The main purpose for setting up a marketing campaign in Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager (BCM) is to help track the details and results of your marketing efforts. Creating campaigns can also help you create your marketing materials, particularly those you want to personalize (e-mail, direct mail, etc.)
There are several different type of campaigns:
- Direct Mail Print
- Telemarketing
- Printed Flyer
- Seminar/Conference
- Mass Advertisement
- Other
When you select a campaign type that supports mail merge (e-mail or direct mail print), you will notice in step 2 that you can indicate your list of contacts to include in the campaign. In addition, when you click on the Track button, you can 
view the contacts included in the campaign. It is important to note that when you create a campaign with a type other than e-mail or direct mail, you do not see the list of contacts – something we will have to keep in mind when we talk about tracking the results of our campaigns. I’ll talk more about the tracking screen in a later post.
Once a campaign is set up, it will appear in the drop down list of the "Initiated By" fields in the contact, account, and opportunity records. Setting this field to the appropriate campaign is how you "close the loop" and record the results of your campaign. For this reason, I recommend filling out at least the minimal information about a campaign (usually with a type of "other").
After I post a little more about the tracking features of BCM, I will get into the specifics of implementing the plan outlined in the previous post.
Bill Brelsford Small Business Marketing Consultant
