ConsultCRM's Services Director provides answers to common 'how do I..'

Question:
You have distributed a marketing activity to list of people and now you want to send follow-up emails according to whether each member of your list has responded or not.

Answer:
So, let’s assume you have distributed your initial campaign activity, in this case I’ve distributed an email to five people titled ConsultCRM Jan 2012 Event.

I’ve then gone on to log two campaign responses, one from Henry Porter and one from Kevin Towers to say that they’re interested.

So, I’d like to send a follow-up email to Henry and Kevin thanking them for their interest and confirming the details, and a second follow-up to the others reminding them of the event.  I’ll start with the first as it’s the easier to do.

Firstly, we need to setup a new marketing list for the confirmations.  There are several ways to do this, you can either create the list and then add it to the campaign or you can go to the campaign and create the list from there.  Either way, the end result is the same.   I will talk you through the latter approach here.

Open your marketing campaign, navigate to Target Marketing Lists and click Add existing Marketing List.  When the lookup dialog pops up, click on New to create a new marketing list.  Create the new list, making sure to choose the same member type as your initial list.

Once you’ve saved the list (don’t close it just yet), navigate to Marketing List Members to add the appropriate contacts to the list.  Click on Manager Members and select Use Advanced Find to add members and click OK.

CRM will then present you with a blank Advanced Find screen in order to build criteria to find the right contacts.  We need to find the contacts who have a logged an ‘interested’ campaign response for our initial distribution.  My initial campaign was called Jan 2012 Event, so my criteria looks like this.

This gives me a list with Henry and Kevin in it.

Once you’re happy you have the right list, select ‘Add all the members returned by the search to the marketing list’ and click Add to Marketing List.  This will add the resulting contacts to the list.  Once this is done, close your list and return to the lookup dialog.

Click OK to add your new list to the campaign.  At this point, CRM will ask you whether you want to add the members of the new list to any undistributed campaign activities.  Just click OK, unless you specifically don’t want to add these people onto any up-and-coming distributions.

You will now see against your campaign, that you have the new marketing list, which you can now use to distribute a new confirmation activity.

From your campaign, navigate to Campaign Activities and setup a new activity record.

Once you’ve done this, navigate to Target Marketing Lists within the campaign activity and you’ll see that by default, CRM has included all the marketing lists for the campaign, including your new list.

Clearly, on this occasion, I don’t want to send confirmations to everyone on the initial invitation list, so we need to remove this list from this activity.  Do this by selecting the original marketing list and clicking on Remove.  Once you’ve done this, you can now distribute this activity as usual.

In order to generate the list of contacts who have not responded, we have to perform two advanced finds.  To begin with, the process is identical above; so create a new list on the campaign as before, but when we come to manage the marketing list’s members we have to do this in two stages.  So, here’s our new list:

Now navigate to Marketing List Members and click on Manage Members.  As before, we will use an advanced find to add contacts to our list but this time, the list of contacts needs to be all those who received the orginal invitation.  In my example the criteria is as follows.

This gives me my original five contacts.

Once you’re happy with the list, ‘Add all the members returned by the search to the marketing list’ and click Add to Marketing List.  Your marketing list will now contain all the original invitees, now we need to remove those who responded.  To do this, click on Manage Members again and this time select ‘Use Advanced Find to remove members’.  Again, this will present you with an advanced find, and this time we need to find a list of contacts who were included on the original list; similar to the first query we ran but this time we’re not going to include the response code field in our criteria.  This will also eliminate anyone who replied but with a different response code.

‘Remove all the members returned by the search from the marketing list’ and click Remove from Marketing List.  Your list will now reduce to those that did not respond.

Once this is done, you can now distribute to this list as before, remembering to remove the two unwanted lists from the campaign activity when you create it.