Tag Archives: Marketing
Enhance Marketing Emails with Spam Score and Accessibility Checkers
Creating marketing emails within the Dynamics Marketing module has been simplified with the drag-and-drop technology approach adopted in the system. Pulling in images, dynamics content, and even embedding videos only take a few clicks. What is important, though, is ensuring emails make it to the intended inbox. Fortunately, with Microsoft’s newest features, the Spam checker and Accessibility…
Creating a Social Posts Approval Flow with Dynamics 365 Marketing and Power Automate
is a powerful application within Dynamics 365 that allows for the easy management and deployment of digital marketing campaigns. Included within this is the ability to create and schedule social media posts.. As part of Dynamics 365 and the greater Microsoft suite of business apps, Dynamics 365 Marketing allows for easy integration between Microsoft products. This includes the workflow automation tool, , formerly known as Microsoft Flow.
Power Automate allows users to create automation flows within other Microsoft apps and some 3rd party applications. With the help of Power Automate, you can create a social post approval process in Dynamics 365 Marketing. This flow automatically sends social post drafts to a designated approver when marked for approval in Dynamics 365. The approver then receives an email with the name and text of the post along with a direct link to the draft in 365 Marketing. From there, the approver can schedule the post.
Create the flow
To get started making the flow, navigate to Dynamics 365 Marketing Social Posts and select New. On the editor page, there will be a Flow drop down on your top tool bar. Select new to begin creating the approval flow.
It will default as a common data service button, which is what you are looking for. Since we initiated it through the social post editor, it should have your first step set up already. If not, it should be titled “When a Record is Selected.” The environment can be left at Default and the entity should be “Social posts.” Next, create an “Initialize Variable” step. It is not fully necessary in this instance, but in longer flows with multiple of the same kinds of steps, you may want to rename them to something more specific. We can call this one “Post Link”. The name field should be “Post Link” and select String in the Type drop down. Value can be left blank. This step creates a variable that will be used in the process to give a link to the draft of the social post in Dynamics 365 Marketing.
The Process Scope
A scope step is essentially like a file divider. It keeps similar functioning actions together. Scopes keep your flow organized as you can collapse it when you are working on a different step. Rename this scope to Process Scope, or something similar that makes the most sense to you. This scope will be what sends the email to the approver. Add a “Set Variable” and “Send an Email(V2)” action. Either email action should work fine, however the original is no longer receiving updates. In the “Set Variable” action, enter “Post Link” in the name field. The value function may be confusing, but Power Automate makes it pretty easy to get through it.
When clicking into the field, you should see a Dynamic Content window appear. Within this window click the Expression tab. Look for a function called “concat(text_1, text_2,…).” In the next step you will replace the two placeholder texts. Open another tab and navigate to a social post in 365 Marketing. Copy the web address and paste it into Word document or notepad. It should look like this:
https://[Your URL]&pagetype=entityrecord&etn=msdyncrm_socialpost&id=c6e087e9-7209-eb11-a813-000d3a17769f
Delete the section after “socialpost&id=” and keep everything else. This will replace “Text_1” in the concat function. This is input as a string, so you will need to put apostrophes on both ends of the link. The second placeholder is much simpler. All you need to do is replace “Text_2” with the “Social posts” variable from the dynamic content window where you got the concat function.
Now, the flow will combine the static portion of the URL with the unique ID for each social post. With the Set Variable action complete, we can move on to the email. The email action is simple and completely customizable based on what information you want to include for the approver. Add the email address of the approver and give it a relevant subject. In the body, you can add dynamic content to give a preview of the post within the email itself. In our Flow, we use Name, Post Text, and the Post Link variable that we created.
The Failure Scope
This is technically an optional step, but we have found that including a failure scope in flows provides quicker notification if something goes wrong. Power Automate does give notifications if a flow fails, but it can sometimes delay the email, or try to bunch them together. This scope sends an email immediately upon failure of the process scope.
To add this, create a scope step and rename it Failure Scope. In the settings dropdown of the scope, which looks like an ellipsis on the right side, set the run condition to failure of the process scope. Add two actions into this scope. One will be an email and the other Terminate. Set the email up to send to whomever is your flow manager. Be sure to specify in the subject and body which flow has failed. On the Terminate function, you only need to set the Status field to Failed. Everything else is fine to leave blank. This action just makes sure the flow stops in case of failure.
This flow simplifies the process of sending social posts created in Dynamics 365 Marketing off for approval. With Power Automate, it is easy to create these kinds of automatic processes without requiring a super extensive coding background. If you have questions or want to learn more about what Dynamics 365 Marketing and Power Automate can do for your company, with a Dynamics 365 Consultant to talk through your situation and answer any questions you may have!
Dynamics 365 for Marketing – Exciting Updates in October Release
Wave 2 of the Dynamics 365 2020 Release is just about here. And there are some pretty exciting innovations that will improve the way businesses do business.
The release includes substantial enhancements and hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, among others.
While the entire 2020 release plan is immense – and laid out in a 486-page document – the October release includes some notable upgrades.
Without diving too deep into everything the new release has to offer, here is a quick overview of some of the exciting bells and whistles you can expect specifically in Dynamics 365 for Marketing in the month of October.
DYNAMICS 365 FOR MARKETING
Microsoft understands customer engagement is the key to every business development process. This month, they add meat to their highly touted 360-degree view of customers with smart improvements to relationship-building processes and capabilities.
- In-Place Editing of Email & Forms. No longer will you have to disengage from a customer journey to create or edit email communications or forms. In-place editing keeps the focus where it should be – within the customer journey. You can also create or edit marketing forms related to an event within the event itself. This one is a big improvement and just makes smart sense.
- Enhanced Content-Rich Social Media Creation and Management. The entire social media post creation experience has been redesigned for ease of use, better management across multiple channels and enhanced scheduling features.
- A Redesigned, More Efficient Customer Journey Canvas. The new design offers a more intuitive approach to building customer journeys. The experience is further enhanced by no longer needing to hop between the canvas and the toolbox when creating the journey. One of my favorite new features is the inclusion of negative journey paths that allows you to create alternate journeys and follow-up events for those customers not meeting a certain condition (like not opening an email or not clicking on a specified link). This alone is a real game-changer.
- Running Webinars within Microsoft Teams. With the onslaught of virtual events, the October release enables you to manage webinars and video meetings in Teams, directly from the Dynamics 365 Marketing platform. You can create and host live events – and integrate them directly into Marketing events. Businesses are already looking for better alternatives to Zoom and other video conferencing platforms and Microsoft is definitely stepping up to the plate.
- Expanded Entity Options for Easy Data Collection. Before now, forms had to be connected to a lead or contact. But with the new release, forms no longer need to be mapped this way. Instead, marketers can store form submissions to other entities. and workflows can be created to move the data to where it needs to be.
The entirety of Dynamics 365 October Release is enormous, with updates and enhancements made throughout the entire suite of applications including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, Commerce, Fraud Protection, and Business Central. There are also notable features in the new release, including substantial improvements for Power Apps developers.
Suffice to say Microsoft continues to create and deploy exceptional CRM capabilities – and Dynamics 365 is increasingly fortifying its place as the industry innovator.
And there is certainly more cool stuff to come.
By Christopher Smith, Founder & CEO of
Successful Banks Save Money by Bringing Marketing and Sales Together
When your sales team and your marketing team operate independently, managing leads and customers will be slower and cost more. CRM systems are no longer just for retail or business verticals, banks have the same need to manage customers. Implementing a CRM system for the banking industry is critical to serving your customers at every point in the sales process.
Your bank will save money by giving both marketing and sales a complete snapshot of each customer in a single view so they can spend less time gathering data and more time finding new customers and strengthening existing relationships.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement helps bring sales and marketing together and saves resources by:
- Reducing costs and keeping your teams connected with unified data.
- Prioritizing the most promising high-revenue leads and streamlining complex sign up processes.
- Automating routine tasks, thus giving sales team members more time to spend with clients.
- Responding quickly to customer needs with automated request routing.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 can increase your efficiency and improve your customer relations.
Improve efficiency with a holistic view of your customers
- Unify data from all your departments to attain a single comprehensive view of each customer with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Create rich customer profiles and define segments.
- Export the segments to Dynamics 365 Marketing and execute targeted campaigns.
- Leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to boost your target segments and scoring models to prioritize sales-ready leads.
Generate leads across channels to grow opportunities
- With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can send out multichannel personalized campaigns to appeal to your customers and prospects.
- Align your marketing and sales team using shared information and processes to manage leads and events.
Prioritize and nurture your best leads.
- Use custom or out-of-box templates for your promotional emails, emergency communications, and newsletters.
- A/B testing functionality lets you try different email variations and choose the ones that best fit your target audience. Use AI to determine the optimal time for sending emails.
Improve response time with Lead Management
- As the global workforce pivots to virtual and digital models, the necessity arises for new modes of working and improved relationship management.
- With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, you can unify your relationship data across CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, social networks such as LinkedIn, and productivity tools to generate insights. Knowing your customers increases your credibility and relationships with them.
- Empower your employees with guided processes allowing them to respond to customers more effectively.
Foster collaboration with Opportunity Management
- With Dynamics 365 Sales, your entire team has access to the information they need via their preferred application, such as Microsoft Outlook, Dynamics 365, or Teams.
- Today’s sales processes require collaboration between departments. By improving meetings, communication, and ways to share data, Microsoft Teams facilitates collaboration among your sales team.
- Dynamics 365 Sales enables smart selling with actionable insights and contextual AI. Better intelligence allows you to formulate better strategies.
Build relationships that add value
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales integrates with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to give your team embedded inline access to company and personnel details.
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing is built on the same powerful platform that your employees who work with Office 365 will find familiar. Nurture demand, personalize buyer experiences, build relationships, and make insight-driven decisions to drive more qualified leads and increase revenue.
Modern banking is a customer-driven world. If your bank can understand and serve the needs of your individual customers better than the competition, you will succeed. If you are still using antiquated systems to keep track of your accounts, other banks will take your place.
Crowe CRM for Banking
A Customer Relationship Management solution built for the banking industry will help you manage customers and better understand their needs in order to provide the right solutions, quickly.
powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 empowers bank staff with the tools and information needed to efficiently deliver high-quality, personalized service – for all interactions across all channels. It gives managers and team members the information they need to be effective.
For more information, contact us at crminfo@crowe.com.
By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner,
3 Ways to Drive Intelligent Marketing with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing CRM
Vying for the attention of buyers today requires more effort than ever before. As Marketers try to nurture customer demand, they must differentiate their business by offering truly personalized buyer experiences that turn prospects into engaged customers. Make that difference with CRM from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.
To formulate the right message, delivered at the right time, tailored to the buyer requires a lot of insight. Part of that insight comes from open communication and sharing between Marketing and Sales so that intelligence can be applied to planning every touchpoint of the customer journey. Managing marketing programs successfully with all these expectations is a monumental task. Thankfully, there are tools like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing – a marketing automation application that helps marketing and sales teams turn prospects into business relationships.
Dynamics 365 for Marketing helps organizations:
- Personalize buyer experiences to increase customer demand
- Align sales and marketing
- Make informed decisions
In this post, we will explore these points further, highlighting some of the application’s top features.
1. PERSONALIZE BUYER EXPERIENCE FOR INCREASED CUSTOMER DEMAND
Create Automated Campaigns with Customer Journeys
Customer Journeys allows Marketers to visualize and automate the steps of interaction from the point of discovery to becoming a qualified lead. Marketers can target specific segments, and manage multiple-step, multi-channel marketing campaigns that may include email marketing, web landing pages, events, LinkedIn integration, and more. Customer Journeys can also manage responses, generate follow up tasks, and launch Dynamics 365 workflows for tasks like content approvals.
Draft and Automate Personalized Content that Fuels Engagement
Marketers can create campaign assets quickly with configurable templates, reusable content blocks and design tools to stylize content. Assets include professional-looking email marketing campaigns, and marketing pages with text, images, links and other information. Pages can feature forms that capture visitor data (such as leads or contacts) into their Dynamics 365 database.
2. ENSURE SALES AND MARKETING ARE ALIGNED
Get a Holistic View of Your Buyers
Marketing and Sales can unify customer data from multiple sources in one single view with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. From there, Marketing can define segments that can be exported into Dynamics 365 Marketing for targeted campaigns, as well as create detailed customer profiles.
Prioritize with Lead Scoring and Qualifying
Setting up lead scoring attributes makes Marketing efforts more deliberate and can lead to improved engagement with prospects. It also helps sellers track and prioritize sales-ready leads and better manage their opportunities.
Coordinate, Share and Collaborate
Sales and Marketing can use familiar Office 365 tools to collaborate on campaigns and leads. Prebuilt workflows automatically hand off sales-ready leads and initiate follow-up sales activities.
3. USE DATA TO MAKE INFORMED DECISIONS
Get a High-Level View of Your Data
Pre-built and custom dashboards display a visual analysis of the performance of marketing initiatives such as lead generation, customer journeys, email marketing, and more. Insights use data from across the application and could include data sourced from several Dynamics 365 applications.
Test Content
When creating email campaigns, Marketers can use built-in A/B testing capabilities to measure the performance of different versions of the same email.
Focus on the Right Audience
Marketers can set up lead-scoring models and then segment the high-priority leads to target campaigns with intelligence.
Just the Beginning
We’ve barely scratched the surface on how Dynamics 365 Marketing can transform CRM for your organization. And what’s more, Dynamics 365 Marketing works seamlessly with the Office 365 applications you already use every day. Contact JourneyTEAM to get set up with CRM Dynamics 365 Marketing now.
Daniel Bowker – Associate Solutions Architect
| 801-436-6636
JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more.
5 Features for Savvy Email Marketing with Dynamics 365 Marketing CRM
Applying the appropriate strategies to email marketing can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Implementing comprehensive CRM solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing with apps that support marketing operations can help.
When evaluating email marketing efforts, it can often lead to this deceptively short-and-sweet question:
“Is it working?”
Without the right tools at your disposal, it is probably not an easy question to answer. But it is important as it reveals how well you leverage email marketing to create the personalized buyer experiences that transform cold leads to engaged customers.
Let’s look at five ways Dynamics 365 Marketing CRM allow you to be more strategic in your email marketing efforts:
- Manage Campaigns from the Customer Journey
- Automate Emails with Reusable and Dynamic Content
- Perform A/B Testing
- Score Your Leads
- Solicit Feedback
1. Manage Campaigns from the Customer Journey
Customer Journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing allow you to:
- Share information and processes across sales and marketing teams
- Automate email marketing and run multichannel campaigns
- Access key insights that promote smart decisions
With sales and marketing data in sync, all the information that is critical to personalizing the buyer experience can be found in one place. You can plot all marketing interactions along the journey from a visual top-level view that resembles a game board.
Customer Journeys also provide access to key email interaction data including opens, reaction time, clicks, bounces and more that can be used to fine-tune your email marketing strategy.
2. Automate Emails with Reusable and Dynamic Content
In Dynamics 365 Marketing you can optimize the email creation process with design and edit tools that support:
- Standard or customized email templates
- Reusable blocks of content
- Dynamic content that personalizes messages
Templates and blocks of reusable content help optimize the email publishing process. Your options are flexible – from using standard templates provided by Microsoft, or creating something more custom. Using easy drag-and-drop tools, blocks of standard, pre-approved content can be placed anywhere in the email draft in seconds.
With templates and reusable content ready to go, you can spend less time writing and focus instead on tailoring the buyer experience to something much more personal.
Dynamic content can transform a generic email into a personalized one. Dynamic content can be automated into the process before a message is sent to a recipient, merging information from a recipient’s contact record.
A typical use of dynamic content is merging a first and last name to personalize an email salutation. But there are more powerful uses for dynamic content. For example, if you are emailing an existing customer, you could use purchase history data to update a dynamic content field with a blurb promoting a product upsell.
With some code work, custom logic can dictate the use of dynamic content anywhere in an email message.
3. Perform A/B testing
A/B testing capabilities offered with Dynamics 365 Marketing allow you to trial two different variations of the same email, which can reveal messaging that is proven to resonate better with recipients.
4. Score your leads
By assigning lead scores based on behaviors and conditions, you can tailor campaigns and foster growth of leads that are more likely to become engaged customers.
5. Solicit feedback
Insightful feedback from your prospects can be especially useful when planning your future email marketing efforts.
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Ready to Go Next-Level?
Want to see how the tools offered with Dynamics Marketing 365 can take your email marketing efforts to the next level? Contact JourneyTEAM to get your organization set up with Dynamics 365 Marketing at (833) 438-2312.
Nevin Anderson – CRM Solution Engineer
| 801-436-6636
JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more.
Oracle Marketing
The emergency caused by the novel coronavirus is causing deep structural changes to how we do business. We don’t sell or market the way we did before the virus, and it may be some time before we return to that model — if indeed we ever do.
Even before the emergency, market research conducted by Beagle Research (my company, full disclosure) has conclusively shown that employees have made do with old and ineffective technologies.
Our studies show that employees have added labor by juggling multiple screens and windows, and by working longer hours to support old systems of record, when the actual need is for systems of engagement and systems of intelligence.
Retention and Renewal Priorities
No one is to blame for the rapid obsolescence of older customer-facing technologies because the market has simply moved very quickly.
For instance, demand changed overnight forcing a big rethink of what we use customer facing tools for. At the start of the year the emphasis was on new customer acquisition, and while that’s still important, the situation on the ground has made customer retention and renewal more critical.
A new generation of tools supported by analytics and technology platforms is becoming available to fill the technology holes we saw before COVID-19; holes that are so big now in the current environment of remote work that they simply have to be filled.
Remote working conditions are important, but so is the reality that marketing activities have taken on additional importance as businesses work to communicate with customers.
All of this drives a reliance on data to drive algorithms that increasingly drive business — and data is where many vendors are putting emphasis.
New Marketing Tools
Oracle’s strategy centers around the CX Unity Customer Intelligence Platform, a data management platform that’s central to marketers’ activities when using Eloqua, Responsys, Maxymiser, CX Audience, Crowd Twist and CX Content.
Here are the primary announcements and their significance:
- Account Based Marketing (ABM) — a new account management dashboard added to Eloqua to provide greater visibility into the activity of the most engaged accounts. Also, the ability to further enrich firmographic data using Oracle Datafox.
- We increasingly communicate through video conferencing. Oracle has introduced solutions that integrate Zoom, Webex and Microsoft Teams to make it easier for marketers to communicate from Eloqua to customers.
- Content blocks to improve the efficiency of content marketing programs. Essentially this enables marketers to pre-configure blocks of content that can be used on landing pages and email. The results are more efficient content use and distribution.
- Personalization capabilities for Responsys that will optimize channel, time and message to send to individual customers. There’s also an intelligent audience selection function to help marketers find more customers with similar backgrounds.
- Polling capability for Oracle CrowdTwist, a loyalty programs monitor. This drives data capture and helps the rest of Oracle Marketing Cloud to drive more personal interactions.
Opportune Timing
So there’s something for every marketer in all this whether they reach out to B2B, B2C or some other customer model. These additions appear to have been in the works for a while, perhaps longer than the pandemic that has kept people from going to offices. So, these are both natural evolutions of Oracle Marketing Cloud, and improvements that come along at a good time.
Obviously, for safety reasons, one of the natural evolutions on display in business right now is a strong trend away from congregating in offices, while still managing the demands of business. These new introductions should enable Oracle customers to be more effective in a new reality that calls for less face time and therefore more intuition.
Denis Pombriant is a well-known CRM industry analyst, strategist, writer and speaker. His new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, is now available on Amazon. His 2015 book, Solve for the Customer, is also available there.
Email Denis.
Salesforce Ups Its Marketing Game
The pandemic might be changing the way we work, but much of the need for change in our CRM tools predates COVID-19. Nevertheless, Salesforce last week introduced some changes in its Marketing Cloud that couldn’t have been timelier.
In much of the research I’ve been conducting this year, there’s a distinct trend. Employees are well aligned with the directions and goals of their companies, they are competently led and respect their bosses; but the tools, the technologies they use, leave a lot to be desired. This includes CRM, and too often the functionality that their currently installed CRM doesn’t offer.
My research shows that while these employees are definitely getting the job done, they’re also working harder than needed because their labor makes up for integrations and functionality that isn’t there yet. That translates into not always having the best offer at hand or taking too long to organize, get permission, and deliver proposals. The unambiguous result is that despite their best endeavors, which include some Herculean efforts, they lose deals they ought to win.
It’s Time for Better Technology
The older a CRM system is, the more likely this scenario, but that’s not the only issue. In some research that hasn’t been published yet, I can see that way too many inside sales and marketing types have to juggle too many screens, windows, and even devices to get their jobs done.
A CRM system that’s more than about five years old, or one that lacks integrated intelligence and can’t routinely offload some of the rote work, or make smart suggestions about next best actions or offers, is likely costing its business owner deals. Ironically, without better analytics and more data, these businesses probably don’t even realize they’re falling behind.
With uncanny timing, last week Salesforce announced additions to its Marketing Cloud that address some of these needs. Salesforce comes at the problem from a slightly different perspective, one that’s mostly focused on the pandemic, but as my research shows, the problems were there hiding in plain sight all along.
In addition to my findings, Salesforce said their research shows ad spending is down while 79 percent of respondents are changing their messaging to fit the times. How you change messaging while reducing ad spend is a problem that has to be dealt with one-on-one with customers — and that requires some realtime fancy footwork that’s only possible with improved technology.
The Announcements
So, in a nutshell, the announcements add more Einstein innovations to Interaction Studio to optimize marketing results. This includes Einstein Personalization Recipes to build, manage and test AI-powered recommendation strategies and an improved algorithm to improve next best actions and offers.
Another timely addition, Pardot Premium, is designed to enable marketers to scale teams globally — a challenge we all face now that working from home, or anywhere else, is no longer simply a nice thing to have. Interestingly, some of my recent research shows people believe their current technologies are enough to support them working from home. But the same people said they couldn’t see needing to.
Lastly, for really big marketing intelligence jobs, Salesforce bought the Israeli marketing intelligence company Datorama in 2018. Last week, Salesforce announced integration between another recent acquisition, Tableau, a data intelligence and visualization platform, and Datorama. The integration is poised to provide realtime marketing insights into all of the data held by Datorama on spend, performance, and business outcomes. The result is advanced visualization for better analysis into opportunities and optimization of budgets.
Pardot Premium will be generally available (GA) this month, Interaction Studio will be GA in Q3 of 2020 and Datorama integration with Tableau is GA as you read this.
My Two Bits
They say that being lucky is better than being smart and there’s more than a bit of luck in Salesforce’s recent Marketing Cloud announcements. But there’s plenty of smart in those announcements too. This company carefully monitors the marketplace looking for new product opportunities and builds to suit them.
One reason for the company’s phenomenal growth and success over 20 years has been its consistent innovation and the way it brings products to market almost on a conveyor belt.
How else do you sell into your installed base? Once you’ve sold your basic stuff, you might have a lot of good will but that won’t translate into additional sales unless you have additional and relevant things to offer. That’s a lesson Salesforce learned well and one that aspiring companies in any industry would be smart to emulate.
A good deal of Salesforce’s growth and success comes from selling back into the installed base, not simply to see if they can add seats but to add functionality. These announcements are just the latest example.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.
Denis Pombriant is a well-known CRM industry analyst, strategist, writer and speaker. His new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, is now available on Amazon. His 2015 book, Solve for the Customer, is also available there.
Email Denis.
Marketing Automation Platform Implementation Guide for Microsoft Dynamics
There are lots of questions to answer as you consider what sort of marketing automation platform to connect to your CRM system, but one question that’s often overlooked is how will you implement the software? Will the process be painful or easy? And what do you need to know about that process before you sign a contract?
As you move into the final buying stage, here are a few questions that can ultimately guide your decision-making process and ensure you buy a marketing automation platform that can achieve your goals:
How Does the Marketing Automation Platform Connect to Microsoft Dynamics?
Some marketing automation platforms are reliant entirely on Microsoft Dynamics to function, meaning that your marketing users will likely need to log into Microsoft Dynamics in order to use their marketing automation platform. From a security standpoint, IT teams tend to like this approach because they can easily control who does and doesn’t have access to the marketing automation platform, but it also puts your marketing team at risk of downtime (from Dynamics), can significantly increase your Dynamics licenses costs, and means that your marketing team could have a difficult time separating Marketing Qualified Leads from Sales Qualified Leads in Dynamics—which could lead to conflict with the sales team.
On the other side of that coin, some marketing automation platforms offer just a surface-level integration that connects only standard fields (and not any custom Dynamics fields that may be important to your business). For some integrations like this, you may have to figure in the cost of a third-party tool that sends data back and forth or custom work on the Dynamics side to make the integration work at a level you’re looking for.
There are marketing automation platforms that sit somewhere in between as well—the , for example, can be accessed via a browser or from within Microsoft Dynamics and allows for custom field integrations (as well as standard fields). You would also want to know if it’s possible to integrate to Custom Entities, if you have them—not many standalone platforms can do this.
With any of these scenarios, another important question to ask is how will the sales team get Leads and/or Contacts into the right lists? Every platform will handle this differently, so be sure to document how the one you pick will do this so that you can ensure your sales and marketing teams are in alignment.
Who Needs to be Involved in the Marketing Automation Implementation?
It’s easy for workplaces to get stuck in silos, but integrating your marketing automation platform to your CRM system requires getting sales, IT, and marketing on the same page. Depending on your use cases, you may want to additionally include your HR and/or recruitment teams and your customer success teams as well. You’re looking for:
- What skills are required to implement this software tool? Who has those skills internally, and who do we need to contract externally?
- Who needs to be a user of the marketing automation platform? What level of access does each user need? How is access/permissions controlled in the marketing automation platform?
- What use cases does the marketing team have mapped out? What data fields will they need to make these use cases happen? Do they need workflows or Flows or other development to facilitate automation?
- Who’s in charge of training? The marketing automation software company? An IT provider, like a Microsoft Partner? Self guided?
- What’s in your existing marketing automation platform that needs to be migrated? Who will be in charge of migration?
Ongoing Maintenance
Once you have your marketing automation platform integrated to Dynamics, ask the following questions about how the software will be continuously maintained:
- Who will be in charge of continuous updates?
- Who will handle support requests?
- How are feature requests handled?
- Who will be alerted about product updates?
- What if you need additional training or marketing help?
- Who owns the relationship with the marketing automation provider?
The Full Migration Guide for Software to Software
After you document and outline the logistics of selecting the right marketing automation platform for Microsoft Dynamics for your company, be sure to check out our
How to Run a Content Download Campaign with Marketing Automation and Microsoft Dynamics
Ready to ramp up your lead generation efforts? As more of your marketing strategy moves online, it’s more important than ever to create downloadable, education-oriented content that can deliver more early funnel leads into your pipeline.
How and When to Gate Your Content
One of the questions we hear frequently is when should content be gated, and when should it be freely accessed? Creating long-form content, like whitepapers, user guides, and informational pieces, can help you establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry. Since these pieces often contain lots of information and are pretty time consuming to create, it’s fair for you to ask your target audience to “pay” for this content by providing their email address and contact information. Blog posts, on the other hand, are typically shorter and more informal by nature. They are great for SEO goals and for providing high-level content, and thus aren’t quite worth the value of requiring contact information in exchange for access.
We recommend a successful content strategy that incorporates both blog posts—for early interest and for SEO—and content downloads designed to drive more leads into your nurture funnel.
Converting Downloaders into Leads
As you make a plan for content downloads, the first—and most important—question you’ll want to address is where will these downloaders live? This conversation is best captured by discussing how your sales and marketing departments want to track Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) versus Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). MQLs are often early funnel leads who are in a nurture state—you have their contact information and they have demonstrated some level of interest (e.g., by downloading a whitepaper), but they aren’t quite ready to have a conversation with a member of your sales team. SQLs, on the other hand, are sales-ready leads. They have filled out a “contact us” form or reached out directly to say that they would like to have a conversation about what you sell.
In some organizations, the sales and marketing departments may choose to integrate everyone, including MQLs, into Microsoft Dynamics. Other organizations prefer to keep MQLs in their marketing automation platform until the MQL either reaches a predefined contact score or demonstrates intent. How you choose to track this is important—if you don’t have this conversation ahead of time, you could wind up with MQLs getting contacted by a member of the sales team well before they’re ready to talk.
Setting Up Your Campaigns with Marketing Automation
Building the content and the landing page to gate it is just the beginning! Don’t forget to set up an automated email and a nurture campaign to work that downloader into a sales-ready state. On the Microsoft Dynamics side, use your integration to your marketing automation platform to create a notification to members of your sales team in the event that a Lead or Contact they own downloads your content. Also, be sure to create a Campaign to help you track the overall success and budget of your downloadable campaigns.
Watch How We Build a Nurture Campaign
Want to see what we recommend for whitepaper download campaigns and nurture strategies? Watch our three-minute video here: