Creating and Using Marketing Activity Plans

Activity Plans associate preconfigured planning and milestone activities and tasks with a template (activity plan). Users can assign the templates to marketing programs and campaigns. This creates one or more activities that are associated with a campaign or a program.

Note: Activities are not created for contact records that are loaded into a campaign.

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

For example, a marketing department production manager can design an activity plan template called Direct Mail that contains regularly scheduled campaign planning activities (meetings with creative or budgetary staff) and start tasks (such as generating an export list according to segmentation criteria). 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.

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