Sales Campaigns

[PC MedEvac]

Hello

I am trying to figure out how to use CommitCRM for structured Sales/Marketing campaigns.

I would like to have a my sales letters, post cards and e-mails as templates and then use CommitCRM to automate the tasks.

Example
Meet lead A
Put lead A into CommitCRM as a prospect
Start a predefined workflow that kicks off 3 step letter, e-mail and postcards
After 3 to 6 months the campaign workflow ends and a flag is set to remove or renew.

The Opportunities does not appear to support this natively. Does anyone have a clever work around or idea to get this kind of thing started. Our current manual approach is getting painful.

[vsouthmayd]

This is on my list also. The way I am thinking this needs to be handled currently is to generate individual marketing steps as tasks and generate a series of tasks to be imported for the lead via the mail API. Each each step/task is an individual XML record to be imported. The idea is to create the workflow inidivdual tasks in an external web control panel and then apply the campaign workflow to the lead's RECID using the posting date as the beginning of the campaign and calculate individual tasks based from the begin date.

This was on my list of things to talk about Friday, but I never had a chance to catch you on the CommitCRM stuff after talking turkeys. :-)

Vernon Southmayd
Creative Computing

[Support Team]

Hi, thanks for the interesting ideas regarding automated campaigns.

What you can do currently in RangerMSP is manage your prospects as Sales Opportunities, and create create tasks with reminders for each opportunities. You can then set the due dates for the future, for each step of your campaign. Each task can contain an attached document, which can be an attachment an email you plan to send to the client, or any other document which will be needed when you reach this step in the campaign.

When the task due date arrives, you will be alerted with a popup message. You can then right-click the ask and select to send an email, which will automatically copy the clients email address to the "To" field, and will fill in some information for this client in the email body. It will also attach the document which is linked to this task.

This is a semi-automated way to go about it, as it requires preparing the tasks, however, once the tasks are there, this will make sure you follow the steps on time, and send the emails easily. vsouthmayd's suggestion of creating the tasks via the API is definitely interesting, and it may provide a good interim solution. In addition, we may indeed add more automation in this area in the future.

I hope this helps.

Neta

[vsouthmayd]

The problem we are really addressing is the pure volume of work that it would take to setup a multi-step marketing campaign to a 1000+ leads. The campaigns we are looking to execute have a minimum for three printed/mailed letters, possibly multiple emails and follow up calls for each lead all occurring simultaneously during 30 day campaign.

Even if we automate the setup of individual workflow tasks we are looking at setting up 3-6k tasks for one 1000 lead campaign if we use a task for each campaign step. I had thought through how to get the tasks into Commit, but I had considered the process of completing each task.

Instead of tasks to print each lead's individual mailing documents, it might be better to tag each lead with the current campaign (managed01) and then export data for a mail merge of all members of that campaign. Dates for the export/mailings would be tasks scheduled for our admin assistant one per mail piece. This would leave individual tasks for phone follow ups during the 30 day period for each lead, but cut the number of tasks to be entered by at least 3k. The individual call back tasks would be useful to verify the calls have been done and what the results of those calls were in history.

Same plan could be used for email follow ups. Export the campaign list out of CommitCRM and email through email marketing software instead. The only thing this would loose is that history in CommitCRM that the steps of the campaign were actually done.

Vernon Southmayd
Creative Computing

[Support Team]

Hi Vernon,

sounds like a great way to send out the campaigns. What you can do in order to track the history in RangerMSP for which steps of the campaign were actually done, is add history notes.

Once you export the list of account which are going to be part of your campaign, you can leave this filtered Accounts list in the Accounts window, and then use Account > Tools > Add Group History Notes option and add a note such as "Sent the Campaign "managed01" on date XXX".

Just another small note - you can also easily print out account labels report for sending out the mails, and filter it by the same tag on the account.

HTH

Neta

[vsouthmayd]

Neta,

Thanks for the hint on the "Account > Tools > Add Group History Notes option and add a note" option. I also saw the batch update which will make it easy to tag the leads with the campaign tag. This fills the missing history hole I was concerned about running the print outside ofCommitCRM.

Can we group add tasks or close tasks for a filter group?

Vernon Southmayd
Creative Computing

[vsouthmayd]

One more thought on the handling the 3 Step mailing campaigns. I would think it would be better to not open an opportunity in CommitCRM until a cold lead turns into a actual prospect by making some form of contact with you, or they engage in the sales process. If you create an opportunity for each lead and then have to kill all of those opportunities for leads that never responded at the end of the campaign your close rate is not going to look spectacular and you will have a lot of work killing opportunities.

Vernon Southmayd
Creative Computing

[Lee Edge]

Hi,

I have this issue too - I want to track marketing campaigns where there are multiple steps so that I know what has been done when etc. and make sure nothing gets missed etc.

Has there been any update to CommitCRM since this thread that resolves the problem?

Thanks

[Support Team]

Hi Lee,

Thank you for your post. Marketing campaigns management hasn't been changed lately, however, some automation options which were added to the system (such as activity templates) can help and also, as suggested in previous thread, you can already manage this in RangerMSP using the existing tools.

Specifically the "Add Group History Notes" can tremendously help you manage each step of a campaign, view which accounts were part of this step and manage the next steps. This helps you to tag the leads with the campaign tag, filter reports and lists by it, etc.

As for Activity Templates, you can create an activity template for "new leads" which will include all the tasks that need to be performed with the new lead, and run your work flow by this template. You can read more about activity templates here.

I hope this helps!

Dina

[Lee Edge]

Hi Dina,

Thanks for your reply, I can see how you could do it with activity templates for new leads - you would have to classify them as opportunities wouldn't you? as you can't apply activity templates to leads?

Also is it possible to group the leads that you want to apply the template to? for example week1, week2 and so on?

Thanks

[Support Team]

Hi Lee,

Thanks for that last post.

The activity template can actually be applied as many times as you like directly to an account which is classified as a lead. Just select the lead (account with type = "Lead") from the accounts list, go to the pending tab, and click New > Apply Activity Template. This way you can apply the activities without creating a sales opportunity for this.

As for your second question regarding grouped leads: You can rename the field1 field to Week and then edit the list to already include the groups you wish to label. This way, when looking at the accounts list, or generating reports, you can use the field1 stipulation to filter by the categories you've created.

I hope this helps.

Dina

[Lee Edge]

Hi Dina,

Thanks have managed to filter imported leads by for example using week1.

Is it possible to batch apply the activity template?

Also the import file contains the contact as seperate fields for firstname and lastname is there anyway i can make the contact field populate?

Thanks

Lee

[Support Team]

Hi Lee,

Thank you for that last post.
Unfortunately, there's no option to mass apply an activity template to a group of accounts, this should be done during creation.
Let me know if you need anything else.

Dina