CRM MVPs on Marketing Automation Best Practices
January 26, 2012 – Today I had the pleasure of co-presenting a webinar with John Gravely and Matt Wittemann of ClickDimensions, CRM MVPs Reveal Best Practices: What Works in Marketing Automation. If you know me even a little bit, you’ll probably guess that I didn’t name the session. But as I said, I presented, and in addition to giving you a link to the recorded session on Vimeo, I thought I’d write up a summary while it was still fresh in my mind.
The session was built around case-study/scenarios. This was John’s idea and I think it was a good one: with six different case studies discussed in a sixty minute session, we moved pretty quickly and didn’t have a lot of time for marketing fluff. As a matter of fact, I think John set the record for the least amount of pitching time by a CEO.
I recently wrote an overview piece on using the ClickDimensions marketing automation solution in Dynamics CRM, and in this article I’ll summarize the two slightly more detailed scenarios I discussed in today’s presentation: nurture marketing and customer surveys.
Nurture Marketing
I started by defining terms and contrasting traditional marketing with nurture:
- Traditional marketing was essentially a 1:N model, with nurture, the goal is to create a personal, 1:1 relationship with a client.
- Traditional marketing was event-based, with every activity essentially an independent event. In contrast, nurture marketing is relationship-based, with activities part of an ongoing conversation, each activity making use of information gathered from all the others.
- Traditional marketing was targeted at a demographic, at best. With Nurture marketing the goal is to create a tailored set of activities, specifically crafted for an individual.
Now this is a bit of a straw-man comparison: contrasted like that, who wouldn’t want to do nurture marketing? Of course, the answer is because with the tools we’ve traditionally had it’s so much more difficult! With the data-driven marketing foundation provided by Dynamics CRM, and the ClickDimensions add-on solution, you’ve got the tools to do nurture marketing, and your only real constraint is your creativity and imagination as a marketer.
I focused specifically on email marketing, and for the discussion I made a distinction between drip and trigger marketing:
- Drip marketing is where a pre-determined set of emails go out, one after the other…drip…drip…In this context, a good example would be the confirmation email you get when you register for a seminar; then the day-before reminder, then the post-event email with a link to a session evaluation. Another drip marketing scenario was described in a ClickDimensions blog post from last year.
- Trigger marketing is more adaptive – where specific marketing activities depend on a customer’s behavior. You could inject a trigger component into the webinar example by sending a different post-event email depending on whether somebody attends or doesn’t. I showed a different application of trigger marketing in Dynamics CRM in my demo, using CD as the foundation, combining it with a custom Dynamics CRM workflow.
Here’s a Visio diagram that describes the process I demonstrated:
- I send out my monthly email newsletter using CD. If I send an email and it bounces, an automatic workflow creates a Bounce Followup task for the record owner.
- If it doesn’t bounce, we wait to see what happens
- If nothing happens for a certain number of days, we send another email – maybe with a reworded subject line
- But if before then we get an open we take a different path: wait for a click and if we get one create a Click Followup task for the record owner.
Here’s what that process looks like in the form a Dynamics CRM workflow:
This workflow really consists of three logical branches:
- The first one tests for a click-through, and creates a click followup task if appropriate.
- Next, if an email bounces we create the bounce followup task, and as a best practice I go straight to LinkedIn when that happens.
- And if neither of those two things happens, we sit and wait for 5 days, eventually sending a second email, generally with a re-worded subject line so as not to be tedious.
If you have a little experience with Dynamics CRM workflows, you might recognize this entire Wait, otherwise, timeout until block as a good example of parallel wait conditions. These are characteristic of workflows like this, where you’re waiting for a number of different events and you don’t know which will happen first.
That workflow is written for a custom entity that’s part of the ClickDimensions solution, Sent Email. Records of this type are created when I distribute a ClickDimensions email, with one sent email going to every member of the marketing list. Here’s a screenshot of the sent emails from the most recent edition of my newsletter, the one I used to drive registrations for this webinar:
You can see that aggregate statistics are calculated on this record type, such how many opens, clicks, bounces, opt-outs and so forth. And you can probably guess that those are used to calculate the score field that the list shown above is sorted on. And, that’s why the nurture marketing workflow needs to be written for the sent email entity: when each email is sent, the workflow fires, and waits for whichever event happens first — an open/click combo, a bounce, or nothing – and takes appropriate action.
Not to go all nihilist on you, but in this scenario, nothing is an important event.
Surveys
Surveys are a great example of a highly structured, data-intensive conversation we can have with our customers…which means they’re perfect for ClickDimensions and CRM. There may be scenarios where anonymous surveys add value, but for the kinds of scenarios discussed in this session, you definitely want survey responses attached to a customer record, which you get out of the box with ClickDimensions.
Here’s a stylized life cycle for a survey deployed against Dynamics CRM customer records using the ClickDimensions survey functionality:
In a recent email campaign I included a link to a survey asking people to rate content topics for my blog, so I could use the results to guide my content development efforts. Here’s a screenshot of the data, in the form of a whole bunch of records in the CD custom entity Survey Answers…and if ever there was a case where a visual display of quantitative information improved my ability to digest and do something with the data, this is it!
There’s a little more detail on how to create surveys here, but there’s a lot more in the recording for the session.
And be sure to let me know if you have any questions about marketing automation in Dynamics CRM, ClickDimensions, nihilism, the history of Rome, or related topics. Cheers!
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