Marketing – Marketing Control CEnter

For mortgage businesses with several loan officers and marketing managers, keeping track of a large number of campaigns—with a larger number of individual steps and even more potential recipients—can be a very confusing process. In the BNTouch CRM, the Marketing Control Center can make this job much easier for you. This module lets you administrate your entire firm’s marketing from a single page, where all new campaigns, triggers, steps, and even updates and changes to these elements will automatically show up for your review.

From this control center, you will be able to review all marketing information in your CRM, track the activity of loan officers, schedule notifications for new campaigns, and manage the modification of your campaign steps as your material updates. Users can individually start, pause, copy, or edit any piece of marketing on the fly, and you can see which users are blocking or editing campaigns in detailed reports. This level of control is perfect for mortgage offices that don’t want each user to have the same editing rights for marketing campaigns, and it still gives you administrative privileges from one convenient location.

The Marketing Control Center is a free module without any extra monthly cost. If you are an administrator for your account, you can enable this module from the user menu in the upper-right corner of your CRM. Do to so, open the “Modules” section, then scroll to the “Marketing Control Center” panel. You can hover over the panel for support materials, and you can enable the feature for your account by clicking the “Activate Module” button. If you do not have access to this area and would like to use the Marketing Control Center, please contact your administrator for help.

After the module is activated, you will see an extra option in your Marketing Tab titled “Marketing Control Center”. When you open this page, you will see a master list of campaigns for your account. These campaigns will be organized by the Campaign Groups you use in your Marketing Tab Campaign List. You can search for keywords in your campaigns using the “Filter” box in each category. For each campaign, you can see the title and description, any automation triggers, the number of records for which the campaign is “Active”, “Finished”, and “Unsubscribed”, and which CRM user created it.

You can click on any campaign’s title to see a list of steps involved in that campaign. From here, you can preview what the step will look like for recipients, see who the step is being sent to, the day interval or date it will be sent, whether it is set to automatically trigger for relevant records, and the “method” of transmission.

Some businesses may prefer for the Marketing Control Center to open by default when the Marketing Tab is clicked. Administrative users can customize whether this screen or the Campaign List display by default for various user groups and branches in the “User Groups” section of your User Menu.

To the left of each campaign in your Marketing Control Center, you will see either a green “Play” icon or an orange “Pause” icon. These symbols indicate whether that campaign is currently “paused” or “active”. For active campaigns, you can “Pause” them to prevent triggers for that campaign from activating automatically for your assigned records. You can pause a campaign by clicking the icon to the left of its title or by clicking “Make Inactive for All” below it. To make a campaign “Active” again, just click the “Pause” icon to the left.

Pausing is specific to the CRM user account, so a campaign that is “Paused” for some users but “Active” for others can still trigger automated steps for clients and partners assigned to those users. Pausing will not hide the campaign or step from being seen, accessed, or copied by other users in your office. Users will still be able to see any campaign that has been “Made available to the whole office” in the “Settings” sub-tab of that campaign.

You can also pause individual steps within a campaign, which will prevent only that piece of marketing from being sent automatically from campaign triggers. To do this, open an active campaign by clicking on its title in the Marketing Control Center, then click the icon to the left of the step you wish to disable. This will change the indicator to show a “Pause” icon and grey out the text to the right.

For offices that manage user access to marketing materials, some users may not have the access privileges to edit campaign steps. This is intended, as changes made by one user could affect campaigns and records for the entire company. From the Marketing Control Center, you can create copies of campaign steps that will be owned and editable by these users, so they can still customize their own marketing material without changing anything for everyone else in your business.

When you open a campaign in the Marketing Control Center and display a list of the contained steps, you will see a column to the left labeled “Copy”. “Original Copy” in this column will identify steps that were first made in this campaign, and users can click “Create My Copy” below to make their own version of that step. This copy will be ‘owned’ by that user, who will then be able to edit it without affecting the original.

In the prompt that appears, that user can enter a new Subject for the step and change anything in the message using the Text Editor below. Be sure to remove “COPY” from the title of the step, otherwise it will appear in the Subject of any marketing material sent.

From the Marketing Control Center, you can also track the activity of each of your user accounts in your CRM to make sure your campaigns are running smoothly. In the “Report” sub-tab, you can easily see if any users have blocked marketing campaigns. Users will be organized by User Groups, so you can also compare different branches in your marketing flow.

In the graph that displays below, each user will have a row to the right, and each column represents a marketing campaign in your CRM. If a user has blocked any part of a campaign, a red “Stop” indicator will display for it. If you click on the name of a campaign above any column, you can see a more detailed list of each of that campaign’s steps. Just like before, you can see if any user has stopped a step by looking for the red “Stop” icons.

When Loan Officer accounts make copies of campaign steps for their own use, their changes will need to be approved by an administrative user before they can be used for marketing. This allows you to have complete control over your outgoing campaigns and ensure compliance.

If you are an administrative user, you can review copied steps that require approval from the “Pending Approval” sub-tab of the Marketing Control Center. Here, all step changes will be listed along with the user that made them, the campaign and step that were copied, and the date they were modified. You can see any changes that were made to the original content by clicking the “Preview” link to the right, which will display the “Message” text editor from the step.

Once you have reviewed the changes, you can either “Approve” the modifications the user made or click “Revert to Original” to undo them. After you have approved or reverted the changes, that user will again be able to use the campaign for marketing.

In the Marketing Control Center, you can schedule notifications about campaign updates to be sent to your staff by clicking the “Schedule Notification” link below any campaign or step title. You can then choose a date and time you want the alert to be sent to the other users in your account, add an Action Icon to show for the notification, and enter your own message to explain the changes. Recipients of the notification will be able to click the included Action Icon to block or enable the campaign for their account.

When you click the “Schedule Notification Email” button below, the alert will be sent to users in your CRM via email. Users that have access to the Marketing Control Center can also review these alerts in the “Notifications” sub-tab. You can stop pending notifications from being delivered by clicking the “Cancel” link to the right.