A campaign is the actualization of your marketing strategy; all the careful planning and ideation that go into marketing is brought to life with a campaign. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 makes your marketing more effective by efficiently managing all your marketing efforts and providing a campaign framework for the execution of your strategy. In this chapter, we will deep dive into the process of planning, creating, and executing campaigns with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.
We will cover the following subtopics in this chapter:
- Quick campaigns
- Marketing campaigns
- Creating campaigns
- Planning campaigns
- Campaign activities
- Target lists
- Sales literature, products, and price lists
- Executing campaigns
- Campaign templates
- Related campaigns
- Tracking campaign costs
The process of marketing a product or service involves a complex set of tasks, which needs to be carried out in a definite fashion. Marketing campaigns refer to this coordinated set of activities performed over a period of time to help communicate the value of a product or service to its potential buyers. The marketing teams invest a lot of time and money to carefully plan their marketing campaigns, starting from allocating the budget, targeting customers, designing the messages, and deciding the delivery channel, to coming up with the delivery schedule and frequency. The marketing automation feature of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 lets the marketers plan, create, execute, and track their campaigns within the CRM application. This ensures that all the campaign activities are performed as planned.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 supports the following two types of campaigns:
- Quick campaign
- Marketing campaign
In the following sections, we will explore both these types of campaign in detail.