Responsive Auto-Responders with Web2CRM and CRM Workflows

I’ve written a few times about integrating Internet marketing into your overall Dynamics CRM marketing efforts. In particular, one of the big gaps in the traditional feature set was the lack of a web-to-lead function so real “marketing types” could capture leads from a web form directly into Dynamics CRM…without having to write code to do it! So, let’s start with

A Review of Internet Lead Capture for Dynamics CRM

This problem now has some good solutions, and one that I particularly like — Web2CRM from CRM Innovation at http://www.crminnovation.com — is the starting point for this article.

To quickly review, what Web2CRM lets you do is create an Internet page with a form on it, into which a visitor can enter information, and from which you can pop the information directly into your CRM. One big advantage of the Web2CRM product, compared to (for example) the Microsoft implementation in CRM Online, is that Web2CRM lets you create a web form for ANY entity in your Dynamics CRM, including custom ones! So while the CRM Online approach only lets you accept Internet Leads into the new “Internet Lead” entity, Web2CRM gives you a sweet drag and drop form designer you can use to create a web form to populate any entity.

For example, here’s a look at the Web2CRM form design environment. In the next figure, I’ve already selected the entity I’m designing a form for, and I’ve got a nice drag and drop environment I can use to select any of its fields to place on the form. You get a nice design-ish view of your CRM form on the left hand side, from which you can drag and drop fields onto the Web2CRM form-in-progress in the middle. At the right, you can see which entity the form’s being designed for, and you get some other form-level settings I won’t go into here.

If you click the Publish button you get a very generic form that is hosted on the CRM Innovation servers — another example of the hosted “software+services” model. But if you click the cryptically named “Carry Code” button you open up a window with a bunch of script code you can simply copy and pasted onto one of your very own pages, and create a page on your site that looks like this one (or however you want yours to look!):

To review, the form is created for the “Info Requester” custom entity I created in my CRM organiztion. So if you fill out the form you will find here —  www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com/request-content — a new record gets created in my CRM with the information you provide.

So…on to the main point of this article…

What to do with those Internet Leads?

One good thing to do is to send an acknowledgment email — often referred to as an “auto-responder”. In Dynamics CRM, one of the seven actions a workflow can take (can you name the other six?) is to send an email, so I can create a workflow to run automatically when a new Info Requester record is created and send a nice auto-responder. But…you can’t email directly to a custom entity (yet!) in CRM 4, so the first thing my workflow has to do is create a Lead record based on the Info Request record. So here’s what my simple workflow looks like:

The “Create Lead” action simply takes the fields entered onto the web form, and pops them into the corresponding fields on a new lead record.

You can use dynamic values to configure the “Send e-mail” action, crafting a somewhat customized and oh-so-responsive response! Like this:

And last but not least, notice the Attachments tab in that figure. You can attach one or more items to a workflow-generated email in Dynamics CRM 4, so depending on what kind of information people might be interested in receiving — a white paper, say, or even a Dynamics CRM workflow all zipped up and ready to go — you can include that in the response as well.

If you want to see how it works, feel free to fill out this form, and I’ll get immediately back to you with a responsive auto-responder, attached workflow and all!

Richard