A marketing campaign supports all the features of a typical campaign, starting with planning the campaign, associating marketing lists to the campaign, sending periodic nurture messages as per schedule by creating multiple activities across various channels, and tracking responses, cost, and ROI. Marketing campaigns are used by the marketers to execute full-blown strategic marketing by associating target products with offer price lists and sales literatures with the campaign. The marketing campaign also supports analysis and reporting by a large set of marketing reports and dashboards available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013. Moreover, with templatization and duplication features, it becomes extremely easy to reuse successful marketing campaigns executed in the past.

The marketing campaign in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 is used for the planning and execution of strategic marketing. The marketing campaign starts with the creation of a campaign record, association of any planning tasks and activities required for the launch, creation of the campaign activities to deliver the marketing message, and associating target customers along with target products and sales literature with the campaign record while tracking the campaign cost. In further sections of this chapter, we will explore various steps involved in planning and executing marketing campaigns in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.