Real Estate Marketing Campaigns

[Glen]

I am looking into purchasing Outlook 2007 with BCM to run my real estate
agent business. I need to be able to assign a lead to a specific marketing
campaign that constantly touches that lead. IE: I meet someone in an open
house and I want to setup
* a follow-up call in 3 days
* a follow-up email in 7 days
* a follow-up letter in 14 days
* etc...
Can BCM do it?

 

[Lon Orenstein]

No, the Marketing Campaigns in BCM are basically for sending one template to
200 people. Check out our pinpoint Marketing tool -- you can combine
emails, letters, tasks, and appointments into a campaign or action plan and
apply that to one or more contacts. Each plan can contain as many steps as
you want for as far in the future as you want...

Thanks,
Lon
___________________________________________________________
Lon Orenstein
pinpointtools, llc
(e-mail address removed)
Author of Outlook 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies
Author of the eBook: Moving from ACT! to Business Contact Manager
800.238.0560 x6104 Toll Free (U.S. only) +1 214.905.0401 x6104
www.pinpointtools.com

 

[Ed Marmon]

Lon,

Just a followup on this if I may-- the marketing campaigns in BCM07--
without subscribing to the micrsoft email services which I believe I will
not do-- what can the email campaign do alone, without that additional
subscription? What can be measured and reported on marketing campaigns in
BCM/OL 07 alone?

Also, why did you pick 200? Just an example, or is there a practical
limit on bcm/ol ability to handle a larger marketing campaign? If yes,
what's the number, just ballpark?

 

[Lon Orenstein]

Ed:

Yes, I chose 200 as an arbitrary example. I don't know that there's a
limit -- the BCM database can handle tens or hundreds of thousands of
contacts.

You can send out emails through Outlook's Outbox using a BCM Marketing
Campaign and not need the Email Marketing Service. BCM will do the merge
and the emails will end up in your Outbox just fine. The problem comes in
when you exceed your ISP's limit (Internet Service Provider, like Earthlink
or RoadRunner or your cable company) on how many emails you can send at one
time or in one day. Check to see if that's an issue for you.

The measuring of a campaign is dependent on using Microsoft's Email
Marketing Service because that's the way the results get loaded back into
BCM. That's how those Tracking numbers are entered into the Marketing
Campaign fields. That said, you can use the Initiated By field in a contact
or account record to link the campaign that produced that new contact or
account. That can give you some stats on who responded, but it's tedious to
do and only valid for new entries. Sending repeated emails and wanting to
measure who clicked is possible only from the Email Marketing Service, or
any one of third party services but they can't update those fields in BCM.
Is that clear???

The other advantage to the Marketing Service, besides tracking and entry
into BCM, is CAN-SPAM compliance. You have to give recipients a way to
unsubscribe to unwanted emails, although you could do this on your own by
knowing how to do it in your HTML template.


Hope that helped,
Lon

___________________________________________________________
Lon Orenstein
pinpointtools, llc
(e-mail address removed)
Author of Outlook 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies
Author of the eBook: Moving from ACT! to Business Contact Manager
800.238.0560 x6104 Toll Free (U.S. only) +1 214.905.0401 x6104
www.pinpointtools.com

 

[Ed Marmon]

Thanks for your resonse and its detail. Yes, I understand. There's
limited functionality to the loopback on marketing campaigns-- doing
something after you shoot your emails out-- analysing the results, then
updating the database accordingly... Oh well... maybe in v4...