Dynamics 365 Business Central: CRM Part 5 - Campaigns

Dynamics 365 Business Central: CRM Part 5- Campaigns

Hey everyone, so we're going to keep going with CRM. Today, we're going to talk about campaigns and a little bit about opportunity. The reason why I'm mentioning opportunities is because we're going to generate opportunities from a campaign. This thing is not really about opportunities. The next video will be opportunities, but I'll touch on it.

Anyways, we have campaigns, which is the main thing. I have campaigns. From campaigns, we have something called segments. You can have many segments, segment one, two, three. Each segment within the campaign can have contacts, so contact one, two, three, etcetera. Campaign contains multiple segments. Each segment contains multiple contacts.

Why do we do that? We're running a campaign, let's say, on 25% discount. I'd like to, let's say, send messages to our existing customers and also anybody who has sent us an email regarding anything in the last three months. I'd like to split those between two segments. One segment could be existing customers. The next segment could be – let's call it prospect.

From that, those two segments, I can apply different rules. I can send a different email to segment one and log that. Then the segment two, let's say over here, which is for the prospect. There we go. The campaign – it all goes up to the campaign, which could be a 25% discount.

Now, here we have, basically, a structure where we have one campaign. We've got multiple segments and inside each segment we have a number of contacts. From the contact, we want to generate something, right? From here, we want to issue maybe an interaction onto a contact. You can do that with the – with a campaign, so an interaction log entry, or we can actually create an opportunity.

That's what we're going to do in the video. We're actually going to go into one of the segments, go to the contacts, and create opportunities for the contact. They're all assigned to a certain salesperson, and so the salesperson should be able to see all these opportunities generated for them. They can then follow up on those opportunities.

I would have loved to see tasks here, create tasks, but we don't have that in Business Central. That's a note for Microsoft or anybody who wants to extend it. However, from the opportunities we can get into the tasks. I'll show you that in the next video after this one. Let's take a look at the screen share.

Okay, so campaigns, let's start by going into the salespeople, purchasers, and go into Peter Saddow. Here, you can get into everything that has to do with a salesperson. Particularly for CRM, CRM-related things are the easiest to access from here, for example, campaigns and opportunities. I'm going to talk about campaigns and opportunities right now.

If I go into opportunities, opportunities are basically leads, or opportunities per se, that's sales qualified leads that we are going to push through our sales cycle. Each opportunity here has either not started for status, not started, one lost, etcetera. We can also see which sales cycle it is in. Oddly enough, these demo ones don't have a current sales cycle, but we're going to get into that. You can see how much the value of it is, chances of success, etcetera. It's basically an opportunity that's going through a sales cycle.

Without going too deep into that, I'm going to show you how we can create opportunities in masses through a campaign. If I go into a process, I'm sorry, close this out and go into campaigns. The reason why I like to explain this through the opportunities is because when you create a campaign, it has to have some kind of result. We're going to create this campaign where we're going to give 25% discount on a few items. I create a new campaign, 25% of – just say everything. The status is in planning. We're starting today. It's going to run through the end of the month. The salesperson in charge of this is Peter Saddow. That's it. We created this campaign.

Campaign, you can manage the whole campaign cycle. We're planning it, and it's been approved, it's initiated, scheduled, start, and done. I'm not going to go through these stages right now. Obviously, that's as you're pushing through. It would be nice to be able to book costs towards this. You can if you work with dimensions because campaigns are related to dimensions. Again, it's a side topic, but the main thing here for what I wanted to do is get some contacts into this campaign. Then have those contacts initiate opportunities.

I'm going to go in and create a segment. Each campaign can have many segments. This one, I'm just going to have one. A segment is a container of contacts. We can dump contacts into a segment. Here, I'm just going to say all customers. It's going to be just one segment. Again, the salesperson is going to be Peter Saddow. I can come in here and say, add contacts.

This is really cool. Here, we can actually put a filter in for contacts and bring them in. Notice that I don't just have the standard information like the name, where they are, profile answers, whether they're married, not married, male, female, etcetera. I also have value entry filters, which means I can do it for – if they bought a special item. If they have bought this mug before, then I can send a mailer to them saying, "Hey, this mug is now 25% off."

Anyways, what I wanted to do is just pick customers. All contacts doesn't necessarily mean customers or customers at all. It could be a vendor, it could be a prospect, it could be anything. I'm going to pick existing customers. This is for our current customers, it's an upsell, and just hit OK. Then it brings in all customers. We don't have a whole lot of customers in the whole company. Anyways, and there were some errors here. My name is coming in here, and I shouldn't be on here. We have a test customer, which is not really good. I'm going to delete those out. I can go in here and say delete and delete.

One of the interesting thing here is that there is a criteria – I'll do this slowly. There is a criteria action that comes up here. If I click on that, it shows me exactly what happened. I brought in all of the contacts with the business relation customer, and then I removed these two contacts. I can actually save this criteria. If I have a standard criteria that I run, it can be saved. For next segments, I can just bring up the saved criteria and get all those contacts that are now qualifying that criteria into the segment. If I copy the segment, that wouldn't be good because you are adding contacts. You want to copy the criteria, not the segment.

From here, I can go ahead and do a lot of functions. We can make a phone call. We can attach something to it. I can actually get an interaction template here. I'm going to go ahead and just put email on this. This is going to be emailing out. That applies that to everyone. Now, there is a whole feature on you can import an attachment, and you can open up an email, and stuff like that. It gets a little clunky, and it depends on what system you're using. If you're mass mailing out of the system, chances are you're not going to mass mail out of Business Central. You have to use some kind of mass mailer, so you don't get blacklisted, and then all kinds of things like that.

For example, you can go ahead and export – let me see, I think that's somewhere over here. You can get exported into Excel right here, etcetera. You can just get it into Excel, and then take it into a mass mailer, and then log this segment saying that you've mailed everybody out.

What I really want to do is create opportunities for Peter Saddow. I'm going to do that. I can go here into Actions, Functions, let me see. Where is this? Here, Navigate2, okay, I don't know why it would be Navigate. Navigate segment, create opportunity, or create opportunities. I'm going to go ahead and create opportunities. I'll just go ahead and do that. Now, the opportunities should be for Peter Saddow. We can explore the opportunities in the next one.

This is how you would do a segment. Then, once you're done with going through everything in the segment, you can then log that. It will log the interaction entry for those contacts that are in the segment. Also notice one point, here, we have both the company and the person. We're emailing two, here. I could have just picked the person if I wanted to. Anyways, I hope that gives you an idea of what segments the campaigns are used for.