I've received multiple requests on how to add attachments to "canned" emails that you send out. Typically this is requested for the Quick Campaign. While you cannot add an attachment to Quick Campaign emails there is another way to accomplish our goal.
Workflow gives you the ability to send emails and it also allows you to send emails with attachments out of CRM. In workflow you can choose as a step the "Send Email" option and the "Set Properties". You'll see the "Attachment" tab and you can add multiple attachments to the email. Set the workflow to be triggered "On Demand" and you can then send out your emails with their attachments where you like. It is unfortunately only 250 at a time but that's better than none.
David Fronk
Dynamic Methods Inc.
11 comments:
Even though I created the Workflow related to a "Marketing List" entity, the email still only addresses the recipients in my "To" field. How can I execute an on-demand workflow, and have the email sent to the recipients in my Marketing List ?
Creating a workflow to send an email off of a Marketing List doesn't give you direct access to all of the contact emails (or the emails on whatever entity you are trying to send to). So, what I would do is create an On Demand workflow against the entity that you want to send the emails to. Set up the email as you want and publish. Then run an Advanced Find against that entity and set up the query to show all records related to the Marketing List that you prepared. This will give you all of the records from that list and you should be set.
Hope this helps.
David Fronk
Dynamic Methods Inc.
Is it possible to attach some dynamically created document based on some data?
Jesper,
The best way to accomplish this would be to set conditions and depending on the condition you would have predetermined emails with the set attachments to be sent out. There is no way that I am aware of that would allow you to dynamically choose one attachment over another. You would have to set up each static email and dynamically/logically choose which email to send according to conditions you set in oyur workflow.
David Fronk
Dynamic Methods Inc.
Thanks, this works good.. but I have 5000 contacts and this is growing.. I need to send them emails with attachment.. but the grid is having the limit of only 250.. this is too tedious ....
any help!!!!
Unfortunately 250 records at a time is a limitation of the system at the moment. The only other way to do what you want would have to be through custom code or some third party application. Either way it costs you money. 250 is what you get to work with when going with only out of the box functionality.
David Fronk
Dynamic Methods Inc.
Well I have a great solution for you.
We have been faced with this exact problem, but on a much bigger scale. Around 180,000 users. Not only was the number a problem, but bogging down an smtp server was a real issue.
We purchased a solution from Interactivewebs.com who have integrated a Bulk Email website solution into a two way Synchronization with CRM.
All our contacts and marketing lists are available in the Bulk Email web application, and we can include tokens and attachments in emails that we send out.
Best of all for us are some really cool features that we love, and a few that we don’t need.
1. No duplication email messages. We can send to any number of email addresses, or lists, and all possible duplications of email addresses are removed automatically as they go. (man that is great!)
2. An inbuilt unsubscribe feature ensures that we are meeting the legal requirements when we send, and unsubscribed users are automatically updated in CRM as "Do Not Sent Bulk Email".
3. There is an auto bounce feature to stop sending to dud email addresses.
4. Best of all for us, is that the send goes out via a remote SMTP server at an acceptable rate. This ensures that we do not bog down servers etc.
5. There is a read notification tracking response that allows us to see how effective our email message was.
6. The other thing we loved was that there is no “0” code to be installed on our CRM server. All the work is done from their hosted application. No applications that could damage our server. They even told us that it has been tested against CRM Live (or whatever they call the MS hosted CRM solution).
Not really a feature, but they are less than half the price of other similar solutions, so the choice was easy for us.
I cannot find their CRM page... (always the way when you are looking for something) but their contact page can be found here. http://www.interactivewebs.com
Dean
Dean,
Thanks for the comment. I was unaware of Interactive Webs' email solution for MSCRM, thanks for bringing that up. I too looked for their MSCRM integration webpage and couldn't find anything. I've seen ExactTarget work as a great third party solution as well but I would be interested in knowing the pricing that Interactive Web offers to see if that would better fit some of my customer's needs.
I try to keep my blog posts to things that end-users/administrators can do on their own but knowing what third party options are out there are always helpful...especially when the software doesn't perform exactly has you had hoped it would.
Thanks for the comments.
David Fronk
Dynamic Methods Inc.
I have viewed the website Interactivewebs.com I would just like confirmation that I looked at the correct site.... Is the company based in Australia?
That's the website I saw. However I didn't see any direct mention of Microsoft CRM...so maybe I was in the wrong place as well.
David Fronk
Dynamic Methods Inc.
I found some traces of the CRM integration in the history information (http://www.interactivewebs.com.au/Help/VersionHistory/tabid/1445/Default.aspx)
Post a Comment