One of the more obscure facts when working with the CRM 4.0 workflow engine is the ability to actually create a marketing list. Actually, you can create records for almost any entity, but I always found it interesting that Marketing Lists were on that list.
So why would this be useful and how would you use it?
That’s the question I have been asking myself for quite some time and to be quite honest, I really didn’t have an answer until a couple of weeks ago. Here’s what I’m doing:
The Scenario
I am starting a new venture which involves providing Internet-based training for CRM users. The training will be broken down into courses and lessons – pretty standard stuff.
I decided that I would like to have a marketing list for each course so that I could communicate with each person who had purchased the course.
The Solution
Create a workflow that will automatically create the Marketing List when a new Course is created. Here’s what the main workflow screen looks like:
The workflow needs to fire when the Course is created. I also added On demand so that I could start the workflow manually.
There is only one workflow step involved, which is the actual creation of the Marketing List record, and I’ve supplied the following fields:
The name is the Title from the Course. The Member Type is Contact, since all of my users are Contacts. And finally, the Purpose is just a summary of reason for the Marketing List exists.
Conclusion
While it has always been easy to create new records using CRM workflow, I think the use of automatically created Marketing Lists is pretty unique and I hope this inspires you to rethink the use of CRM workflows.
Finally, you are probably wondering how members of the Marketing List are maintained. This is pretty simple: When you purchase a course, the code-behind the web site automatically adds you to the Marketing List for the specified course. This means there is zero used-intervention in this entire process.
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