Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 - Marketing Lists

So, I am deep into Microsoft Dynamics CRM lately and I thought it would be a good idea for me to blog about my findings.  If your asking, how does this relate to SharePoint?  Well... it does; there has been a number of customer who have both technologies and want to integrate them.  I will be covering this too.

With some help from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Forum members, I now have a better understanding of how Marketing Lists are used.

First and foremost, Marketing Lists are a place-holder to manage a set of Accounts, Contacts or Leads.  Once you create a Marketing List to manage a specific type of record, only that type can be stored in it.  So if you are working on a campaign that will include records from your Contacts list and Lead list, you will need to create 2 Marketing Lists.

A Marketing list is dynamic from the stand-point that you can add, remove and updates associated records on an as needed basis.  However, don't be confused with the belief that the list will be updated based on some filter criteria.  For example, you create a Marketing List named Campaign Leads and add all records from your Leads list.  Adding a new record to your Lead list will not automatically update the Marketing List.  In this circumstance, you will need to update the Marketing List members by re-running the query again.

Here are a couple of links that may help with using Marketing Lists:

• Creating and Managing Marketing Lists
• Fine-tune your marketing lists with Advanced Find
• Creating a winning marketing list

Thank you again to those in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Forums for helping me better understand some of the details related to Marketing Lists!