Planning and Preparing Marketing Activities

Before executing the marketing activity, you need to specify the details of the marketing activity and create any necessary documents and records

Follow the below steps to plan and prepare your marketing activities:

  1. Determine how you wish to contact your customers or prospects. You can contact customers via:
    • Mailings: Letters, e-mails, faxes or SMS can be created automatically within the scope of the marketing activity.
    • Telephone calls: Activity records are automatically generated and can be edited by telemarketing staff.
    • Combined channels: The customer/prospect is contacted using their preferred channel.
    • Adverts: An advert that is published with a keyword. Companies or persons that respond to the advert can be assigned to the marketing activity via this keyword.
    • Surveys: A questionnaire is sent by e-mail and the answers are automatically saved in Aurea.CRM. The survey is filled out by the appropriate rep if the survey is carried out by telephone.
  2. Create the target group using a selection, see Defining a Selection.
    • Enable the Exclude from Marketing Activities field in company and person records that should never be included in marketing activities.
      This allows you to store data relating to friends or competitors in the database, without running the risk of sending them expensive marketing material or distorting analyses.
      Note: Enabling the Exclude from Marketing Activities field for a company also automatically excludes all persons in this company from marketing activities.

      If all persons in a company are excluded from marketing activities and the appointments are generated (e.g. for activities or mailings), the appointments generated are company-related.

      Records in the Person (PE) info area are not excluded from marketing activities if linked to a record in the Contact Person (CP) info area that is excluded from marketing activities.

    • You do not need to define a target group for follow-up marketing activities and published adverts: these target groups are built up later from those customers/prospects that responded to the previous marketing activity in a specific manner.

  3. Ensure that labels have been assigned to the recipients (Label field in the Person, Contact Person or Person in Company info area) or define a general label format (Extras > Define Label).
  4. Define a transfer field format, if necessary (Extras > Define Transfer Fields), that includes the fields you wish to include in the body text (e.g. order number), see Defining Transfer Fields.
  5. For mass mailings and faxes:
    1. Select Extras > Document Directories from the menu. Select the version of your word processor. You can also specify default directories for your documents, see Document Directories.
    2. Create the main document containing the static portion of the text in Microsoft Word.
    3. Define a transfer format, see Defining Transfer Formats.
    4. Enter the mail merge fields in the main document, see Establishing a Connection with the Word Processor.
    Note: You can later define whether CRM.server should generate a letter ready for printing or just a control file (containing the field contents for subsequent editing in your word processor or fax software).It is not possible to send faxes directly from within Aurea.CRM. You need to send faxes using external software. Depending on your software, create either a control file or a mail-merge document.
  6. For e-mails:
    1. Configure the e-mail client, see E-mail Clients.
    2. Create a file containing the e-mail's body text, see Contents of a Mass Mailing in the Business Logic Manual.
    3. Verify that e-mail addresses have been entered for the companies/persons in the target group.
  7. For SMS:
    • Define your SMS settings, see mmsms.ini File in the Business Logic Manual.
    • Create a file containing the message text, see Contents of an SMS message in the Business Logic manual.

    You can define the SMS settings in the Configuration info area (MC) (General settings category, SMS settings option), see Configuration Info Area in the CRM.core Administrator Guide.

  8. For surveys (via telephone or e-mail):