Configuring the Thunderbird plugin

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11.3 Marketing Campaigns

OpenERP offers a set of modules allowing you to easily create and track your Marketing Campaigns. With the Marketing application you define your direct marketing campaigns, which can be displayed in List or Diagram view process. To use the email functionality, you have to configure your email account. Go to Sales Configuration Emails Email Servers . Configure your server i.e. Google, example below. The object defines where you want the emails to enter e.g. as a Lead. See Using the e-mail gateway Click the Fetch email button to get the emails directly. OpenERP also automatically creates a Scheduled Action to fetch the mails every 5 minutes. The email is automatically created as a lead according to the object used.

11.3.1 Automate your leads with Marketing Campaigns

Example with the email marketing campaign we follow at OpenERP for our SAAS offer. Whenever someone subscribes to OpenERP online heshe fills a form which becomes the lead of OpenERP SaaS offer Campaign. Our SaaS salesperson triggers the marketing campaign by sending an introductory email of services we offer and thanking for subscribing for the one month free trial. Based on the response, we plot whether the lead is interested in OpenERP SAAS offer, Training or buying the OpenERP book. Significantly these are our subsets and based on their cues we send them email catering that respective needs. If they respond back, they are converted into an opportunity and thereby on subscription of our services they become our partner. In lack of response, we sent them another reminder regarding the offer after a weeks duration. If they still did not respond, our salesperson gives a voluntary call inquiring their needs. Hence like a flowchart we can trigger a respective activity for every possible cues. The chances of leads going unattended becomes very low, and for every lead we have a predefined method of treating it and we could measure it with our goals. Based on the goals we can also evaluate the effectiveness of our campaign and analyze if there is a room of improvement. What are the questions you should focus on? Designing every marketing campaign is mostly a long term process and the success of any campaign depends on the research and the effectiveness in the selection of customers in the campaign. There are certain questions that every marketeer always asks while designing a campaign. • What would be our marketing campaign? • Who would be the target audience? • How would we measure the effectiveness of our campaign? The OpenERP campaign works on the basic principle of lead automation. A lead is created based on a specific response by a customer towards a stimuli. E.g: Filling the subscription form on your website. The first step is defining the campaign i.e. the sequence of steps to be performed. On defining the campaign we trigger a set of activities in the marketing campaign module of OpenERP. Based on the lead automation we define the sequence of steps we ought to follow, the modes of creating and processing these activities and the cost involved with these campaign. Thus after each activity and based on its respective stimuli we can trigger the next event of the respective campaign. Why is the Segment important? The two most important points for any successful campaign are the adoption of a concrete methodology of execution and choosing the right segment: a target loop of customers to whom our campaign would be directed. Inappropriate focus on segment would result in the campaign being misfired and our efforts would reach deaf ears. Through the Segment tab in the Campaign module we can define our segment for the Campaign activity, since it is possible that with every step downwards our segment gets narrowed in terms of number. You can also synchronize the entire campaign steps based on our defined segments. How is Marketing Campaign related to CRM? 130 The Marketing Campaign module is closely synchronized with the Sales Management Business Application CRM. Initially,let us consider the segment we cater in the campaign as Leads. Goals are set for each campaign which would be considered as a desired state. Once a lead accomplishes our objective criteria of goals we change their status by converting them into Opportunity i.e. we should give focused attention to those leads. Once the lead satisfies our final objective we would consider them as a partnercustomer and close that lead. Email Templates For each email template, you can have OpenERP generate a Wizard Action Button that will be related to the object. So if you choose to do marketing campaigns for leads, the action will be added to the right side panel of the Lead form.

11.3.2 Defining a Marketing Campaign in OpenERP

Please notice that it requires some technical knowledge to configure Marketing Campaigns. To be able to see, create, edit campaign, users need to be in the Marketing User group. 0. Introduction A campaign defines a workflow of activities that itemsobjects entering the campaign will go through. Items are selected by segments. Segments are automatically processed every few hours and inject new items into the campaign, according to a given set of criteria. It is possible to watch the campaign as it is running, by following the campaign “workitems”. A workitem represents a given objectitem passing through a given campaign activity. Workitems are left behind when the item proceeds to the next activities. This allows an easy analysis and reporting on the running campaign. Each activity may execute an action upon activation depending on a dynamic condition. When the condition is not met, the workitem is cancelleddeleted; if the condition is met, the action is executed, the workitem is marked as Done, and propagated to the next activities. 1. Campaigns Marketing → Campaigns → Campaigns Campaign Each campaign is made of activities and transitions, and must be defined on any specific object the system knows about e.g. Leads, Opportunities, Employees, Partners. Mode A campaign can be in one of 4 modes: • Test Directly: process the whole campaign in one go, ignoring any delay put on transitions, and does not actually execute the actions, so the result is simply the set of corresponding campaign workitems see below. Any time a segment adds new items in the campaign they will be processed in the same manner. • Test in Real time: process the campaign but does not actually execute the actions, so the result is simply the set of corresponding campaign workitems see below. Any time a segment adds new items in the campaign they will be processed in the same manner. • Manual confirmation: No action will be executed automatically, a human intervention is needed to let workitems proceed into the flow. It is like a step-by-step manual process using the Campaign Followup menu. You can ignore the time delays and force any step of the campaign, implementing the campaign at your pace i.e. you have a test email and want to see if the steps and templates work to your liking. You will see that the actions set are defined as to do and Done and the page has to be refreshed to see the next activities defined by tthe campaign note: the campaign sends real messages to the actual targets, be warned. • Normal: the campaign is processed normally, all actions are executed automatically at the scheduled date. Pay attention that in this status, the campaign sends real messages to the actual targets. Regardless of the current mode of the campaign, any workitem can be manually executed or cancelled at any time even if it is scheduled in the future through Campaign Followup. Resource Specifies where the campaign will get the information from, i.e. the OpenERP object linked e.g. Leads, Opportunities, Employees, Partners.