Frustrated with Sugar! E-Mail campaigns are a nightmare

[sc123]

Yesterday I began working on setting up an E-Mail campaign in Sugar 5.0. I initially created a Campaign, then created a number of Contacts and assigned them to the Campaign. I thought that I could just keep adding Contacts and then E-Mail them using their assigned Campaign, but it appears that things can't be that straight forward in the world of Sugar CRM.

No, I was disappointed and amazed to find no link between the new Contacts and my Campaign. The Campaign only allows you to send to Target Lists (which Sugar also refers to as Prospect Lists), I can manually select Contacts to add to the Target List, but that is not only redundant but utterly frustrating. I have hundreds of Contacts - am I really expected to sift through them all and manually add them to the Target List?

This whole system just doesn't make sense in many areas and is overly complex everywhere else. There seems to be two ways to do everything, and for no good reason. You can create a Contact, but then you have to create a Target List and assign the Contacts manually. You can create a Target entry instead of a Contact, but you still have to manually go back after creating each Target and assign them to the Target List - and then you are stuck with a Target which is generally much less useful than a Contact.

What a nightmare, and for no good reason!

So my questions/suggestions are:
-Why allow assignment of Contacts to a Campaign if you just have to manually add them to a Target List later? It seems to serve no purpose at all to assign a Contact to a Campaign.
-Why not just remove Targets from Sugar altogether?
-If you're going to insist on using Targets, why not allow users to assign Targets to Target Lists when they are created? Having to go back and add them later is a waste of time.
-Why not allow Target Lists to be assigned to Contacts when they are created?
-Why is there a shortcut to "Newsletters" and "Campaigns" when they both do the same thing?
-Why are there so many disparate components to setting up an E-Mail Campaign? Because every single component has to be setup separately it makes the process much more time consuming and confusing that it needs to be.
-You can create an "E-Mail Template", but to actually assign it to a Campaign you have to use the not-so-obvious "Email Marketing" area at the bottom of the Campaign screen. Why not follow the lead of the big players in the E-Mail Campaign industry (iContact and Constant Contact) and implement a more streamlined approach?
-Why have these annoying "Status" fields? That is redundant with the function that allows you to setup the time for distribution. You're just giving a user too many ways to screw up and get frustrated.
-What does "Send Test" do in the Campaign? It never shows me an option to select anything after I click it.
-Why isn't there a "Run Now" option? Do I really have to manually set the release time for a minute ahead?
-I click "Send E-Mails" in my Campaign and nothing gets sent. Everything is active, and there are no errors. The "View Details" screen doesn't show anything like "Sending...", "Sent" or "Failed".

After sifting through all of these issues and investing days of trying to get this thing to work so far I haven't been able to send out a test E-Mail at all. This has been extremely...frustrating.

[Toy92128]

I'm frustrated as well. I spent today trying to set up and run some test e-mail campaigns. I got to a point where all of my targets in the target list were identified as "Message Sent/Attempted", but no emails ever were received by any of the idetified target email accounts. As far as I can tell our e-mail accounts are set up correctly and it doesn't look like spam filters are preventing any of these from being received.

I tried this as a test, tired it as active, tried it with dates in the past and dates in the future, but nothing seemed to send the e-mails out.

[longreach]

This whole system just doesn't make sense in many areas and is overly complex everywhere else. There seems to be two ways to do everything, and for no good reason. You can create a Contact, but then you have to create a Target List and assign the Contacts manually. You can create a Target entry instead of a Contact, but you still have to manually go back after creating each Target and assign them to the Target List - and then you are stuck with a Target which is generally much less useful than a Contact.

What a nightmare, and for no good reason!

I wondered if something like this might improve things for you. I have attached two images. First one shows Contacts List view - with a button in the Mass Update panel to do a Quick Campaign. Just select Contacts, and click the button. Image 2 shows what happens next - a panel open up above the Mass Update fields, allowing the user to pick an email box and an email template. Then just click to Run the Campaign.

This is what we did in info@hand to address the complexities you mention. (Actually, the initial version was contributed to info@hand by Groupware Inc., and it was coded for them by Lampada) Perhaps a modification along these lines might make Campaigns more palatable for you?

[sc123]

longreach:
Your solution is better, but not really to the level that we're trying to reach. You see, you still have to manually select your Contacts - and this is a major issue. Currently we have 500+ Contacts. There is no way we can sort through these in any way to manually select them to add to a Campaign. It's just not possible, even with your solution.

It's my opinion that Campaigns and more specifically Newsletters should be classified as "In development/not fully functional" or removed altogether. They are riddled with serious issues and just don't work (as I and Toy have mentioned).

My background in E-Mail campaigns is fairly extensive. I have worked with other open source applications, as well as the two major industry players - iContact and Constant Contact. Sugar has the weakest implementation I've seen yet. I just hope that the developers take heed and make some adjustments. The core issue with Sugar's E-mail campaign functionality is the lack of understanding that the developers had when they created it. It is clear to me that this was not put together by anyone who has worked extensively with E-Mail campaigns or marketing professionals.

[longreach]

Actually - all you really need to do is to filter by Category (a multi-select) or perhaps Lead Status and then do a select all - then click on Quick Campaign.

The Quick Campaign can also do a Mass Update at the same time the Campaign is performed - so it is handy to update Status on the Leads or Contacts you are emailing - to track what you have sent them.

Does that sound easier?

[sc123]

Actually - all you really need to do is to filter by Category (a multi-select) or perhaps Lead Status and then do a select all - then click on Quick Campaign.

The Quick Campaign can also do a Mass Update at the same time the Campaign is performed - so it is handy to update Status on the Leads or Contacts you are emailing - to track what you have sent them.

Does that sound easier?

No, I'm not following you. Filer by Category? There doesn't appear to be a Category field in Sugar CE for Contacts. I don't want to use Lead Source because I can't add custom Lead Sources and because I don't have any Contacts assigned to a source. Another major issue is that only 20 contacts can be seen at a time - what if I have 1,000 to send an E-Mail to?

[longreach]

Well yes, this whole feature is not in SugarCRM CE - but in info@hand we added a multi-select Category filter for this sort of purpose. Also a Job function filter with drop-down values so it has a controlled vocabulary - to filter by Financial, Sales, CEO, etc... also handy for filtering for email campaigns.

And of course in Admin - System Settings you can change listview items per page. Or it would be very simple to add a control to select all overall, not just all on the page.

Just trying to show you a few ways in which this system really is not very far from being able to do what you want it to do.

[sc123]

Well yes, this whole feature is not in SugarCRM CE - but in info@hand we added a multi-select Category filter for this sort of purpose. Also a Job function filter with drop-down values so it has a controlled vocabulary - to filter by Financial, Sales, CEO, etc... also handy for filtering for email campaigns.

And of course in Admin - System Settings you can change listview items per page. Or it would be very simple to add a control to select all overall, not just all on the page.

Just trying to show you a few ways in which this system really is not very far from being able to do what you want it to do.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate your input on this - I just want to see E-Mail Campaigns working properly in the general release of Sugar CE. I think that the changes needed to make Sugar function in a logical manner aren't Earth shattering, but considering the developer's inability to address even the most basic flaws in design - such as the inability of Sugar to be able to search meetings or tasks - show us they that can't even manage to cover the basics, let alone the more advanced functionality that is E-Mail campaigns.

[malcolmh]

Hi,

The campaign fields in Leads, Contacts & Opportunities have a different purpose to the way you are thinking. Orignially I was thinking the same way you was. Here you can associate only one campaign, whcih seemed strange.

They are there to associate which campaign that has already been run was associated with that Lead, Contact, or Opportunity, i,.e. after the event.

For planning campaigns you need to create say custom multi-select list boxes which contain the campaigns, events etc that you are planning and associate each Lead or Contact

Hope this helps to clarify

[andopes]

Hi, sc123

Do the same of some some developers and users:
Check if something is wrong in a specific release and submit a new bug into BugTracker.
Help SugarCRM Developer Team help you.

Best regards.