Due to their unique attributes, Campaign Responses in CRM 2011 are incredibly useful for tracking ROI of Marketing. Like the simple example below, this blog will help you determine if and how Campaign Responses may fit into your CRM architecture as it is designed to support your sales and marketing strategy.

The traditional use of Campaign Responses, as their name implies, is to track the responses to outgoing marketing Campaigns. For example, your organization may send an email offer to your customer or prospects in CRM, and when they express interest (via phone, email, or otherwise), you would create a Campaign Response. You can automate the Campaign Response creation from an outbound Campaign, and this is discussed in this tutorial on 4 Ways to Put Campaign Response to Work.

But Campaign Responses can be used for much more than tracking responses to campaigns! Campaign Responses are unique because:

• They are an Activity, and they have all the benefits of an Activity, including:
  • They can be associated with an existing Lead, Account, or Opportunity through the Customer field (a.k.a. the "Regarding" field on other activities). This allows for tracking of ROI of a Campaign in a single place, even if some responses are coming from Leads and some from Contacts.
  • They show on the left navigation under Activities and Closed Activities or in a single view if you are using PowerOneView . Therefore, users can see a history of multiple responses to marketing efforts, rather than just a single Source.
  • You can add Campaign Responses to a queue if multiple people are responding to them.
• Unlike other types of Activities, Campaign Responses contain contact fields such as phone number and email address for collection of lead information.
• Unlike Leads, you can mark multiple Campaign Responses as complete or closed at the same time for easy clean-up.
• Campaign Responses can be converted to a Lead or to an Opportunity, Quote, or Order for an existing Customer.

Top 10 Uses for Campaign Responses

In addition to tracking responses to an outbound Campaign, here are the top 10 further uses for Campaign Responses.

• Track new 'leads' from existing customers (Contacts or Accounts).
• Track additional inquiries from existing Leads or Contacts.
• Triage web leads or inquiries coming in from a web form—especially if many of them could be already in your database.
• Collect registrations to an event where a Campaign is set up for the event.
• Collect leads during or after an event and assign for follow-up.
• Import a purchased list as Campaign Responses if the list possibly contains a number of existing Leads or Contacts.
• Import a "one-time use" list as Campaign Responses. Conduct the follow-up and convert those who respond. Close those who do not respond. If you include Campaign Responses in your search, you will never lose the data.
• Rather than creating Opportunities where there may be none, generate Campaign Responses for a group of prospects potentially interested in an event, product, or service. Follow-up with each prospect and either convert each one to an Opportunity or close it.
• Use workflow to generate Campaign Responses automatically when a new Lead or Opportunity is created with a Source Campaign. This creates a single place to track and report on results of Campaigns, but eliminates having to teach end users how to use Campaign Responses.
• When your organization does an outbound Campaign such as an Email offer, send people to a web form as the primary response channel. Bring the web form submissions into CRM as Campaign Responses.

Common Customizations Involving Campaign Responses

If you plan to use Campaign Responses, you ought to customize the Campaign Response to match your organization's processes just like you would any other entity in CRM. Here are some common ways the Campaign Responses are customized.

• Rename Campaign Responses to something that means more to your organization—especially if end-users will get involved in managing responses.
• Customize the Campaign Responses form—especially in the order you want to display and gather data. Remove unused fields. Rename the fields appropriately; for example the 'Customer' field might be renamed to Existing Contact or Lead.
• Add additional contact fields such as address and phone. Note that the mapping of fields on the out-of-the-box Convert to Lead process is hard-coded, so you may need to create workflows if you want to map additional fields.
• Add fields needed for a specific Campaign. If using Campaign Responses for different types of Campaigns, you may need JavaScript to hide and show fields based on the Campaign Type.
• Use plug-ins to create an automatic matching of Campaign Responses to existing Leads or Contacts. When importing, you can lookup existing Leads or Contacts, but for more complex matching or for Campaign Responses coming in from other channels, you may need to create a plugin.
• Add direct lookups to Lead, Account, and Contact. This enhances the ability to run workflows and report on Campaign Responses.
• Create workflows to automatically assign Campaign Responses out to users or close Campaign Responses after a certain time.
• Creating workflows to convert a Campaign Response to Contact, Account, or other types of records that are not included in the built-in conversion process.

  

Many organizations will consider creating a custom entity for what Campaign Responses were designed to do out-of-the-box. In doing this, they are missing out on some of the built-in functionality that makes Campaign Responses great. Before you travel down this path, consider what Campaign Responses can do for you!

PowerObjects provides marketing solutions that help organizations achieve their marketing goals and strategies including Email Marketing, Event Management, Surveys, Web Forms, and Web Analytics. For organizations with advanced Marketing needs, PowerObjects has created custom screens that allow users to complete unique processes such as converting multiple campaign responses at once to different types of records. Contact us if you are looking for a unique marketing solution today!