In a previous article NET Genium ERP – Documents and activities, we learned about document and activity management.
We will now show you how to work with campaigns and explain how to use the CRMService service. These instructions can also be viewed online on the website https://www.netgenium.com/en/help/erp/customer-help.
Creating campaigns
Campaign records combine campaigns or other marketing activities associated with multiple customers at once. Typically, this involves managing advertising campaigns, promotions or, for example, creating mass e-mails to customers (newsletters, informing about important changes in the company, etc.).
1. step – create new campaign
In the upper gray bar, click on the application group “CRM”. In the navigation bar, click on the “Campaigns” application. Then click on the “New campaign” option or click on the button with the same name on the “Campaigns” view page.
2. step – campaign editing
In the introductory tab of the campaign edit form, we will fill in all required fields. Fill in the name of the campaign, or use Picker to take the name, including the type of campaign and the method of contacting from the already existing campaign record (more about using Picker in the general help Edit forms). In the field “Expected response” we can fill in the expected number of responses of the campaign recipients (eg the number of responses to the offer of new products). As part of the introductory tab, we also have the option of attaching up to several file attachments to the campaign.
On the “General” tab we can add the financial attributes of the campaign, on the “Recipients” tab we can use the “Marketing list” option to select the target group of our campaign (or bulk e-mail, to which the campaigns also serve). After selecting a specific marketing list, all business relationships and contacts that belong to the relevant list will be loaded into the campaign. We can edit these marketing lists on the “Marketing list A (or B or C)” view pages – this procedure is described later in this article in the “Working with campaigns” section.
In the “Business accounts” section, we can press the button “Include contacts marked with business relationships” include in the list of downloaded contacts all business relationship contacts from the selected marketing list. If we do not do so, only those business relationship contacts that have been included in the marketing list “Marketing List A (or B or C)” will be loaded in the table.
In the “Recipients” section, select the desired way to contact the campaign recipients and click on the “Load list of recipient” button, which will load the selected contact information into the adjacent field (e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, fax numbers, etc.).
3. step – send message
If e-mail or mass e-mail is selected, the “E-mail message” section will appear, where we can pre-fill the subject and content of the e-mail. After clicking on the “Send e-mail” button, a new form of the integrated email client NET Genium will open and the pre-filled message data in the campaign will be filled in immediately.
If the content of the message is empty and an HTML page is attached to the message as an attachment, the HTML code of this page will be inserted into the body of the message (the message will be sent in HTML format and without an attachment). Another special feature is sending the content of the website in the body of the email message. We can do this by copying the URL of the page into the subject line of the email. We leave the body of the message blank. The content of the message sent in this way will be the content of the website and the subject will be the title of this website (HTML tag <title>). When you have finished editing the message, click on the “Send” button and the e-mail will now be sent.
In the case of e-mails (both mass and intended for one recipient), the retrieved list of e-mail addresses can of course simply be copied, pasted and sent within any other suitable e-mail client – eg MS Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird or even through the web interface such as Gmail, List, etc.
It is also possible to create activity records for the campaign on the last tab “Activities” by pressing the “New activity” button. The activities created in this way will be automatically assigned to the campaign from which we pressed the button. However, we do not usually create activities immediately when the campaign is set up, but only, for example, when we receive a response from a customer to an e-mail sent within the campaign. A typical case is also the assignment of already existing activities, which were created by the CRMService service, for example, to a certain campaign record. The activities that we assign to the campaign are selected from the list of activities in the “Activities” application.
We'll save the campaign record at the end.
Working with campaigns
The view pages of each marketing list contain a list of all business relationships. If you want to assign a business relationship to the currently open marketing list (eg A), check the check box in the “In list A” column next to the line of the relevant record in the table. If you want to add more relationships to the list in bulk, in the simple table filter, expand the column “In list A”, select “Assign value ...” and check the box “... to list A” and save the selection. In this case, all records that are loaded in the table will be assigned to this list (the total number of displayed/loaded records will be found in the upper right corner of the table). We limit the number of bulk-assigned relationships, for example, by searching for specific relationships or setting user filters (see advanced functions of view tables View pages).
In the same way, we will include the contacts on the second tab in the marketing list, or we will load them into the list in bulk by pressing the button “Include contacts of selected business accounts”, which does the same thing as the button named in the campaign form – includes all business relationship contacts from the marketing list in the loaded contacts list.
CRMService
CRMService is used to automatically store incoming and outgoing e-mail communication with customers in the Activities application in the form of e-mail activities.
CRMService stores in NET Genium only those activities that relate to e-mails from existing business accounts or contacts. Activity records will not be created for other business relationships that are not registered in NET Genium. CRMService motivates system users to enter new business relationships and contacts honestly – and thus keep the corporate directory up to date.
Thanks to CRMService, we can record all incoming and outgoing communication with each customer in one place in NET Genium within the “Activities” application, or directly display this communication in a specific record of the business relationship.
Incoming traffic
As soon as a new e-mail arrives in your company mailbox, the CRMService service compares the sender's e-mail with the database of e-mails of NET Genium business relations, contacts and users and, if it finds the relevant record, creates a new activity within NET Genium (in the application “Activities”) about this communication associated with this relationship or contact.
Outgoing communication
In this case, the CRMService service works similarly. When sending an e-mail, we will send a blind copy to a special CRMService address (eg crm@netgenium.com, this address is specific to each customer), from where the service analyzes the e-mail and, if the recipient finds the relevant business relationship, contact or users, will create a new activity in NET Genium.
If we enter a text string in the format “Order:number” (without quotation marks, where the number represents the order number, eg “Order:4”) on a separate line or in the subject line of the e-mail message, the new the created activity is also assigned to an existing offer or order with the appropriate number.
Contents of the next article
With this article, we have discussed in detail the remaining basic capabilities of the Customers (CRM) module and completed a series of tutorials on this module. In the following article NET Genium ERP – Introduction to the Finance module, our attention will be focused on the Finance module. We will show you how to set up the module correctly and then we will get closer to working with issued invoices.
Sincerely, Your NetGenium Team.