Marketing Categories

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The Marketing screen in Mercury Administration allows you to set up marketing categories for your customers. Marketing categories help you market to your customers more efficiently. For example, you may want to send marketing letters to customers with a birthday in February, or send a list of specials to your business accounts. You can create custom categories that will help you in your marketing efforts.

You have the opportunity to specify certain marketing categories when printing mailing labels, occasion code letters, and all types of customer lists. This way you do not have to print customer information for all customers; you can specify customers that only fall into certain marketing categories.

Marketing categories are set up in Mercury Administration. You assign the categories to your customers in the Marketing tab of the Customer Detail Information window.

To set up marketing categories in Mercury Administration:

1. Access Mercury Administration by using one of the following methods:
   • If you are already logged into FTD Mercury, on the Tools menu, click Mercury Admin.
   • If you are not logged into FTD Mercury, double-click the Mercury Administration icon on your computer’s desktop. Type your login name and password and then click Login.
2. Double-click on the Accounting folder on the right hand side of the window.
3. Double-click Marketing.
4. Type a category in the text box under the word Category. Some examples of categories are account type, birthday month, mailing list, age group, etc. After typing a category in the text box, click Add Category.
5. With the category highlighted in the text box on the left, type the first marketing type for that category under the word Types (on the right). For example, if the category is “account type,” some related marketing types may be Business, Personal, Non-profit, School, and Other. Type the first marketing type and then click Add Type. Then type another marketing type for this category and click Add Type again, until all marketing types are added to the list.
6. At this point you can add another category in the Category field, and add types for that category. Notice that when you highlight a category in the list of categories, the types for that category display on the right in the list of types. Make sure that when adding/removing types, you have the correct Category highlighted.
7. When you are finished adding categories/types, click the Apply button.

Assigning Marketing Categories to Customers

To see the categories and types that you created, log into FTD Mercury and perform a Customer Search to bring up a customer (on the FTD Mercury Main Menu, in the Search area, click Customer). Once you have located the customer, click the Marketing tab to see the marketing categories and select category types for the customer.

To select a category type in the Marketing tab:

1. Click in the Type column for the category so a menu appears.
2. Select the category.
3. When you are finished selecting categories for the customer, click Save.

Using Customer Categories in Reports

Marketing categories are especially useful when printing reports. Some FTD Mercury reports allow you to print customer information by marketing category. For example, if you want to print a customer list of only your Business accounts, you could do so in the Customer Master List report by specifying that you want to print Business accounts in the Marketing Criteria Selection area of the screen (the report window displayed below is for the Customer Master List):

In this example, the florist set up a marketing category of “Account Type” and set up the following account types: Business and Personal. By maintaining the account types, the florist is able to print reports based on account types. In this example only Business accounts are selected to print.

If you would not like to filter customers by marketing information, leave the Marketing Criteria Selection option unchecked. Marketing information will not be considered when printing the report.

To print only customers with no marketing information specified in the Customer Detail Information window, first check the Marketing Criteria Selection option so that a check mark appears, then check Customers with No Marketing Criteria.

The following reports and letters allow you to print by marketing category:

• Customer Master List
• Abbreviated Customer Master List
• Customer Letter
• Occasion Code Letter
• Mailing Labels

The marketing information that you selected for the report prints at the top of the report. The Customer Master List is the only the report that prints each customer’s marketing selections.