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Campaigns

You can use campaigns to retain existing customers and acquire new clients.

A campaign is a coordinated set of predefined activities for achieving a marketing-related goal, such as a fundraising campaign.

Use the Campaigns workspace to create campaigns and manage the details associated with them, including steps, participants, and opportunities.

Campaigns enable you to:

  • Target your marketing efforts and personalize them for your customers.
  • Analyze your book of records and make proactive product and service recommendations.
  • Increase the number of opportunities closed.

FAQs for using campaigns and opportunities

This FAQ contains questions and answers about when to use campaigns and opportunities.


Use campaigns when you want to manage bulk email lists, track responses from contacts, manage and send invitations to events, and track lead stages for targeted marketing campaigns.

Avoid using campaigns to create saved lists or to share lists.  You can create entity lists on the Contacts workspace. For more information, see Saved lists and Searching and filtering in NexJ CRM.

Use opportunities when you want to track specific products or services that create further upselling opportunities.

For more information about opportunities, see Opportunities .

Campaigns workspace

The Campaigns workspace displays a data table that shows all data records matching a specified filter criteria. You can filter the table to refine what records are shown or search for specific campaigns. Use the Campaigns workspace to navigate between records and to add, view, and manage campaign information.

The Campaigns workspace enables you to:

  • Search for and find campaigns using a text search field and filter chips
  • Create campaigns by using the Add button on the top of the table
  • Edit campaign properties, including the name, description, start date, and end date, by using the Edit button for the campaign
  • Delete campaigns by using the Delete button for the campaign
  • Navigate to the campaign detail view by clicking the name of the campaign

The detail view is used to view and update the complete information about a specific campaign.

It allows you to:

  • View and update additional details about the campaign, including the team members working on the campaign, supported participant statuses, and any notes associated with the campaign
  • View graphs showing participant status and the pipeline
  • View, add, or delete campaign participants
A participant is an entity (usually not a user) that is involved in a campaign and will be in contact with the user responsible for it during the campaign.
  • View or edit opportunities generated from the campaign
  • View documents associated with the campaign or email them to a participant

You cannot add opportunities or documents directly to a campaign.

  • To add an opportunity, you must use the Contacts workspace to create the opportunity for a contact who is a campaign participant and specify the associated campaign name in the Campaign field. The opportunity will then be listed in the campaign's Opportunities tab.
  • To add documents, you must specify the Document Manager folder that contains those documents in the Folder field for the campaign. The documents in the folder will be displayed in the campaign's Documents tab.

Searching and filtering the data table

You can use the text search field and filters to find entity records on the Campaigns workspace. NexJ provides the following predefined filters that enable you to quickly find records that match the filter criteria:

  • Manager
  • Status
  • Priority

For more information about searching and filtering functionality, see Searching and filtering in NexJ CRM.

For more information about sorting data tables, see Navigating the NexJ CRM user interface.

Adding campaigns

To add a campaign, click the Add button at the top of the data table.

When adding a new campaign, the New Campaign dialog includes the following tabs and fields:

TabFieldDescriptionRequired field
DetailNameThe name of the campaign.Yes
Start DateThe date when the campaign starts. No
End DateThe date when the campaign ends. No
PriorityThe priority of the campaign: A, B, or CYes
Stage

The overall stage the campaign is at. Campaign stage is not set directly, it is based on what actions team members have performed for the campaign. For example, if a team member has started the campaign, the stage automatically changes to In Progress.

When you are creating the campaign, the stage is automatically set to Planning.

Yes
ManagerThe user in charge of the campaign. A manager is not required to create a campaign, but you must specify a manager before you can start adding participants.No
FolderThe Document Manager folder in which the documents related to the campaign may be stored. For more information about documents, see Managing your documents.No
Allocation Rules

The name of an assignment model that automatically assigns owners to new campaign participants.

An assignment model is a method used to assign roles or activities to users automatically in a variety of situations, including campaigns and activity plans.

Assignment models are created in NexJ Admin Console on the Assignment Models page. When assignment models that can be applied to campaigns are created, their Assignment Target field is set to Campaign Coverage.

If a model requires a coverage role to function, then you must select the coverage role from the Role field beside the Allocation Rules field.

NexJ Admin Console comes with one preset assignment model for campaigns: Campaign User. This assignment model requires that you input an entity coverage role, and does the following:

  1. It looks at the coverage for the new participant. If a user who is covering the participant has the same coverage role as the one that was selected in the Role field, then that user is assigned to be the owner of the participant.
  2. If no user covering the participant has that role, or if no users are covering the participant, then the user who is the campaign manager becomes the owner.

No
RoleA parameter used for the assignment model. The valid roles for each assignment model are defined in NexJ Admin Console on the Assignment Models page.No
DescriptionA description of the campaign.No
SecurityPublic/Group/Private

The view and edit security settings for the campaign. For example, Public or Private. For more information about security settings, see Security settings for objects in NexJ CRM.

The Security tab is not available when the Hierarchical Access Model is enabled.
Yes

After a campaign has been added, you can update this information:

  • On the Campaigns workspace, but clicking the Edit button for the campaign
  • In the detail view, by clicking the More Actions buttonin the campaign's banner

Modifying properties for a campaign

To modify the properties displayed in the campaign banner, click the More Actions button in the banner.

Other information related to the campaign can be viewed and modified in the following tabs.

Summary

The Summary tab contains the following cards.

Overview card

Displays the description of the campaign. To update the overview, click the Edit button .

Team Members card

Displays the team members responsible for executing the campaign. You can add or remove team members or change team member roles. The possible team member roles are Manager, Sponsor, and Support. A campaign can only have one Manager, who is defined in the New Campaign or Edit Campaign dialog. The campaign Manager cannot be deleted. Multiple team members can be in the Sponsor or Support role. A single user can also be defined with multiple roles.

Workflow card

Displays all supported statuses for the campaign and any actions associated with those statuses. A workflow for a campaign specifies the actions that should be executed for each campaign participant based on their status. For example, you can define the Not Interested status without an associated action and the Interested status associated with the Create Opportunity action. When a campaign participant's status is set to Interested, an opportunity is automatically created for them.

Participant status can be updated for individual participants or a selected group of participants on the Participants tab for the campaign.

The following actions can be associated with a workflow status:

  • Create task
  • Create meeting
  • Create opportunity
  • Print document

    To print a document for each participant:

    • The document must exist in the Document Manager folder specified in the Folder field in the New Campaign or Edit Campaign dialog.
    • The document must include an attachment in the correct format.

    After the documents for the participants have been printed, you can access them on the Batch Processes workspace

    You can also see the document on each contact's profile, in the Activities tab.

    For more information about documents and campaigns, see Documents.

  • Send email

    You can indicate whether the email should be sent as soon as the participant's status changes or after a specified delay.

    You can include a document as an attachment to the email for each participant, if:

    • The document exists in the Document Manager folder specified in the Folder field in the New Campaign or Edit Campaign dialog.
    • The document includes an attachment in the correct format.

    You can specify that an existing document should be used as a template for the email, if:

    • The document exists in the Document Manager folder specified in the Folder field in the New Campaign or Edit Campaign dialog.

    You can check whether the email was sent successfully on the Batch Processes workspace .

    You can see email content on the contact's profile, in the Activities tab.

    For more information about documents and campaigns, see Documents. For more information about personalizing the email for each participant, see Using tokens.

  • New activity plan

    To create a new activity plan for each participant, the activity plan template must be active. For more information about activity plans and activity plan templates, see Activity plan templates.

    If you assign the activity plan to a coverage role, the activity plan will not be created for participants who do not have users with that role on their coverage team.

The workflow for a campaign also indicates which future statuses are supported for each specified participant status. For example, you can define the Responded status with Interested and Not interested as the next available statuses. If a campaign participant has the status of Responded, then the status of the participant can be changed to Interested or Not interested. It cannot be changed to any other status, such as Contacted or Not responded.

If you do not define the next available status for the selected status, then the selected status for a participant cannot be changed during a campaign. The selected status indicates a final step in the workflow. By default, only the Don't contact me status has no possible next available statuses.

Campaign workflow templates

Campaign workflow templates are defined by administrators on the Customize workspace in the Campaigns tab.

By default, when a new campaign is created, it uses the "Default campaign workflow" template. You can modify the default workflow as required or you can load a different template by using the Select button

When the template used by your campaign is updated, the Reload template button is enabled. Click the button to load the latest version of the template.

When you select a new template or reload an updated template, all configurations for each status are reset. Any customizations you might have made will be lost.

For more information about workflows, see Workflow and participant status example.

Other cards

The Summary tab also contains two charts showing participant statuses and the pipeline:

  • The Participants by Status chart displays the number of participants for each participant status (only participant statuses with at least one participant having that status will appear on the graph). 
  • The Pipeline chart displays the expected revenue generated for each opportunity stage (only the stages with at least one opportunity on that stage will be displayed).

Participants

The Participants tab allows you to view, add, remove, or modify campaign participants. For more information, see Managing campaign participants.

Documents

The Documents tab on the Campaigns workspace displays all of the documents associated with the campaign.

To add documents to a campaign, you must specify a Document Manager folder in the Folder field when you are creating or updating the campaign. The documents in the specified Document Manager folder will be reflected in the Documents tab. You cannot add or remove the documents, but you can add, remove, and edit the attachments of any existing documents, as well as other document details, such as due dates.

You can also email documents to contacts, by clicking the Email button for the document. For more information about sending batch email, see Batch operations.

For more information about documents, see Managing your documents.

Opportunities

The Opportunities tab displays a list of all of the opportunities that have been generated from this campaign. These opportunities have been added for each individual participant on the Contacts workspace, and cannot be added or removed here. You can, however, change the properties of an opportunity here by using the Edit button.

If an opportunity has a business process in progress, the opportunity is locked until the business process is approved, rejected, or deleted. You can add activities to a locked opportunity but cannot edit other opportunity properties.

For more information about opportunities, see Opportunities.

Managing campaign participants

In the Participants tab, you can add any entity in NexJ CRM to a campaign as a participant.

A maximum of 4096 participants can be added to any single campaign.

After you add participants, the participants list displays the following information for participants:

  • Participant Status
    Displays a participant's current standing within a campaign. You can choose from any of the five default statuses (inactive, initiated, responded, not interested, or removed) as well as any custom statuses that have been defined on the Enumerations page in NexJ Admin Console.
  • Owner
    The user who is specifically assigned to all the activities for a specific participant in a campaign. Depending on your allocation rules, an owner may be automatically assigned to the participant upon creation. Each participant must have an owner associated with them or you will not be able to initiate their campaign.

You can change a participant's status or owner by clicking the Edit button for that participant.

In order to change a participant's status, the participant must first be initiated in the campaign.

Adding individual participants to a campaign

To add participants to a campaign, there must be a value in the Manager field for the campaign.

To add one or more participants to a campaign, click the Add Participants button at the top of the participant list.

You can also add participants to a campaign on the Contacts workspace.

  • Add a single participant by clicking the More Actions button for a contact and selecting Add to > Campaign.
  • Add multiple participants by selecting checkboxes for multiple contacts in the contact list, clicking the More Actions button on top of the data table, and then selecting Add to > Campaign.

Adding participants to a campaign using a predefined filter

If several of the intended participants of the campaign share a common property, such as a company, last name, or category, you can use a predefined filter to identify them and then add them to participant list.

To add participants to a campaign using a predefined filter, there must be values in the Manager, Allocation Rules, and Role fields for the campaign. This ensures that participants are assigned owners automatically.

Predefined filters are created by administrators using NexJ System Admin Console. This is done on the Filters page in the Predefined Filters tab on the NexJ System Admin Console.

Removing participants from a campaign

To remove a single participant from a campaign, click the Delete button for that participant.

To remove all of a campaign's participants, click the More Actions button and select Remove All.

Managing participant statuses

When a campaign is initially created, it is in the Planning stage and all participants have the Targeted status. You cannot change this default status while the campaign is in the Planning stage. You can only change a participant's status after the campaign has started.

After a campaign has started, the campaign stage changes to In Progress and participant status for all participants changes to Contacted. If any workflow actions are associated with the Contacted status, then they are performed on all participants. 

After this, you can change the status for a single participant or multiple participants at the same time. The list of possible future statuses changes depending on what status the participant currently has.

  • Change the status for a single participant by clicking the Update Status button for a contact and selecting the required status.
  • Change the status for multiple participants by selecting checkboxes for these contacts in the participant list, clicking the Update Status button on top of the data table, and then choosing the required status.

When the status changes, any actions associated with the status performed for the participant.

Updating the status for multiple participants at one time is also known as a status update batch process. You can view the status and results of the batch process by navigating to the Batch Processes workspace:

  • Click the User settings button in the application toolbar and select the Batch Processes option from the menu.
  • Click the Batch Processes icon  or workspace name in the navigator sidebar.

To easily find the relevant results, set the Type filter on the Batch Processes workspace to Update Campaign Participant Status.

Workflow and participant status example

For example, you may want to automatically create an opportunity for every interested campaign participant.


Starting a campaign

Starting a campaign changes the campaign stage to In Progress, changes the participants' status as specified in the workflow, and assigns the actions associated with the campaign status to the appropriate team members.

After the campaign stage changes from Planning to In Progress, it cannot be changed back to Planning. The active campaign be either completed or canceled.

To start a campaign, click the More Actions button in the campaign banner on the detail view, and select Start campaign.

Canceling a campaign

Canceling a campaign changes the campaign stage to Cancelled. The participants' statuses, activities associated with the campaign, and opportunities associated with the campaign are not affected.

A canceled campaign cannot be completed or re-started.

To cancel a campaign, click the More Actions button in the campaign banner on the detail view, and select Cancel campaign.

Completing a campaign

Completing a campaign changes the campaign stage to Completed. The participants' statuses, activities associated with the campaign, and opportunities associated with the campaign are not affected.

A completed campaign can be re-started, but it cannot be canceled.

To complete a campaign, click the More Actions button in the campaign banner on the detail view, and select Complete campaign.

To restart a completed campaign, click the More Actions button in the campaign banner, and select Start campaign.