Dynamics CRM Integrated E-Mail Marketing

 Integrate Dynamics CRM and Constant Contact, using CCC from Zero2TenCRM
Dynamics CRM has most of the features you’d think it would need for a complete e-mail marketing solution: integrated e-mail, marketing lists and campaigns, and of course…it contains and manages the customers and potential customers you’d want to market to.

If you’re new to Dynamics CRM – or new to e-mail marketing, for that matter – it might be hard to put your finger on exactly what the gaps are. But if you’ve struggled as long as I have trying to get your e-mail marketing money’s worth from the Dynamics CRM out-of-the-box feature set, you will know very well what’s missing:

The biggest problem is its weak treatment of campaign responses. For example, you can distribute a campaign e-mail to all the members of a marketing list, but the only way you can automatically tie a response to the e-mail is if the recipient happens to reply directly to the e-mail. (And according to the documentation, even this only works if you have the hideous “tracking token” turned on!)

If you really want to know what happens when you send a marketing e-mail, you may already be familiar with companies like Exact Target (http://email.exacttarget.com/) and Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com ). Companies like these offer hosted e-mail marketing solutions, and in addition to using their own e-mail servers to get your message out, they’ll give you LOTS more information about what happens to your e-mails: who opens them, which of your included links get clicked, who opts out, and so forth. Once you see responses like this happen in real-time as soon as you send an e-mail blast out, you will never want to go back to flying blind.

But once you start sending e-mail to your CRM customers from a separate e-mail service, here’s what you’ll experience:

• You’ll have to create and maintain marketing lists in two separate applications, importing, exporting and trying to keep in synch.
• You’ll have lots of great statistics on what happens when you send e-mails out…but if you want those statistics as campaign responses in your CRM, you’ll have to figure out how to export and import them as well.

If, on the other hand, you had integrated CRM and e-mail marketing, you could accomplish a number of worthwhile objectives at once:

• keep your customers where they belong, right there in your Dynamics CRM
• send your e-mails from an externally hosted, number-crunching e-mail server
• synch everything back and forth without you having to do any extra work.

That’s why I picked on Exact Target and Constant Contact: both have integrations with Dynamics CRM.

I’ve been hearing about Exact Target’s integration for years — I think they were one of the first to market, back in the days of yore and Dynamics CRM 3.0. And I was just about to become an Exact Target customer…when I learned they only integrate with the on-premise option of Dynamics CRM. Ouch! I had to stop right there. On premise is great for some organizations, but I’m committed to the cloud and sworn never to host another server, so I had to keep looking.

About a month ago I saw an article on the Dynamics CRM Online team blog about a product CCC (”c-cubed”) from a company called Zero2TenCRM. Well, one thing led to another and I’m up and running. So far, only for a day, so I can’t provide much detail. But it looks promising. Check out these sweet statistics that get automatically synched back to my Dynamics CRM after executing an e-mail marketing campaign in Constant Contact:

I’ll provide a more detailed treatment after I’ve had more experience; in the meantime, I recorded the meeting I had with Ryan of Zero2Ten, who walked me through the setup and integration. Here’s a link to the recording.

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