Siebel Marketing User Guide > Planning and Designing Marketing Campaigns > Process of Planning and Designing Marketing Campaigns >

About Creating and Using Activity Plans

Siebel Marketing's Activity Plans views associate predefined planning and milestone activities and tasks with a template (activity plan). Then, you can assign the templates to your marketing programs and campaigns. This assignment creates one or more activities that are associated with a campaign or a program.

NOTE:  Activities are not created for contacts loaded into a campaign.

Activity Plans may be designed to help you plan the marketing program or campaign, or launch it. Before you link an activity plan to your campaign, you need to create activity templates or customize existing templates to reflect your business process and needs. Use templates to define a generic set of activities that may be reused.

For example, a marketing department production manager may design an activity plan template called Direct Mail that contains regularly scheduled campaign activities such as meetings with creative or budgetary staff and start tasks. Using the Campaign Activity Plans view the manager can associate the activity plan template to the current campaign and then assign resources, define priorities and status and so on to each predefined task, adding comments where necessary.

The activity plan record is flagged to indicate how the activity plan is to be used. If the activity is designated as a planning task, none of its activities are copied to the campaign record when it is created. If the activity plan is designed for the execution of the program or campaign, select the Recurring check box, and the set of activities are recreated and associated with each occurrence.

If your marketing program or campaign has a mixture of planning and start activities, create two plans—one for planning and one for execution tasks—and assign them both to the program or campaign.