The execution of a campaign starts with the distribution of the campaign activities to the associated marketing lists. When a campaign activity is distributed, an instance of the activity is created for each record in the marketing list. For example, if a phone call is added as a campaign activity associated to a lead list of say 50 leads, then an instance of phone call activity is created for each of the 50 leads, which can be assigned to the lead owners added to the queue of sales representative teams or to the current user distributing the campaign activity.
The campaign activities can be distributed only if they have a specified channel supported by Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, such as the phone call, appointment, e-mail, and letter channels. In case of the campaign activities that cannot be distributed by the channels provided by CRM, a channel type of Other can be specified, which just keeps track of the activity but is not distributed via CRM. The following screenshot shows the distribution of campaign activity using DISTRIBUTE CAMPAIGN ACTIVITY button on the command bar:
Distributing the campaign activities
When distributing the campaign activities, CRM takes into consideration the contact method preferences of the customer. For example, if a contact has opted out and does not want to receive an e-mail, the e-mail distribution will fail for that contact record. The same applies to bulk e-mail, if the customer has opted out of it. This ensures that the campaign respects the customer's preferences, which in turn helps build trust and loyalty with the brand. It's very critical to take contact preferences into consideration when creating the marketing lists. If we use a marketing list where 20 percent customers have opted out of the bulk e-mail, and we use this marketing list with a bulk e-mail campaign, the actual response might be much lower than the marketers' expected response and will adversely affect the campaign performance. We should ensure that we have built a channel for capturing the contact preferences of the customer. For example, when a customer unsubscribes from our newsletter, it should be appropriately captured and updated on the contact preferences of the customer in CRM.
In addition to preferences, we should also ensure that we have appropriate data on the customer record. Adding a lead to an e-mail campaign when the e-mail ID is not known can mislead the marketer and affect the campaign performance.
The following screenshot shows the contact preferences of a contact record:
Contact preferences of a contact in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
When distributing the campaign activities, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 enables us to specify who would own the campaign activities distributed to the target members. The following screenshot shows the list of options for the ownership of the campaign activities being distributed:
Choosing owner for distributing channel activities