As we are approaching Christmas season many corporations will be sending gifts to customers and business partners. For third year in a row we are using Microsoft CRM to organize the process.

Here is how you can do it:

• Create a marketing list
  • If you are sending different kinds of gifts, create one list per gift
  • Member Type for this list should be Contact. You will probably want to send a personal note to each customer/partner.
• Share this list with all eligible employees and allow them to add people on this list.
  • It is very important to include as much people from your company to do contacts to this list. The number of colleagues to include depends on your internal organization (e.g. a developer probably does not know too many customers), but with more people involved there is a better chance you will add ALL customers you intended to.
• Make sure that all contact owners verified that contacts addresses are correct

The best approach is to open this list on January 1st and than add new customers to it all year long.

Sending gifts

When your list is completed, marketing manager should review members and remove/add some if necessary.

The final step is to eventually ship these gifts. Here you have a couple of options:

• Use Mail Merge for List Members to create personalized letters / email / cards / labels. Print these and ship them.
  
• If each employee is going to deliver gifts personally, you could create a simple workflow (see figure below). This workflow is going to assign a simple task (you could create campaign activity instead) for contact owner to deliver the gift.