Dynamics 365 Business Central: CRM Part 11 - Mailing Groups

Dynamics 365 Business Central: CRM Part 11 - Mailing Groups

Hey, everyone, now we're going to go into mailing groups. Mailing groups is probably something you're familiar with if you're an existing CRM system if you're using something different than BC. BC obviously has that as well.

Well, what are mailing groups? You want to take a big set of contacts and you want to put portions of those contacts into mailing groups that are specific for certain things. Let's say, for example, you have a sports calendar that you want to send out, and you want to send that out to anybody who is interested in sports. You can create a mailing group for this sports calendar. Basically the way it works is that if you have a mailing group, MG, that is connected to many contacts. I'll just do it like that, contacts.

You basically create a mailing group and then you go and take contacts or a group of contacts and you put them inside the mailing group How you actually group these contacts together to put them inside to the mailing group is a little tricky. In order to do that, you have to use segments in campaigns. We will go ahead and show you how to do that in this video.

Okay, let's talk about mailing groups. I think mailing groups are very important in marketing. If you're doing any marketing today, you're probably using mailing groups. The idea is you have lots of contacts and you want to put them into groups that you can then use and reuse to send out mailers or gifts or something like that. What we did before, if we went into the contact cart, we set up a profile. I'm going to use the profile questionnaire to help me with setting up a mailing group. If I look at Raymond, for example, I have here that his hobbies are football, and I'm going to try to pick up sports hobbies from the questionnaire and create a sports gift mailing group.

If I go into the mailing group right here, I can see that we have a sports gift here. There's nobody in this mailing group right now, but there's a sports gift. I could go ahead and click on there and start adding contacts, but that would be tedious if I had thousands of contacts. They're all categorized anyways by profiles, so I don't want to do that. I want to rather get the contacts and put them into the mailing group according to a filter, so let's go ahead and do that.

I'll close out of here and in order to do that, I have to use something like a campaign. I'll go into Campaigns, create a new one, just get a number, call it Sports Gift, and we just have it started today ending at the end of next week, and Peter Shadow is the salesperson. We go ahead and create a new segment. Let's go into Segments and then into New. We have a segment for the campaign. Here we can start adding in contacts. I will just say here these are the Sports Contacts, people who are interested in sports. When I'm bringing in contacts here – I'll just click Add Contacts – I can go ahead and filter the profile questionnaire. I want to use the person, the line, and so these are the answers. I want to use football and I could actually put more than football, so I want to use football, and golf – oops, 50,000, copy. I'll do it like this and 60,000 – oops. Both football and golf – I think tennis was there. Let me just take a look, 70,000, okay, so I'll add that too. I'm using or here, so the pipe is or, so 50,000, 60,000, or 70,000.

That's pretty much it. Anybody who has the app – I want them to be type people. It's unlikely that a company was categorized as having a hobby. That would've been a mistake, but I'll put it in here anyways, and I just hit Okay. It finds that there are four people that fit the criteria, Crystal, Evan, Brice, and Raymond. They are all into sports. I want to send them some type of a sports gift. First, I would like to apply a mailing group, so put all of these people into one mailing group so I don't have to do this filter again. I can just maintain that mailing group.

I can go ahead and go in here, go to Functions, Apply Mailing Group, pick my Sports Gift mailing group, and just hit Okay. Now it's been applied. If I take a look at the mailing group right now – oops, thank you – I can see I have four people in this mailing group. Have a look at that. Here are my four contacts. I use the segment to push contacts into mailing groups, and then I can start building my mailing groups like that.

Obviously I could have just added people into the mailing group as I was adding the contact and that would've been also easy. Often times you come up with a mailing group and it doesn't exist. It has no contacts in it, and you want to go into your large set of contacts and push them into the mailing group according to criterias. The best way to do is using segments.