If it’s not Perfect, it’s Pretty Darn Good!

Part 1: Background, CoreMotives, and E-Mail Marketing

I’ve been looking for the perfect “CRM digital marketing” solution for a long time, and while perfection still eludes me, I’ve been working for a month now with something that’s Very Good and that I’d recommend to organizations that want to integrate digital marketing within their Dynamics CRM. CoreMotives is a suite of digital marketing applications that integrates with both Dynamics CRM 4.0 on-premise and CRM Online, and in this and a follow-up article I’ll discuss the challenges I’ve had and how I’m addressing them with CoreMotives.

First, on the terminology I’m using: I’m not thrilled with the term “digital marketing”, but it is short, and it does capture the essence: how do you take all of the interactions with your customers and potential customers that happen through digital media, and integrate them within your overall marketing efforts? And if you’re basing your sales and marketing efforts on the Dynamics CRM platform, how do you make everything work within Dynamics CRM?

Here’s the basic challenge as I see it: if information about the people you market to – leads, contacts, accounts — is stored in CRM, you will want as many as possible of your marketing activities to be there also. To understand the advantages of an integrated solution, consider these “dis-integrated” scenarios:

• E-Mail Marketing. I send e-mail newsletters on a regular basis to customers and potential customers. In CRM, these are leads and contacts, and I use marketing lists to specify things like the criteria for inclusion, managing opt-outs and so forth. Until recently I’ve had to perform many or most of the tasks (creating the e-mail content, distributing the e-mails, managing responses) outside of CRM. At best, this involves a lot of inefficient exporting, importing and duplicate entry of data. At worst, positive responses don’t get followed up on and opt-outs get missed.
• Lead Capture. My blog (WordPress) and my web site (Joomla) are both important sources of leads. Like most blog and web site platforms, they support a self-service “subscribe” feature, where a user can fill in a form and create a profile. It’s awesome to have somebody like your content enough to volunteer information about themselves in this way! On the other hand, if the goal is to have CRM be my single repository for contacts, this blows the model, since now I’ve got multiple profiles on the same person in different places. And once you start going down the “social media” path you realize how ubiquitous this problem is: subscribers to my YouTube or SlideShare channels, people who follow me on Twitter, people I’m connected with on LinkedIn: social media explodes the number of places we can make connections with potential customers…and it also explodes the number of potential customer repositories, since every social media site apparently aspires to be a CRM. With a good “lead capture” function into my CRM, at least I can mitigate the redundant data problem a little bit. (I’m not complaining, though – by all means, subscribe to my YouTube channel!)
• Web Analytics. These are important even if you aren’t selling advertising on your web site. For example, in addition to knowing which of my blog articles are the most popular, I also want to know who’s reading them and if any of my visitors are in response to things I’m doing (e.g., an e-mail campaign or search advertising) or from somewhere else (e.g., referring sites). Google is of course the Bible of the church of web analytics, but once again, the problem is its disconnectedness from my CRM. I do use Google Analytics, but all it tells me is how many visitors I’m getting: it doesn’t know who they are, at least not in the context that matters most to me. (And by the way, if Google ever buys SalesForce or does its own CRM, in my view you’d have to have rocks in your head to give up your customer information to Big G)

E-Mail Marketing, lead capture, and web analytics are the “big three” feature areas CoreMotives tackles in its digital marketing suite, which is very nicely integrated within Dynamics CRM, and supports both the on-premise and Online deployment options. My three big criteria for a CRM digital marketing solution are:

• Integrated with Dynamics CRM
• Works with both on-premise and Online deployment options
• Actually works

Check the first two off. The rest of the way, I’ll talk about the third. In the rest of this article, I’ll provide a little more context by reviewing some of the options I tried before CoreMotives. Next, I’ll drill down on what for me has so far been the most important component with the highest impact: E-mail marketing.

In a subsequent article, I’ll close out (for now anyway) on CoreMotives and cover its Web Analytics features, along with its pricing model, so you can “do the numbers” and see if it’s right for your organization.

Background: The Search

Here are the most important options I considered in my search for an integrated CRM digital marketing solution:

1. I started the way I always do: by trying to use Dynamics CRM’s out of the box features. The two biggest limitations are:
   1. Unless you’re OK with sending text-only e-mails, the E-Mail template editor’s bare bones feature set (lack of support for HTML, limited formatting capabilities) doesn’t really cut it.
   2. More importantly, there’s no built-in response tracking: after you send an e-mail blast you don’t know who opened it, who clicked through, etc.
2. I’d used Constant Contact a few years back (in my pre-CRM days) and was familiar with the advantages of more robust e-mail marketing, so I decided to explore my options with it and some competitive products. I’d heard that Exact Target had a nice integration with Dynamics CRM, so I explored that option. Unfortunately, Exact Target doesn’t pass my “works with Dynamics CRM Online” test, so I had to keep looking.
3. I read an article on the CRM Online blog about a product (”CCUBED” from Zero2TenCRM) that integrates Constant Contact and Dynamics CRM (on premise and Online!). I was excited to try it out, and I was happy to have Zero2TenCRM CEO Paul Colella demonstrate the application at a recent Dynamics CRM User Group meeting. The approach this tool takes is to synchronize marketing information between Constant Contact and Dynamics CRM: when you check the “Synchronize with E-Mail Marketing” checkbox on a CRM marketing list, it automatically pushes it up to Constant Contact, eliminating the tedious process of moving data back and forth manually. Better yet, e-mail campaign you do in Constant Contact syncs back automatically to CRM as an “e-mail marketing” campaign, with results – opens, clicks, unsubscribes… — all tied to CRM leads and contacts. This was good progress! The main problems I had with this approach were a) I still had to execute the campaign from CC, using its editor which is OK but I’m not crazy about it; b) the synchronizing is asynchronous…and in my experience, a little too asynchronous. Campaign results could take several hours (or more) to synchronize and although it might not seem like much it was enough to make me continue searching.
4. CoreMotives found its way onto my radar screen a few months back, and promised to solve all of the most important problems I’d encountered with the other approaches I tried:
   1. All-up digital marketing (e-mail, web analytics, lead capture) integrated entirely within Dynamics CRM.
   2. Works with both Dynamics CRM 4.0 on-premise and Online

CoreMotives Basics and E-Mail Marketing

The following figure shows a portion of my customized site map after getting CoreMotives up and running. “Web Pages” and so forth are custom entities, imported and published as part of the provisioning process.

Assuming you trust a provider enough to integrate their application this tightly into your CRM, this approach has advantages. For example, these are “real” customizable entities: subject to some expected limitations, I can customize their views and forms, and generally treat them the same way I’d treat other customizable entities in Dynamics CRM.

In the previous figure you can see “Mailing Templates” and “Mailings” in the Email Marketing group. If you’ve ever struggled with the email template functionality that’s included in Dynamics CRM 4.0 or CRM Online, you will appreciate the many improvements CoreMotives brings. Virtually all of the important limitations of the out of the box functionality – no HTML support, primitive editor, inconsistent implementation of hyperlinks… — are included in the CoreMotives feature set. The next figure shows the CoreMotives email template editor in action, as I was putting the finishing touches on a recent template for my Dynamics CRM Essentials campaign:

There’s no “copy template” feature, which is unfortunate, but it’s not that big a limitation since you can simply enter the template editor’s HTML mode, copy everything to the clipboard, and paste it into a new template. The next figure shows a list of my saved “Mailing Templates”:

Once you’ve got your template all tweaked just right, you can use it for a “Mailing” – for me, this is where it really starts to get interesting. The next figure shows the General tab of the Mailing form: the Subject field will be the subject as it appears in a recipient’s inbox, the Campaign lookup field lets you associate a mailing with a standard marketing campaign, and the List field lets you designate a marketing list for the mailing.

The next figure shows the HTML Content tab of the same form: here’s where you pour in the template created with the template editor:

I won’t go into every detail for this form, but notice the Testing tab: that lets you send test emails to yourself, or whoever else on your team might give you some feedback…before you’re ready to … gulp! … click Send.

And once you do send out one of these e-mails, you really start to appreciate the value of e-mail marketing, integrated tightly into your CRM. For example, the next figure shows the All Mailings view of the Mailings entity. If it’s not E-Mail Marketing Nirvana, it’s pretty close!

Everything I used to have to go to Constant Contact for, with all the importing and exporting, data double-entry…it’s all now tracked automatically, right where it belongs in my CRM, associated with my contact records. The previous figure just shows the summary for each mailing: recipients, bounces, opens, click-throughs, and unsubscribes…but these are built up from the individual interactions, and with CoreMotives, you can see how every one of an email’s recipient’s responds: who opens, who clicks and what time they clicked a specific link…Wow! The next figure shows a nice graphical summary of a mailing. It might be hard to tell, but I’m just about to drill down on the “Open” slice of the doughnut to see the details on who opened that email:

Next Time…

There’s a lot to this product, and I’ll leave a few things for Part 2. I’ll cover how its web analytics feature works, and why it makes sense to have this integrated within your CRM. And since I’ll have more experience with it by then I’ll cover a few of the things that stand between CoreMotives and true Nirvana status. I’ll also discuss the “per interaction” pricing model, which I suspect will be one of them.