaign the target records can be manually selected from a list, the results of an advanced find or a marketing list. For a Campaign, only a marketing list can be used.

Activity Types

For both types of campaign the interaction can be a Phone Call, Appointment, Letter, Fax or Email.

Activities with Mail Merge

The Letter, Fax and E-mail activity types have a via Mail Merge option. This means that when the activity is created Microsoft Word will be started to run a mail merge.

In a Quick Campaign the via Mail Merge options only appear if the Quick Campaign is started from within the CRM Client for Outlook. If the Quick Campaign is started from within the web client then mail merge options won't be available.

In a Campaign, activities with the mail merge option can be defined in advance but they can only be distributed if the process is started from within the CRM Client for Outlook.

Mail merge templates

When a mail merge using Word is started the user will be asked to choose the content i.e. a template. This can be a:


Having chosen the template, Microsoft Word will be started to complete the mail merge.