Mitch Milam's Dynamics CRM and xRM Discussions

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.