January 26, 2012 – Today I had the pleasure of co-presenting a webinar with John Gravely and Matt Wittemann of ClickDimensions, with the snazzy title, “CRM MVPs Reveal Best Practices: What Works in Marketing Automation”. Not only was the title good, but I thought the session was as well. Here’s a a summary of my part of the webinar, and a link to the recorded session.

December 3, 2011 – I recently began using ClickDimensions for my crm-centric marketing automation solution, and it’s been working great. This article summarizes the primary benefits of marketing automation add-ons for Dynamics CRM, and uses ClickDimenions examples to illustrate. Enjoy!

May 19, 2010 – In part 1 of this 2-part series on digital marketing integrated in Dynamics CRM, I focused on CoreMotives’ e-mail marketing features. This article covers the web analytics piece, and why I like it in my CRM.

May 8, 2010 – I’ve been thinking a lot about social CRM lately, and here’s a summary of my thinking on how “social” impacts our CRM efforts.

May 8, 2010 – This short article mainly contains a link to the recording of Rhett Thompson’s presentation at the April meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group, on CoreMotives integrated digital marketing features.

April 17, 2010 – My search for CRM digital marketing perfection has taken so long, I’d settle for CRM digital marketing adequacy. CoreMotives is a lot more than adequate, and if it’s not perfect, it’s the best I’ve used so far. In part 1 of a 2-part series, I provide background information and drill down on its sweet e-mail marketing features.

February 7, 2010 – How do you take the information submitted on a web form and pop it into Dynamics CRM? This feature – sometimes referred to generically as “web-to-CRM”, or “lead-to-CRM” – is not included in Dynamics CRM 4.0 on-premise, but has been added to Dynamics CRM Online. The built-in approach in the cloud version is better than nothing, but there’s a better solution, Web2CRM from CRMInnovation, if you’re willing to spend $495.

February 7, 2010 – 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 here’s an article where I discuss integrations for both Exact Target and Constant Contact, and my recent experience with the Constant Contact integration

Jan. 26, 2010 — Dynamics CRM is a great product, but it’s got some feature gaps. One of the big ones is in e-mail marketing. Hosted e-mail marketing services fill the gap, but it’s a total hassle sending e-mails from a completely separate application! Here’s an introduction to a solution that integrates Dynamics CRM and Constant Contact: C-Cubed from Zero2TenCRM.

Internet Marketing in Dynamics CRM Online works great — no code required custom landing pages now let you track leads back to any web page or campaign.