Send bulk mails from campaign and quick campaign using Mail Merge feature

The blog will cover the process on how to send bulk emails using Quick Campaign as well as Campaigns with the help of Mail merge document. The Mail merge document allows ability to create your own word document in which you can format the mail content as per your requirement easily. The most useful feature of using mail merge is you can add images in the mail which you can not directly add in CRM mail.

Send mail merge email using quick campaign
You can create quick campaign from marketing list/CRM view you can create it using following steps,

Click on toolbar button “Create Quick Campaign”

Now follow the steps and on selection of activity type select the “Email via Mail Merge” option. (Note the below option will only be viewable from outlook client machine i.e. where outlook client is installed)

Here select the mail merge document. Open word document and follow the steps. You can update the content of the document if you need. Once all the steps completed send mail from “Electronic mail” option this will send mail to the members present in Marketing list.

You can create activity in CRM by choosing the option from below screen,

In quick campaign you can track the sent mails and tracked response from the clients just one another below as shown in below screen shot.

Send mail merge email using campaign
Here you need to create campaign activity against campaign which should include target marketing list from campaign to distribute the mails. Note while adding marketing list in campaign you will be prompt that add this marketing list to undistributed campaign activities. Select this option.

On campaign activity choose Channel as “Mail via mail Merge”, now once the campaign activity created you can click on toolbar button “Distribute Campaign Activity” to send the mails. (Note the distribute campaign activity feature is only available in outlook client).

On click of button you will shown the pop up to select the mail merge document and you need to follow same steps to send mail and create activity in CRM.

The main difference in campaign and quick campaign is when you send mail from campaign activities it allows you to select different type of customer i.e. accounts, contacts, leads but in quick campaign you can create mails to single type of customers.

CRM Quick Campaign - Unsubscribe option

We can create a marketing list for group of contacts, accounts or leads and against these records we can create a Quick Campaign. This Quick Campaign would ask for the type of activity to be created for these selected records.

We were required to setup a marketing list of our contacts for a mailer to be sent to them frequently. We created a Quick campaign for these contacts and selected the activity as Email. The email template provided includes an “Unsubscribe” option which can be used for getting mails back from the contact who don’t wish to receive mails thereafter.

Below is the screenshot where an activity type is selected along with the assign to options. Here, you can set the “Assign” accordingly. “Me” option says that the owner/sender of all the emails would be the logged in user while “Assign to another user or queue” option would allow you to select a particular user and this user would be the owner/sender of these emails. When any of the contact clicks on unsubscribe link, the “To” field will get set to this selected user.

In body of this template email you can set the template message with Unsubscribe link. To provide the Unsubscribe link select the Text and click on Unsubscribe button.

This wizard ends with creating campaign and the process of sending of mails starts. The success/failures can be evaluated from the Quick Campaign just created.
When the contact clicks on Unsubscribe link the unsubscribe subjected mail would be mailed back to the sender of these mails as set above.

When the unsubscribe mail is received that particular contact from the marketing list gets updated automatically and its “Do Not send marketing materials” is set to”No” as shown in the screenshot below.

But this auto subscribe may not work and can be reasoned due to two factors:

1) The “set auto unsubscribe option” in the System settings under Marketing tab should be set and to do this follow these below steps:
a) Go to Settings ==> Administration ==> System Settings
b) In system settings go to Marketing tab and set auto unsubscribe option to “Yes”.

2) The contact for which the auto unsubscribe should have worked must not have duplicate email address duplicating with another contact, account, lead, or user. Knowing this, even resolving the email address will not set the “Do Not send marketing materials” to “No” i.e. would not auto unsubscribe this contact.