A common question when building a list of records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM is “should I use a view or a marketing list?” This question doesn’t always have a straightforward answer, because there is some overlap in functionality, as you can see from the table below:
| | Advanced Find / View |
Marketing List |
| List of Contacts, Accounts or Leads | X | X |
| List of other entity records | X | |
| Automatically refreshed list | X | |
| List that is not automatically refreshed | | X |
| Multiple-step logic/list composed using a variety of lookup, advanced find, and ad-hoc members | | X |
| “Not” queries from related records | | X |
| Quick Campaign | X | X |
| Campaign | | X |
| Mail Merge | X | X |
| Bulk E-mail | X | X |
A common misconception when doing mailing lists or direct e-mails is that you HAVE to use a marketing list. This is not true—you can use either a marketing list or a view/advanced find. The answer to the question will depend on the the nature of the list and what you want to do with it. Here are the main differences:
1. Entities: Marketing lists can only include members from the account, contact, or lead entities. Views/advanced find can include any entity, including custom entities.
2. Auto refresh: A view is automatically refreshed every time that you open it. You can perform an advanced find, save the query, and the next time you select that view, you will see the latest data. Marketing lists are not automatically refreshed. This is by design. Since marketing lists are used to maintain a list of subscribers for a mailing list or attendees for an event, you typically don’t want the members of the list dynamically changing. Imagine if you had an annual conference attended by clients in a certain industry. You built a marketing list for the 2010 event and invited the attendees. If the list automatically refreshed, you could potentially have somebody show up on the list that wasn’t invited, or have someone fall off the list, if the industry on their record changed. This would be problematic for the event planning staff.
That being said, in some situations it might be nice to have a marketing list automatically refresh. This is not offered as out of the box functionality, but there are some solutions documented, such as Muhammad Ali Khan’s blog post using workflow to automatically refresh marketing lists.
3. Multiple-step logic: One of the key strengths of Marketing Lists is the ability to build a list using multiple queries or steps, or create a list that is based on an advanced find, and then add some other records to the list that are not part of the advanced find—for example, get all contacts who are named John, then add three Larry’s to the list, then remove everyone from the list who is in Michigan. Say you have a newsletter that goes out to all of your clients, but you also want to add some additional recipients that are not clients to the list—Marketing lists can be built from an advanced find, then you can add additional records to the list in an ad-hoc manner.
4. “Not” queries from related entities: One thing to keep in mind about Advanced Find, it is great at telling you what IS true, but not that effective at telling you what is NOT true, especially what is not true about related entity records. For example, I could do an advanced find for all companies where City is not Chicago—that’s very straightforward; however, I can’t do an advanced find for all companies that have NOT ordered product X, or all companies where a related contact name is NOT “John.” The reason is the way that “NOT” works with advanced find. Say a company has ordered product X, product Y, and product Z. If I do advanced find for companies where related product does not equal Product X, this company will still be returned, because it has order records for products that are NOT product X.
Marketing list’s capability to build a list based on multiple advanced finds can answer my “NOT” question. I can build a marketing list, use advanced find to add all companies to the list, then use advanced find to remove companies from the marketing list where related product equals product X. The resulting list will be a list of just companies that have not ordered product X.
5. Campaigns: If you want a list of companies or people to associate with a campaign, use a marketing list; however, Quick Campaign recipients can be either a view or a Marketing List.
del.icio.us Tags: Marketing Lists,Dynamics CRM,Microsoft CRM
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