improvements for marketing campaign

[Hooijer]

Greeting all Sugar people,

We our now busy too make our first Marketing e-mail campaign. I suggest the following improvements (look further).

We are a company with many of php/mysl developpers. We are willing too make the code (under GPL for free) or too help the sugar team.

But when we make the code (for free) we like that this code will be part of the next sugarcrm releases. Big problem in open source movement is that “add on” works with a certain release but don't work good with a new release.

Whishes of improvements (concept list not completed):

1) it has to be possible too select all contact of many accounts in one click, the selection process has to be possible on the search fields of accounts ore contacts

2) it has to be possible too sent attachments's with the e-mail, the files (attachments) are the same files you can put in the document module

3 ) when you want too sent personalised mail (for example $contact_salutation + $contact_first_name $contact_last_name ) their has to be a report that show all contacts with not correct data, so you can modify the contacts before sending mass mail

4) the e-mail template has also be a shortcut in the campaing module

5) it has to be possible too make a e-mail signature in the e-mail template

6) some language issues are not in the language files: when someone received the mass mail he can unsubscripe but the text is english and can't bee change (look too some echo statements in remove.php)

7) when a prospect reacted by e-mail then the incoming e-mail has automatically be related with the marketing campaign, or if this is too difficult the incoming mail has too be related with the contact (lead or prospect)

Well anyway my questions are:

1) are their more people with the same wishes?
2) do you have other wishes in this contecxt?
3) which wishes are planned by the sugar team (road map issue)?

I/m interested in the reaction. I like SugarCrrm a lot. I think that because of the financial strength of the organisation Sugar could be a succes in the future. But i think that a lot of improvements has to be done before everyone will be completely excited about the code. Anway we say too our customers that Sugar is the best in class open source CRM.

Evert Jan Hooijer
general manager Dutch Open Projects (www.dop.nu)
and also an old PHP code programmer.....

[danyelb]

Hello Evert,

I believe your comments are right on the money! Another suggestion I might make is that for people using the Campaign module, they should be given the possibility of adding a Prospect tab within the system. Because, I for one looked for a while after reading some of these threads making mention of Prospects.

If one assumes that the intended flow in Sugar is to go from a Prospect (could be from a list, a trade-show, etc) to a Lead, then to an Account. Then other enhancements are require, such as the Prospect tab becomes the functional equivalent of the existing Lead tab, and the Leads tabs needs the same functionality as the Account tab as you are now working with a quilified lead and potentially dealing with different contacts within that organization. Anyway, I digress.

Let's work together to make a good product better!

Danyel

[rbemrose]

Hi,

I'd also like to have the function of associating contacts and archive emails to each campaign. I would find this very useful.

Regards,
Rich

[martinb]

A short and incomplete set of requirements:

1. Conditionalisation of segments within collateral (email or otherwise)
2. Full, multi-step communication plan definition, with branch steps based on rules and timings
3. Ability to start plans based on a range of events, not least registration and opportunity creation
4. Complex segmentation (including sampling) and scoring of customers/prospects
5. Ability to rank opportunities/offers and pick the most appropriate for each customer/prospect based on rules
6. Click tracking of links and reporting
7. Ability to track bounces, mark customer/prospect as having an invalid email address and exclude from future mailings

[gskohner]

Wow ! You are right on the money. I have spent a fortune on CRM and I will have to keep doing so until SugarCRM puts in these basic features

[martinb]

A short and incomplete set of requirements:

Forgot a *real* biggie - ability to target recipients based on criteria (ie queries).

Static prospect lists are useful, but do you really want to manually add (and remove) every single person for every single outbound communication?

[manoj]

Stay tuned. We will be announcing some enhancements pretty soon. Our aim is to take the Campaign management module to the next level.

[Ericmuc]

I wish urgently (would be great)

Campgaigns related tp projects
Special Prospect Lists filled with leads by export / import (multi choosable on one page with 50 leads) related to the campaign
the sent mail of a campaign stored under the campaign
e-mail attachment in mass mails

Stay tuned. We will be announcing some enhancements pretty soon. Our aim is to take the Campaign management module to the next level.

[manoj]

Team,

PLease check out the community preview which is live right now.Review and please provide feedback.

http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/40-preview.html

Thanks
Manoj

[aardvarkads]

1) it has to be possible too select all contact of many accounts in one click, the selection process has to be possible on the search fields of accounts ore contacts

This should be included in all three pop-ups (Prospects, Leads & Contacts) for Propspect Lists. When you want to add many prospects to a list you're not going to go through and check them off 20 at a time with pagination to add to a Prospect List.

1) A "Select All" in the popups for selecting rows for list (in Popup_XXX_picker)
2) More advanced search in pop-up to create a specfic list
3) A "Add to Prospect List" pull-down that would create the PropspectList<-Prospects relationship when importing prospects

I got an error in my preview install:

Error retrieving Prospect list: Query Failed:SELECT users.user_name as assigned_user_name ,prospects.* FROM prospects LEFT JOIN users ON prospects.assigned_user_id=users.id where prospects.deleted=0 ORDER BY name asc LIMIT 0,20::MySQL error 1054: Unknown column 'name' in 'order clause'

So, I'm not sure if #1 and 2 are in 4.0

Some positives I saw:
- Categorization of emails from campaign (bounced, etc)
- convert prospects
- Didn't dig in to confirm, but I believe Sugar has said that the removeme.php (unsubscribe response) is no longer hard-coded and can be language independent.

Thanks
Mike