The marketing list is a critical component of a marketing campaign. In fact, the marketing message and the entire campaign are designed with the target customers in mind. Marketing lists are put to action once associated with campaigns, and its members become the distribution target for all of the marketing communication generated by the campaign.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 allows the marketing list to be associated with multiple campaigns; we know that the marketing list supports just one member type, meaning we cannot have multiple record types as members in a single marketing list. We might have scenarios where some of the existing customers and new prospects might be a part of the same campaign. In such scenarios, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 allows the association of multiple marketing lists of different member types to a single campaign. Also, marketing lists of multiple types, both static and dynamic, can be associated with the same campaign.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 allows accounts, contacts, and leads as the member type. Let's consider a scenario where CRM delivers a newsletter to its prospective leads and the existing contacts. This might involve two separate marketing lists, one for leads and one for accounts, who have subscribed for the newsletter. Now, when a lead gets qualified to an opportunity and the contact is created, this new contact will not have the subscription information propagated from the lead, which is now inactive, so the customer might stop receiving the newsletter. In such a scenario, it is important that we propagate subscription information form leads to contacts via field relationship mapping or custom code. So, it's not just enough to have a list with the right criteria in place, but we should also take into consideration the life cycle of a customer when creating marketing lists for campaigns.
The marketing list in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 ensures that there are no duplicate records added to the list, meaning it's not possible to add the same record twice to the marketing list. This feature helps in maintaining the correct de-duplicated list without the risk of delivering the message multiple times, while also ensuring that the list count remains correct for measuring the campaign performance and cost. It's important to note that this does not provide any duplicate detection features to identify probable duplicates.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 supports a feature that can merge multiple lists of the same member type by copying the members of one list to another. In this way, multiple marketing lists can be merged to create a single list with distinct records.
The dynamic lists are great in terms of maintaining an up-to-date list, but the marketers would like to freeze and lock down the list for specific nurture programs. The dynamic list allows the creation of a static list with a snapshot of its current list members. This allows the marketers to maintain an all-time dynamic list while being able to get a static snapshot of the dynamic list to work with.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 does not allow direct importing of the list members via data import. When migrating data from different platforms, it might help to create a custom bridge entity between the marketing list and the customer record type (account, contact, and lead) to import the members and later add them to the marketing list using advanced find or use custom code to trigger the addition of members when records are added to the bridge entity.