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.

Tips on using Mail Merge Functionality in Dynamics CRM

Like most Contact Managers, Dynamics CRM too provides the Mail Merge ability. Recently we spent quite some time trying this out and we would like to share some of the findings that I am sure would assist other beginners in this area

1. Mail Merge functionality has been added as a privilege and so only users with the necessary privileges would be allowed to perform a mail merge. Mail merge is also available through the Web interface.

2. When the Mail merge process opens the Microsoft Word window to allow for designing of the Template make sure of the following

a. Enable Macros

b. Make sure the CRM addin is enabled and you have to click on this for the CRM mail merge to begin.
3. Though Mail merge can be used from Web interface as well, having Outlook client installed brings up some additional features like ability to “Upload” the mail merge template directly to CRM.

4. There are two ways to upload Mail Merge templates to CRM, one being design the template using the “Create Mailmerge template” button in MS word.

Save the Template file in Microsoft Word XML format.
Attach this document to CRM.
If you had the CRM Outlook client installed and Outlook running, the Word Mail merge wizard would display the “Upload Template” option.

Choosing this would automatically upload the document to CRM.

5. Mail Merge functionality is available for only selected System entities like
· Quote
· Lead
· Opportunity
· Account
but all custom entities are available for selection for Mail Merge

6. Only for the Quote entity would you find the “Related Products” entity in the data fields selection window.

No other one-to-many relations of any entity would be available for mail merge. However all lookup attributes would have their related entities available for selection in the data fields.

7. To design a mail merge template that lists out all the exported entries in a single document instead of creating one document per exported line of data choose the Mail Merge type to be “Directory”.

After you insert the mail merge fields and click on preview, it would still display each record on a separate page. To check the results as a list in a document, complete the merge and export the merge to another document to see the entire list in a single document.