In this article I am going to discuss how you can add an External Mail Merge and External Telesales calls as a campaign activity.

The best place to start is at the beginning so I shall put the usage of the External marketing activities in the context of the set up of a simple Campaign.

Once you have clicked the 'New Campaign' button you can enter the details of your new marketing campaign.

Each of the fields are discussed in the documentation. It is however important to note that the fields in this screen can be extended. New fields can be added and business rules can be implemented using field and table level scripts. For a further discussion of that see the article "Customizing campaigns and marketing features".

Once the campaign has been saved the first campaign wave or phase can be added.

The new campaign phase or Wave details need to be entered. This screen like any of the main marketing screens can be customized.

And once the Wave has been added the actual Wave activities or Wave Items can be added to the system.

The setup of the Wave Activity allows the action to be chosen.

It is in this screen you can choose the behaviour that is invoked. It is important to remember that the exact behaviour of the activity is under your control if you have changed Sage CRM to use the graphical workflow for campaigns and marketing. 

This article is discussing the two activities

• External Mail Merge
• External Telesales

The activities are very similar as they both use the workflow action and result in either a CSV, Excel CSV or Text file being created that contains the output details of a group. The logic for this export within the marketing campaign is that the data is then passed to an external organisation to fulfil a marketing task.

In the graphical Wave Item workflow you can see the the definition of the rule 'Create File for External Use'.

These two activities (External Mail Merge & External Telesales) ultimately both use the same workflow action 'Export File to Group'.

The chief difference is one of the value held in the field 'wait_type'.

Valid = ((wait_type == 'ExtTeleSales' || wait_type == 'ExtMailMerge' ));

This all means that these two types of Wave Activity are both essentially the same. They use the same workflow action to export the data from a group.

The workflow action allows a group to be picked for export. The group can be a custom group and either static or dynamic in nature. There is an article called "Creating and Using Groups of Records" that provides background information about the definition of custom groups.

The details of the export can be be recorded within the shared documents to confirm what was exported and when it was done.

The columns added to the Group Content when the group was defined determines the columns that are included as the data is exported.