I did a comprehensive review of the new functions of SAP CRM Marketing and how these functions address some of the challenges and shortcomings faced by the SAP CRM Marketing user community. The most noticeable function is marketing prospect object. Before, you have to manage a complete BP record when dealing with suspects which are not even close to prospects. It was frustrating and leading to junk prospect data in the system as you all know how low the rate of conversion of suspects into prospects is. This problem is solved with the marketing prospect object. I tried to highlight the core enhancements under different functions below
Integrated Marketing calendar: The first thing you will notice is the SAP moved away from Java based UI to Adobe Flex UI. It is very intuitive with advanced search and functions to create manage and edit marketing projects and almost could be called as a home page for marketing professionals.
Marketing Funds Management: Use this functionality to set budgets for various marketing and campaigning activities. Switch the funds as necessary. Purchasing settlements and commitments are uploaded to SAP CRM from ERP giving visibility into any cost over runs. Funds analytics provides slice and dice of how funds are utilized.
Campaign Templates: creation of campaign templates was bit of challenge before EHP1. You can now create templates out of a best run campaigns and setup a library of best practices. Use templates directly from the marketing calendar.
Marketing task management: This functionality is similar to the all familiar planned activities management within an opportunity. Setup, assign and execute set of predefined or planned tasks that happen within a campaign life cycle. These tasks could be exchanged using the groupware integration between Outlook, Lotus Notes and SAP CRM.
Digital asset management: Manage all unstructured digital content such audio, video , graphics, images and desktop formats from Quark and Adobe independent of marketing channel such as TV, Print, Web and mobile.
Loyalty management: It is now extended to partner channel, point of sale (POS) and web channel. Loyalty management can be used with both organizations and anonymous membership. The loyalty card handling facilitates to increase the membership. The new benefit and voucher tools and more options to redeem the points will help driving the membership of the program. The new extractors will help in analyzing the loyalty membership data.
Collaborative campaign management: This helps your corporate marketing organization in collaborating and aligning the partner channel with marketing channels and goals. The functionality includes option to include partner logo and partner sales executive signature in the campaigning templates and materials and target market programs based on partner channel reach and experience with a particular market segment.
High volume segmentation: one user interface for both classic and high volume segmentation. The segmentation based on accounts, products and marketing prospects (new with EHP1). The object segmenting is enabled in high volume segmentation. In addition, in-memory segmentation is available based SAP TREX and BW accelerator.
Marketing analytics: the marketing executive dashboard provides insights into lead generation, campaign progress and the sales pipeline generated with reference to particular campaign(s).
