Working with Lists

JustRelate WebCRM not only acts as an authentication service and helps to automate event registration on your website. As a CRM, it also lets you select a subset of your customer base for addressing only persons to which particular criteria apply. From this point of view, JustRelate WebCRM is a marketing tool that helps you to realize your communication strategies. There are two interweaving concepts to support this, type configurations and lists.

Several basic entities exist in the WebCRM, each of which is equipped with a default set of properties (fields). Persons, for example, have a first and a last name, a gender, an address, a phone number, etc. An event has a title, a location, a start and an end date, and so on. The possibility to extend these entities lets you form new types that better suit your business purposes. For performing email campaigns targeted at particular occupational groups, you need to be able to add this piece of information to each and every individual in your persons database. Note that it is not sufficient to be able to add this information. You also require a business process that lets you get hold of the data, be it based on web forms, a call center, acquisition, or a combination of several methods. Last but not least, as your database grows, it is essential to clean it from time to time to ensure that targeting still works.

The following WebCRM entities can be extended by adding custom fields to them.

• Persons and Accounts

  Currently, there is only one type configuration for persons, and one for accounts. New types cannot be created. However, each of the two can be extended as desired.

• Events

  You can create any number of event types (e.g. Seminar, Congress, Workshop) and add any number of custom fields to them.
  Additionally, e.g. for planning resource allocation, every event (not event type, but an instance of such a type) can be equipped with any number of fields. These fields will be attached to every event participant (event contact). The data can be filled in manually via the web interface of the WebCRM, or during event registration via a form on the corresponding web page.

• Activities

  As mentioned elsewhere, WebCRM activities are multi-purpose message containers that can be used to trace support cases, for example. You can create any number of activity types with different fields to adapt them to their individual use cases.

Enriching CRM data only makes sense if there are benefits of doing so, i.e. if the data support your workflows and business cases.

Whenever you intend to invite persons to participate in an event, to update your product, etc., you would probably, next to doing this on your website, also send them an email advertising the event or the product. Since it is counterproductive in most cases to send invitations to everyone, you require a means to narrow down the range of prospective email recipients. This is where lists come into play.

Lists are a powerful means for creating subsets of accounts, persons, activities, events, mailing recipients, and event participants. Creating a list comes down to specifying search criteria for one of the entity types mentioned. If, for example your persons’ custom fields include a products field, you can have all the persons put on the list whose product field contains the name of the product in question.

After creating the person list, it needs to be computed. Computation populates a list in accordance with its filter criteria. This can be repeated as often as required.

There are many filter criteria available. It is not only possible to test whether a field value is equal to or contains a particular string, you can also select an entity depending on whether it is contained in another list or in a CSV file. With persons and activities, even associated entities, e.g. accounts, may be queried. Thus, provided your persons database includes the required fields, selecting the members of a target group is straightforward.

Maybe you would like to try this out. Open your WebCRM, add a couple of accounts and persons, then switch to the Lists tab. Create a list, define a filter criterion (e.g. the gender), compute the list, and view the results.

Lists also support many everyday tasks such as batch printing, data conversion and distribution, and many more. For this, lists can be downloaded as CSV files and processed manually or automatically using a spreadsheet application, for example.