Dynamics CRM E-Mail Marketing, Part 2

Dynamics CRM is the best place to store your customer information, and track all of your sales, marketing and service interactions with them. Unfortunately, it’s not the best place to perform some of those interactions, such as e-mail. Yes, it’s fine for tracking one-off e-mails (especially if you’re using the Outlook client), but when it comes to e-mail marketing, the out-of-the-box features of Dynamics CRM leave plenty to be desired. What we need is e-mail marketing integrated with Dynamics CRM. There are more options all for this all the time, and in this article I discuss integrations for both Exact Target and Constant Contact, and my recent experience with the Constant Contact integration.

First, why do we need integration with a third-party application? Here’s a quick summary of the limitations of a 100%-pure Dynamics CRM e-mail marketing approach:

• The e-mail editor is weak, and creating nicely formatted e-mail templates is difficult. It’s true you can use Word mail-merge, but that’s a bit clunky, and only really works well if you’re using the Outlook client.
• If you do send out an e-mail blast to hundreds or thousands of recipients, all of those e-mails will be sent out directly from your e-mail server, a fact that will neither endear you with the spam police nor get you a very high delivey rate.
• Finally, you will have no statistics on what happens to all those e-mails: How many are delivered, how many are opened, how many links get clicked and who clicks them?

All of these limitations can be overcome if you use a hosted e-mail marketing service, like Exact Target or Constant Contact. Once you get used to their features you’ll never want to do e-mail marketing any other way. That is, until you get tired of the hassle of continually exporting your contacts from CRM, importing into the e-mail marketing platform, and maintaining opt-outs in two different places!

Until Microsoft includes these important features into the core product, what we need is integrated e-mail marketing. This is available for some of the e-mail marketing platforms, including Exact Target and Constant Contact, with the following features:

Exact Target provides a direct integration of its e-mail marketing features with Dynamics CRM. I’ve never used it but have many customers who use it and like it. It’s been out for a long time, and apparently includes an “Exact Target” option in the marketing campaign “Channel” list, which if selected allows an elegant direct integration, so you can simply distribute an e-mail activity from you campaign and have Exact Target deliver it, track responses and synch them back to your Dynamics CRM. Two problems with Exact Target:

• It’s quite expensive.
• Worse (from my standpoint, this was the deal-killer), it only works with the on-premise edition of Dynamics CRM. My production CRM is in the cloud, so I can’t use it.

Constant Contact does not integrate directly, but a third-party, Zero2TenCRM, has created a solution. It’s called CRM to Constant Contact, CCC (pronounced C-cubed) for short. I’ve been using this solution lately, and while it isn’t quite as tight as the Exact Target approach, I like it. Basically, it allows you to flag a marketing list to “Synch with the E-mail provider”, in which case the members of the list get pushed automatically to Constant Contact (CC) as a “contact list”. In CC, contact lists are what you execute your e-mail campaigns against, so this automatic synching relieves the pain of exporting, importing and all that. Even better, after you send your CC e-mail, all of those great statistics (opens, clicks, etc.) display like normal in CC, but also get synched back to your Dynamics CRM. Plus, it meets my runs-in-the-cloud criterion, working as it does with both the on-premise and Online versions of Dynamics CRM.

The following figure shows one of the product’s customizations to my Dynamics CRM:

Notice the “Synch to e-mail provider” button at the bottom of my marketing list form. Select it, save the list, and the next time you go to your Constant Contact, you’ll have what CC refers to as a “Contact List” (essentially the same thing as a Dynamics CRM marketing list) automatically created and synchronized with the CRM list.

As I mentioned above, having my marketing lists synchronized between Dynamics CRM and Constant Contact is a nice feature and saves me a lot of importing, exporting and double list maintenance hassle. But it gets even better after I send out a marketing e-mail from CC. Here’s what I’m used to seeing, in CC:

With this integration, here’s what I can now see in Dynamics CRM:

This is the corresponding summary information for the “E-Mail Marketing” campaign that the CCC application automatically creates in Dynamics CRM when a Constant Contact e-mail is sent to a synchronized marketing list. Now, all the great response data I used to have locked up separately in Constant Contact is now available where I need it and where I can do something with it: right in my Dynamics CRM where it belongs.

No product is perfect, and here are a couple areas where this one needs-improvement:

• Synching is (quite!) asynchronous and there’s no manual synch capability. If you’re as impatient as I am to see all those opens and click-throughs, this is a bummer.
• In the CCC approach, the e-mail IS the campaign. Every CC e-mail creates an “E-Mail Marketing Campaign” in your Dynamics CRM. This is a little less flexible than the standard CRM marketing campaign, which can have multiple campaign activities (e-mails, letters, phone calls, etc.)

These are minor, however, compared to the time this product saves me and the valuable campaign response data I now get automatically synched to my Dynamics CRM, where it belongs. A representative from Zero2TenCRM will be presenting at the February 11 meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group, so if you want to check this tool out, please join us! Attendance at the meeting is free, and you should go here to register if you’d like to attend.