Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Marketing Automations (2014)

Chapter 2. Segmentation with Marketing Lists

In this chapter, you will be introduced to concepts of segmentation and targeted marketing, and you will see how marketing lists in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 can be used for targeted marketing, simplifying the tedious process of assembling and managing the lists.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

· Marketing lists and their types

· Assembling marketing lists

· Managing marketing lists

Marketing lists and types

Marketing today has evolved from delivering a common message to masses to delivering focused messages to specific segments. Creating segments based on customer attributes and delivering precise messages allows the marketers to reach the right customer with the right offers at the right time. The concept of microtargeting is of special importance when we have various products and services targeted at different customer groups. A marketing list defines the target to which the various campaign messages will be distributed.

Segments can be defined based on attributes such as the prospects of geography, age, income group, and industry, but most of the time this may not be sufficient to micro-target specifically and deliver messages and offers with high relevance. Segmentation should focus on creating a profile of the customer, which involves gathering customer attributes and behavioral data from various sources and interpreting them in different ways and point of views. CRM can play a key role in building the customer profile and identifying key patterns by data analysis and visualization.

Let's consider a simple scenario where a telecom operator is promoting special international calling offers. It would have been easy to send an SMS to all the subscribers about the new offers, but this would be least effective and spam the subscribers who don't make international calls. Telco's CRM system can track customer service requests, and with this information, we can identify subscribers who requested the international calling facility. Now, sending the offers to this segment would be more effective. We can further target the subscribers by tracking and analyzing the call detail records of the customers to identify the continent/country to which frequent calls are made and then deliver continent- or country-specific offers, which would be extremely focused and helpful to the subscribers. With powerful segmentation and profiling techniques, companies can come up with targeted products and offers, which can provide them with a competitive advantage and improve market share.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 has a specialized marketing list entity, which is used to define the target customer segment for a campaign. The marketing list consists of members who are the recipients of all the communications generated by various campaign activities. We will now explore some of the attributes of the marketing list in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013. The following screenshot shows various attributes of the marketing list:

Screenshot showing attributes of the marketing list and members

Member type

The Member Type field in the marketing list in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 lets you specify the type of record that can be added as a member. Marketing lists are meant to be used in campaigns for specifying the list of people who will receive the marketing message. As marketing is focused towards customers and prospects, member types supported by the marketing list are leads, contacts, and accounts, which are customer entities within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013. Once the list is created, the member type cannot be updated. All marketing lists support just one member type, which means that we cannot have leads and accounts added as member type to a common marketing list.

Marketing list type

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 has two types of marketing lists: the static list and the dynamic list. A static list is more like the traditional marketing list, which has the details of the customer and does not take into consideration the changes in the customer data. In case of any changes, the list has to be manually updated and managed. Consider an example where a static list is created with all the customers who belong to a particular city. Now, over a period of time, if some of these customers who were added to the list move to different cities, the static list does not take these latest changes into consideration. This requires the marketer to manually manage the members of a static list to keep it up-to-date.

A dynamic list is a criteria-based list, which means that instead of adding individual records to the list, specific criteria is defined, based on which records are dynamically chosen on the fly. The members of the dynamic list can be dynamically added or removed, based on the criteria evaluation without any manual intervention. The marketer needs to keep in mind that the set of members receiving the marketing message might be different every time the dynamic list is used as there is no option to simply look up and add individual members. Hence, the dynamic list may not be an appropriate choice to nurture programs.

Other attributes

The out-of–the-box marketing list entity has the Purpose, Source, and Description fields used to populate additional information about the marketing list. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 allows the static marketing lists to be locked, after which there is no way to add/remove the members from the marketing list. Locking is not available for a dynamic list. The Currency and Cost fields are used to specify the cost in the specified currency involved in assembling the marketing list. The Last Used On field in the marketing list displays the date when the marketing list was last used in a campaign. The marketing list, once created, can be used multiple times by adding it to various marketing campaigns.

Assembling marketing lists

Assembling is the process of adding members to a marketing list. In most cases, targeted marketing requires us to deliver specific messages to a specific segment of customers based on their profiles. Assembling the list members involves slicing and dicing of data at various levels to create a list of relevant customers for a campaign. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 being a central repository for all the customer data, allows the marketers to search and profile customers based on various attributes and criteria using the advanced find feature.

This can also include behavioral information from third-party marketing automation tools, such as the activity on websites and social networks. Assembling the members differs based on the type of list. We will now explore the process of assembling the static and dynamic lists.

Assembling the static list

As described earlier, the members of the static list are manually managed and are not dynamically controlled by any special criteria. The command bar provides the MANAGE MEMBERS button. When this is clicked, the user is presented with the following four options to add, remove, and evaluate the members:

· Lookup records to add the members

· Add the members using advanced find

· Remove the members using advanced find

· Evaluate the members using advanced find

When creating a fresh marketing list, the first two options are more relevant while the last two options are more useful in updating and maintaining the static list. The following screenshot shows the options presented for managing the members of the static list:

Options to manage the static list members

Adding the members using lookup

The lookup option, to add the members, provides the basic lookup dialog box based on the member type of the marketing list, where the user can search for the records and add them to the marketing list. This option doesn't specify any special criteria for selection, but depends on the user to select the right record. The following screenshot shows the lookup dialog box for adding the members:

Lookup dialog box to add members to the static list

Using advanced find to add the members

Adding the members using the advanced find option is the most relevant method of adding members to the marketing list. This lets the marketer specify various criteria on the customer attributes, such as the last date of purchase, order amount, type of relationships, and location to build a profile of the customers suitable for the campaign. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 advanced find is fairly simple to use and designed to create fairly complex queries. The following screenshot shows the advanced find query designer to add the members to the static list:

Adding the members to the static list using advanced find

Using advanced find to remove the members

While removing members, use advanced find to specify the removal criteria. For example, a marketer might decide to focus his campaign only on customers in a particular location and choose to remove any member who is not in the target location by using the remove option. The following screenshot shows the Remove Members list option using advanced find:

Removal of the members from the static list using advanced find

Using advanced find to evaluate the members

Since the static lists are created based on the criteria specified at the time of creation, the marketer might need to evaluate and update his list from time to time to maintain its relevance. The Evaluate using Advanced Find option enables the marketer to evaluate members on the list based on the specified criteria, and the marketer can choose to add/remove the members based on the evaluation. Static lists can become irrelevant over time; but the evaluate feature enables the marketer to easily check the list by ensuring that the members satisfy the defined criteria and make changes if necessary. It can also help evaluate the members of the list based on new parameters that the marketer might find important for the campaign. The following screenshot shows the evaluate option to keep the members in the marketing list based on the evaluation:

Evaluate the members of the marketing list

Directly adding records to the list

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 provides the flexibility to directly add information such as account, contact, and lead records to the static marketing lists of the corresponding member type using the Add to Marketing List ribbon button on the various list views and record forms. The following screenshot shows the Add to Marketing List option from the lead list:

Adding selected contacts to the marketing list of the member type contact using Look Up Record

Assembling the dynamic list

The marketing list members represent real people and companies, which are continuously changing. The static marketing list is not a constantly changing living entity; instead, it's just a passive list, which is true only as of the time it was created. Let's consider a scenario where a list member of the static list has opted out by unsubscribing to marketing e-mails. This change is not known to the static list, therefore the marketer might continue sending the nurture e-mails, resulting in CRM failing to deliver the marketing e-mails after opt out, which can mislead the marketer and affect the campaign performance. The static list requires us to periodically use the manage member functionality to handle the changes over time, because the list represents the people whose product preferences, jobs, locations, and businesses keep changing with time. As the name suggests, the dynamic list automatically manages its members based on the specified criteria, and it can help overcome some of these challenges. The following screenshot shows the query designer to manage members for the dynamic list:

Advanced find query designer for managing the dynamic list members

The MANAGE MEMBERS button on the dynamic marketing list lets us specify an advanced find query, which is used to create the member list. In fact, the dynamic marketing list doesn't maintain the related list of members; instead, it just stores the query specifying the selection criteria. This query is executed at runtime to get the current list of members. The dynamic list remains up to date, and it eliminates the need to manually manage the list members until and unless the criteria are not changing.

Managing marketing lists

The marketing list is a critical component of a marketing campaign. In fact, the marketing message and the entire campaign are designed with the target customers in mind. Marketing lists are put to action once associated with campaigns, and its members become the distribution target for all of the marketing communication generated by the campaign.

Multiple cross record associations

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 allows the marketing list to be associated with multiple campaigns; we know that the marketing list supports just one member type, meaning we cannot have multiple record types as members in a single marketing list. We might have scenarios where some of the existing customers and new prospects might be a part of the same campaign. In such scenarios, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 allows the association of multiple marketing lists of different member types to a single campaign. Also, marketing lists of multiple types, both static and dynamic, can be associated with the same campaign.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 allows accounts, contacts, and leads as the member type. Let's consider a scenario where CRM delivers a newsletter to its prospective leads and the existing contacts. This might involve two separate marketing lists, one for leads and one for accounts, who have subscribed for the newsletter. Now, when a lead gets qualified to an opportunity and the contact is created, this new contact will not have the subscription information propagated from the lead, which is now inactive, so the customer might stop receiving the newsletter. In such a scenario, it is important that we propagate subscription information form leads to contacts via field relationship mapping or custom code. So, it's not just enough to have a list with the right criteria in place, but we should also take into consideration the life cycle of a customer when creating marketing lists for campaigns.

De-duplication of members

The marketing list in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 ensures that there are no duplicate records added to the list, meaning it's not possible to add the same record twice to the marketing list. This feature helps in maintaining the correct de-duplicated list without the risk of delivering the message multiple times, while also ensuring that the list count remains correct for measuring the campaign performance and cost. It's important to note that this does not provide any duplicate detection features to identify probable duplicates.

Merge members

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 supports a feature that can merge multiple lists of the same member type by copying the members of one list to another. In this way, multiple marketing lists can be merged to create a single list with distinct records.

Copy to the static list

The dynamic lists are great in terms of maintaining an up-to-date list, but the marketers would like to freeze and lock down the list for specific nurture programs. The dynamic list allows the creation of a static list with a snapshot of its current list members. This allows the marketers to maintain an all-time dynamic list while being able to get a static snapshot of the dynamic list to work with.

Member import

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 does not allow direct importing of the list members via data import. When migrating data from different platforms, it might help to create a custom bridge entity between the marketing list and the customer record type (account, contact, and lead) to import the members and later add them to the marketing list using advanced find or use custom code to trigger the addition of members when records are added to the bridge entity.

Summary

In this chapter, we have seen how Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 can target marketing at highly specific customer segments, which can help deliver relevant messaging to build loyalty and grow the market share while retaining the existing customers. We started out by segmenting customers based on the revenue and frequency attributes such as the last purchase date, purchase frequency, size of purchase, and profitability. We drilled down and built the customer profile based on all the available data in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 to identify correlating patterns. The next step will be to execute campaigns with specific tailored offers and messages. We used the analytics and business intelligence tools in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 to effectively measure the relevance of the campaign and further refine the segmentation process. In the next chapter, we will see more on how to plan and execute marketing campaigns using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.