Add activity to campaign using in-app marketing

Article
10/03/2022

Make your marketing campaigns successful by creating, distributing, and assigning planning and campaign activities in Dynamics 365 Sales.

License and role requirements

Requirement type	You must have
License	Dynamics 365 Sales Premium, Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise, or Dynamics 365 Sales Professional More information: Dynamics 365 Sales pricing
Security roles	Any primary sales role, such as salesperson or sales manager More information: Primary sales roles

Planning and campaign activities

Planning activities are those you want to perform before you launch the campaign, and campaign activities are those you want to manage as part of the campaign. Examples of planning and campaign activities you can add include:

Identify advertising channels and supporting materials
Contact media channels to reserve time or space for advertising
Create or refine target marketing lists
Contact a design agency to request creation of collateral pieces and advertising materials

By default, a campaign targets an activity to the group of marketing lists that you select for the campaign. If you want to run a campaign activity on a subset of your marketing lists, you can distribute the activity to certain members instead.

Add a planning activity to a campaign

In the site map, select Marketing Lists.
Open a marketing list record, and then in the Campaigns area, open the campaign to which you want to add a planning activity.
To add a new activity, on the Related tab, select Planning Activities, then select New Activity, and then select the type of activity you want to create.

-OR-

To add an existing activity, select Add Existing Activity. In the Lookup Records panel, search for and select the required activities, and then select Add.
In the Quick Create (record) form, add the required information.
When you're ready to save your data, select Save.

Add a campaign activity to a campaign

When you add and distribute a campaign activity, an activity is created for each member in the marketing lists that you've chosen for the campaign.

Note

The average time for distributing a campaign activity to 100,000 members is 24 hours. For larger campaigns and faster activity distribution, use Dynamics 365 Marketing. For more information, go to Dynamics 365 Marketing documentation.

In the site map, select Marketing Lists, and from the Campaigns area, open the campaign to which you want to add a campaign activity.
On the Related tab, select Campaign Activities, and then select New Campaign Activity.
In the Summary section of the Campaign Activity form, enter the required information:

a. Subject. Type the objective of the campaign activity.

b. Used in Campaign. When you create the campaign activity from a campaign, the campaign is automatically added here.

c. Channel. Select the channel through which the communication for this activity must be sent. For example, the channel might be phone, letter, or email.

Note

Supported channels are email, appointment, phone call, fax, and letter. Custom activities or other out-of-the-box activities are not supported.

d. Scheduled start and end date. Enter the expected date and time that the activity is scheduled to start and end.
In the Anti-Spam Settings section, enter the frequency cap (in days) for marketing activities directed at any contact. Contacts that have been contacted more recently than this will be excluded from new campaign activity distributions. Enter "0" to disable the limit.

(Optional) Select the Audiences tab to view the information about the records (account, contact, and lead) for whom the activity has been created based on the channel type of the campaign activity. These records are the ones present in the marketing list(s) associated with the campaign activity.

Note

To view the Audiences tab, select the Campaign Activity form.

Option type	Description
Accepted table type	Activity is created for these records to be acted on based on the activity type mentioned in the channel for the campaign activity.
Excluded table type	The users in this section have opted out of any Marketing Materials or opted out of certain types of marketing materials such as email or phone calls. This information for the respective record can be seen on the Details tab of the record (account, contact, or lead). The other reason to be excluded could be lack of information. For example, for Channel Type as Email of a campaign activity, the records with no associated email ID will be excluded.

Option type

Description

Accepted table type

Activity is created for these records to be acted on based on the activity type mentioned in the channel for the campaign activity.

Excluded table type

The users in this section have opted out of any Marketing Materials or opted out of certain types of marketing materials such as email or phone calls. This information for the respective record can be seen on the Details tab of the record (account, contact, or lead). The other reason to be excluded could be lack of information. For example, for Channel Type as Email of a campaign activity, the records with no associated email ID will be excluded.

On the Campaign Activity form, select Save.

The marketing list from which the campaign activity is created is automatically added in the Marketing list section. To add more marketing lists, select the More Commands icon , and then select Add Existing Marketing List.

Distribute a campaign activity

You can distribute a campaign activity when you're ready to initiate the campaign.

Open the campaign activity and on the command bar select Distribute Campaign Activity.
In the activity form, enter the information that you want to distribute. For email activities,
- Draft the email that you want to send to the members.
- To allow your members to unsubscribe from any future marketing email communication, add the unsubscribe link to the email. Select the Unsubscribe option in the designer.
Select Distribute.
Choose who will own the activities, and then select Distribute.
Note
- When you distribute a campaign activity or run a quick campaign, and if a contact, account, or lead in the target audience (typically specified in a marketing list) doesn't have data in the Email, Fax, Address, or Primary Phone fields, respective activities like Email, Phone, Letter, and Fax won't be created for that contact, account, or lead.
After the activity's status turns Completed, you can view more details about the activities:
- To view more information about the type, owner, and status of the activities created for the campaign, view the Timeline section. If your campaign has letter or fax activities, they'll not be listed in the timeline by default. To view them, select Related > Activities.
- To view the reasons for failures, select Related > Successes/failures and then select the corresponding failure view. For example, if your campaign was targeted to accounts, select Account Bulk Operations Failures view.
  
  Note
  
  In the case of email activities, successes and failures don't indicate email delivery status, instead they indicate the status of email activity creation in Dynamics 365.

Close a campaign activity

After all the distributed activities are closed, you can close the campaign activity.

To close the campaign activity:

Open the campaign activity record and, on the command bar, select Close Campaign Activity.
Set an appropriate status for the activity, and then select Close Campaign Activity.
(Optional) Update the campaign activity record with the actual costs in the Actual Cost field. This helps guide you in planning the budget for future campaign activities.

Can't find the options in your app?

There are three possibilities:

You don't have the necessary license or role.
Your administrator hasn't turned on the feature.
Your organization is using a custom app. Check with your administrator for exact steps. The steps described in this article are specific to the out-of-the-box Sales Hub and Sales Professional apps.