Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 4 For Dummies®

Chapter 19. Targeting Accounts and Contacts

Marketing professionals are often looking for ways to build lists of customers and prospects to help target their marketing message. Your Microsoft CRM system is most likely full of useful marketing data. Fortunately, the developers of Microsoft CRM understand that and provide a multitude of ways to target customers and prospects directly from the CRM system. This chapter addresses the marketing module contained in Microsoft CRM 4.

Target marketing with databases consists of storing critical business data, mining that data, and building lists of people that correspond to a marketing need. This book isn't a primer on database marketing, but that doesn't mean we can't review some basic concepts.

Databases are wonderful tools for storing data and retrieving it. With Microsoft CRM Marketing Lists, we can retrieve individual records, aggregate data, build lists, and perform marketing-related actions against the aggregated lists of data. We can then associate marketing lists with marketing campaigns (as we discuss in Chapter 20). Marketing campaigns store data on the types of channels used to reach your target market: who responded, how much new business was created, and lots more. Analyzing this data helps to improve future campaigns by allowing you to focus on the channels and people that not only respond to your marketing activities but more importantly purchase your goods and services.

Believe it or not, marketing list development starts with ...