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CRM 2011 Campaign Activities – How to Distribute Emails via Mail Merge

Post Author: Joe D365 |

Considerations for Sending Email Blasts from CRM 2011 Campaign Activities

In Dynamics CRM, users can distribute many different activities through campaigns and campaign activities to accomplish marketing tasks. There are some advantages to distributing emails via mail merge and campaign activities. For one, users can utilize Word to format the email text, while inserting data fields (First Name, Last Name, Title, etc) from Dynamics CRM. Also, the mail merge emails can be automatically tracked back to CRM and the associated campaign.

How to Send Mail Merge Emails

NOTE: This step-by-step process assumes users understand basic to intermediate navigation of Dynamics CRM, and they have already set up their marketing lists. Also, mail merge must be done from the CRM client for Outlook.

1. Navigate to or create the campaign that you want to associate the mail merge emails to. In this example, we are using "Test Search Mail Merge Campaign." Please make sure to add your marketing lists if you have not done so yet.

2. From here, navigate to associated campaign activities and click "Add New Campaign Activity."

CRM 2011 campaign activities - create your activity

3. Important! When creating this new campaign activity, make sure to select the channel E-mail via Mail Merge.

4. Create the new campaign activity by clicking Save.

5. Once created, now we can distribute to the mail merge emails. On this campaign activity, click Distribute Campaign Activity.

6. You'll see the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mail Merge for Microsoft Office Word window appear. This screen provides a couple different options to start the Mail Merge. Users can use a Mail Merge template (previously uploaded to CRM) to use pre-formatted text by selecting 'Organization mail merge template'. Click on the lookup to select your template and click OK.

 

7.For our example, we will use our first option, Blank Document, to build our mail merge email. To do so, select Blank Document and click Download.

8. Your blank Word document will load, prompting you with the Mail Merge Recipients window. Here you can review the recipient data from Dynamics CRM, and click OK to approve.

9. Now you can format the text. Type in or paste in your desired text, or even insert data fields from CRM by clicking Insert Merge Field.

10. In this example, we are inserting only the First Name data field. End result will look something like this. (You can save this Word document and upload to CRM as a Mail Merge Template for future use.)

11. Once complete, click Finish and Merge and then Send E-Mail Messages.

12. This will open a Merge to E-mail window. Insert text for the subject line. NOTE: This is the subject as it appears to the recipient. Click OK.

13. Next will be a prompt for the user to create optional Dynamics CRM activities. This allows you to track the email being sent. Choose the Create Microsoft Dynamics CRM Activities option. To exclude an unsubscribe link, make sure to uncheck the box. There are also options to include attachments. To send the emails, click OK.

14. Once started, Word will process one by one and send the email through Outlook. Your Outlook must stay open to send all of the emails. Once the mail merge has been completed, Word will prompt with a window. Click OK to finish.

That's all there is to it! Once you have familiarized yourself with mail merge process, you can distribute your emails via mail merge with CRM 2011 campaign activities while tracking those emails against your leads, contacts, or accounts.

If you are looking for other email marketing functionality, you might be interested in our blog on sending email campaigns from Dynamics CRM with MailChimp.

Happy CRM'ing!

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

7 comments on “CRM 2011 Campaign Activities – How to Distribute Emails via Mail Merge”

  1. This is a great post and really explains how to do this, but I have two questions:
    1) why would you not get the CRM dialogue box come up at the end of the merge process? We have just done a test send of a campaign activity, but it sent the emails and did not create the activities because we didn't get the option to choose.
    2) is there a way to send the mail merge email as a different user? We have the security roles set up so that we can send as someone else, but again there is no option to change the sending user at the time that we can see.

  2. I also do not get the last dialog to allow me to track the emails sent. The campaign activity also remains in a proposed state. Do you have any suggestions on how to rectify?

    1. Hi Marian - try this, but from within the outlook crm client. this is necessary to track activities back to crm.

  3. Hi Joe, this is a good post.
    I have one question: Why I don't get the Create activities dialog box? For this reason I can´t create the email activities related to the campaign.

    1. Hi Sandra - for the create activities dialog you need to have the outlook crm client installed.

  4. Hi Joe,

    I am experiencing the same problem as everyone else here... The last step does not appear and instead all emails are sent directly, not allowing for attachments to be selected.I'm currently using CRM 2011 on premises, Outlook Client for CRM with Office 2013.
    It seems to be a problem with Office 2013 (also installed the Rollup Update 17 for CRM Outlook Client).

    Regards,
    Annie

    1. Hi Annie - we will see if we can replicate the issue with office 203. For sure you started the mail merge from within the outlook crm client crm and NOT via logging in from the browser ?

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