Quick Start – Marketing Basics

Once you have set up your CRM and started adding clients and partners to your databases, the next step is to put these resources to use via Marketing Campaigns. This article will explain the basic processes involved with marketing in your BNTouch CRM, including what a “Campaign” represents, how to add already-built campaigns to your account from the Context Exchange, adding steps to your campaigns, and configuring various options for your marketing steps.

This guide assumes you have already ‘taken the tour’ of your new CRM and understand at least the basic capabilities at your disposal. If you have not yet explored our “CRM Basics” manual or training video, we recommend you do so before learning about marketing options here.

If you would instead like to start a full training for your CRM in which you learn what each feature does in each tab, you should begin our Initial Training series with the first part, “Account Setup”. This article and video will help you configure options for your account, and the rest of the Initial Training series will progress through each section of your CRM in order, giving you a more complete understanding of its capabilities and the opportunities available for your business.

In the BNTouch CRM, a Campaign is a general piece of marketing—but not just an individual email.  A campaign represents your marketing communication around a particular concept. For example, you may make many marketing emails that go out to new leads, but you can handle many of these together with a single campaign. Each campaign can have several steps, which represent the various communication events that happen for each campaign. That new lead campaign may have steps that send emails to your clients, remind you to call those clients after a few days, etc.

When you open a campaign in the Marketing tab, you’ll see a list of the steps involved in it. Each can be set up from a basic template (a “T” icon for non-default templates), can be automated using triggers to determine when it is activated (the “A” icon), and can be sent to various target recipients (including borrowers, partners, staff members, or yourself, as indicated by the letter in the third column). The steps for these campaigns are organized into separate lists depending on whether they will be triggered on an interval—after a certain number of days, like a birthday—or triggered on specific dates for holidays and special events.

In this example, you’ll see that when a client is added to this New Lead campaign, an email is sent to the client the day they are added to the campaign. In this case, a reminder would also be sent to you on that day.

You can click a step title to see a preview of the communication, or you can click the icon in the “Actions” column to edit, test, or delete them. Here, you can configure exactly who the communication is being sent to, the subject line of the email, and what will be included in it. If you have a default template selected, that will automatically be applied; otherwise, you can quickly choose from various style templates for your various campaign steps using the “Templates” menu here.

In the text editor, you may also notice strange “##CLIENT_NAME##” sections. These won’t appear as they look here in each email. These are called ‘meta-tags’, and they will automatically replace themselves with record-specific information in each email sent with this step. In this case, each email will have the name of the client pulled from your Mortgages tab and automatically inserted into the mail. These meta-tags save an incredible amount of time, and you can search through all the available tags using the button in the text editor. There are very many of these tags, so you can really personalize your communication without having to compose emails one-at-a-time.

The text editor has several tools and options available—your emails don’t have to just be boring blocks of text. You can add pictures, links, and videos, change the fonts and presentation of your text, and much more using the buttons above the text box. For example, you can use the File Manager button to upload an image from your computer, then click the image from the list below to instantly add it to your campaign step!

Below, you’ll see various types of communication available for the step. This step can be sent as a task to your calendar, an email, or even a text message if you use the BNTouch Voice module. You can also set the campaign to update various fields in your CRM, which can help to automatically move records through the marketing pipeline.

If you want to take advantage of the automated nature of these steps, be sure to check the box labeled, “Yes, I would like it to be sent automatically.” If your Safe Mode is “On”, triggered campaigns steps won't automatically be sent out; they will go to a ‘pending campaigns’ section of your dashboard and await your approval. We want you to become comfortable with turning this Safe Mode setting “Off”, as this will let your campaign triggers run automatically and start saving you time.

If this step needs to be sent out now and also regularly afterward, like a newsletter, be sure to check the “Recurrent Step” checkbox. You can then set a recurrence interval (in days) to have it sent every time that interval elapses. If you instead need to have it send on specific dates afterward, just make a separate step for each date. This is easy when you copy steps—but we’ll get to that soon.

When you make any changes here in a step, be sure to click the “Update” button at the bottom of the page. This will save all changes you have made to that step.

Back in the Campaign screen, you’ll notice that you can add new steps to each campaign using the button at the top of the list. You can also check the boxes to the left of a step and hit “Copy Step” to duplicate it; this can save considerable time when setting up your marketing communication, as you can copy these steps then edit them to change what needs to be different in each case. Be sure to edit the word “COPY” from the step name and adjust the interval or date on which you would like your copy to be sent.

When adding new steps, you can choose who the step is targeting, what method it will be delivered through, and then brought to the Edit Step screen you saw before. If you want to include meta-tag information in your email title, just add the meta-tag to your text box, copy it using the “ctrl” and “C” buttons on your keyboard, and paste it into the title section using “ctrl” and “V”. This way, you can include your clients’ names in their email titles.

Now that you understand how Steps work in a campaign, you should also know how to create new campaigns for further marketing opportunities. Adding new campaigns is very easy; your CRM will walk you through the process. In your Marketing tab, you can do this by clicking the “Add Campaign” button. First, you’ll be prompted to choose a group for the campaign. These are used for your own organization. As an example, imagine you want to make a campaign targeting funded clients titled, “Keeping in touch with you.” You can add a short description for your own records, and you can copy the title of the campaign into the “Name Visible on Unsubscribe” field. This will allow them to choose to opt-out of specific campaigns if they wish.

“Make Available to the Whole Office” can be used when making campaigns that other users in your office may put to use. You can have emails go out on behalf of yourself or the record owner (in case you are a marketing-focused user creating content for a loan officer).  Other options include whether emails will be sent on weekends, whether the campaign can be sent to a single client more than once, duplicate target options, and more. You can often just use the default settings here, but you can always change these as needed. When ready, just hit “Add Campaign” to get it started!

 

Once saved, you’ll see the Campaign List screen again. This will be organized by the Campaign Group; you could find the example campaign you just made by looking under “Funded”. When you open it up, you can then start adding individual steps to the campaign by clicking the “Add New Step” button and choosing a Step Method. Again, you will choose the target, enter a subject, and add the text you want to appear in the email. You could then find a meta-tag for the client’s first name to personalize it, then write it out like a normal email. The difference is that this email will be one that can be sent out time and time again. To finish, you would check the “Send Automatically” box, set an interval of “1” to have it sent out immediately, and hit “Update” to save the step.

While you can certainly design all of your own marketing communications, you may want to save some time and find material that BNTouch and its users have made available via the “Content Exchange”. In your Marketing Tab, you can hit the “Content Exchange” button, and you’ll see a large list of campaigns built by BNTouch and its users. You can search through these campaigns, preview what they look like, and add them to your account. These pre-made campaigns include several for different holidays and anniversaries, and we strongly recommend you look through these always-available options to find campaigns your business can use. These are all ready-to-go campaigns that you are free to use or customize, but be sure to carefully review any content shared by other users for compliance as well as hard-typed data that doesn’t apply for you.

Some businesses will have the default screen for their Marketing tab set to the Marketing Control Center. This screen will show all of the campaigns that are available and whether they are set up with any automated rules, which lets you activate or disable campaigns quickly. This will show or hide the campaign when other users in the office access the Marketing tab. This control center can also be used to activate or disable individual steps in a campaign. For example, this can be used to stop a campaign from emailing you as a reminder if you don’t want to get an email every time the campaign activates for a client.

This setup can be very helpful for offices that don’t want each user to have the same editing rights for campaigns. Say, for instance, that a user doesn’t have access to the ability to edit a campaign step made available in the Marketing tab. They can instead select the campaign step and create a copy of it to customize the campaign step to a version for themselves without modifying the original campaign step that other users may need to access. The user can then edit the new copy of the campaign step and rename it—replacing the “COPY” part—to whatever they need. They can then edit the campaign as needed for their own marketing.

If you would like to learn more general tips about the marketing possibilities available in your CRM, please watch our “Marketing Automation” or “Managing Partners and Co-Branded Marketing” training videos.