How to properly use campaigns?
I'm continually having problems understanding how to effectively use campaigns to improve work flow and keep track of day to day data. A typical "campaign" for us will be reaching out to a group of existing contacts at various companies with some type of idea for consideration. Some companies will say no right away, but for many others we will have a long series of back and forth emails, phone calls, and meetings which we want to track and have a place to look at current status (preferably on a company level).
1. So the first problem I have is how to add individuals to a campaign. I can create a view or run a report that will contain all the contacts that I want to add to the campaign, but it seems there is no way to mass add them to the campaign?
2. Once I do get them into a campaign, what does that get me? Should I be sending all emails from within the Zoho interface (is there a way to automatically update member status once an email is sent for example?)
3. As I said, we're primarily interested in tracking on a company level - I'd like to be able to quickly see all companies that have replied to the campaign that are not interested. Can this be done?
For people who are using campaigns, how are you using them? Right now, it seems that I don't really gain anything over managing the data in an Excel sheet.