Campaign activities are central to the marketing campaign; these activities define the customer touch points and the channel for delivering the marketing message. The following are the campaign activities:
- Making a phone call to customers
- Making an appointment for a webinar
- Delivering a letter
- Sending a fax or an e-mail
The marketing strategy should take into consideration the marketing message to be delivered, the delivery channel, and the frequency of delivery based on the target customers, and products. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 enables the creation of multiple scheduled campaign activities that may be specific to the marketing list to deliver targeted messages to the customer. It also provides the option of tracking the expected and the actual costs for the campaign activities. For a phone call activity, it can be the carrier charges and the average cost of time spent on the call, and for letters, it could involve the cost of paper, printing, envelopes, and postal charges. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 calculates the total campaign activity cost by totaling the cost against each activity that helps in the ROI calculations and establishing the budget for future campaigns.
The campaign activities can be categorized as channel and non-channel activities.
Activities associated with a campaign that specifies a communication channel are referred to as channel activities. The channel activities are the last mile activities, which deliver the message to the customer. The channel activities associated with the marketing campaign are distributed by replicating an instance of the channel activity for each customer, perceived to be the communication from the related user contact of the customer. For example, when an e-mail is to be delivered to a set of accounts in the marketing list, an instance of e-mail activities is created for each account in the list and assigned to the account managers. Even though this communication originated as a part of the marketing campaign, the recipient perceives this to be the message from the related account manager, which helps create a sense of personal touch to the customer and helps the marketers achieve near one-to-one marketing.
Each channel activity requires at least one marketing list to be associated with the lists that are associated with the campaign for the activity to be distributed. The actual execution of the campaign starts with the distribution of channel activities, and a campaign's execution ends with the completion of all the channel activities, which is followed by capturing the responses and the campaign performance analysis.
Activities that have a channel value as Other, or an unspecified channel that cannot be distributed, are considered non-channel activities. The non-channel activities are the pending activities to be performed during the campaign. Similar to the channel activities, they are assigned to users, who can then specify the channel type and complete the activity.
The campaign activities provide a feature to specify an outsourced vendor for the activity; the vendor can be a contact or an account record that would assist with the campaign activity. The non-channel activities may not be distributed, but it does involve cost that directly affects the budget of the overall campaign, hence should not be confused with the planning activities that do not have any direct cost involved.
The following are some of the non-channel campaign activities:
- Creating the e-mail templates and HTML content for the e-mail
- Identifying target customers and products
- Creating sales collaterals relevant to the campaign
Creating the campaign activity involves the following steps:
- Add a new campaign activity as shown in the following screenshot:
Adding the campaign activities to the campaign
- Specify the following details in the New Campaign Activity form and save the record:
- Subject: The subject for the channel activity being distributed.
- Type: This can be one of the following types:
- Research
- Content Preparation
- Target Marketing List Creation
- Lead Qualification
- Content Distribution
- Direct Initial Contact
- Channel: This can be e-mail, phone, appointment, letter, and fax. This also supports mail merge in the case of letters, faxes, and e-mails.
- Outsource Vendors: This shows the selection of accounts or contact vendor records for the non-channel campaign activities.
- Description: This describes the message delivered by the campaign activity.
- Scheduled Start and Scheduled End: This specifies the campaign activity schedule.
- Allocated Budget: This is the budget allocated for the activity distribution.
- Actual Cost: This specifies the actual cost involved in the distribution of the campaign activity.
- No. of Days: The anti-spam settings to avoid contacting members who were contacted within the specified number of days. The following screenshot shows the New Campaign Activity page:
Creating a new campaign activity