I put up a slide show that goes into this in some detail on slideshare.net (which is pretty cool in its own right, but that’s a topic for a different post). You can see it here: Internet Marketing in Dynamics CRM.

But here’s the executive summary on the topic. Dynamics CRM has a strong marketing implementation, but one big gap has always been Interneting Marketing. This is because it never had a built-in ”web to lead capture” functionality. So there was no built-in way to track a campaign response back to a Google ad or any other web page. 

The Dynamics CRM Online product has finally filled the gap with what in my opinion is a very nice first release. It includes a custom landing page entity, where you can use a wizard to create a landing page hosted by Microsoft, or to generate a snippet of code you can put on your own server. When somebody visits that page, fills in the form and clicks submit — presto! — a nice fresh record in your “Internet Lead” entity (another new entity). You can then review these Internet Leads, delete the inevitable net chaff, and import the real leads right into the standard CRM Lead entity.

Very nice! No code required, relatively nice looking landing pages, and if you use the “snippet on your server approach”, you can even track back to the specific campaign that generated the lead.

Take a look at the slide show I linked to above for some details, but the main idea is that I can tweet out from Twitter, drive traffic from a Google or Live ad, from my Linkedin or FaceBook page…or even from a blog post. And all of the leads coming into my CRM now can be tracked back to wherever they came from.

So that’s for Dynamics CRM Online…unfortunately if you’re running on premise you’re still on your own. This will be a nice out of the box feature in Dynamics CRM 5.0!

And by the way, if you’ve customized your Lead entity in Dynamics CRM Online and you can’t get the new Internet Marketing features to work right, there’s a tricky little buglet I might be able to help you with. My guess is most people won’t encounter this, but if you do, check in with me and I might be able to help you with it.

·         In order to take advantage of the features, you had to select a campaign type of “Internet Marketing” when you created a marketing campaign. When you did this, it exposed the new functionality, but disabled (for that specific campaign) all of the other marketing features you might be used to using in a “classic” Dynamics CRM marketing campaign. This meant that Internet Marketing could only be done as part of a dedicated campaign, rather than as an integrated part of your overall marketing efforts.

·         More importantly, the only Internet Marketing activity it allowed you to integrate into your Internet Marketing campaign type was a Microsoft Live Search Words campaign! I like Live as much as (heck, probably a lot more than) the next guy, but I don’t know of too many people whose only Internet marketing is limited to Live search.   

In my opinion, these limitations made it more of a pilot than a ready-for-primetime part of your marketing toolkit. But the new enhancements might make it worth another look. To understand them, it might help to clarify what I mean by “Internet marketing”. I’ll define it to mean the activities you undertake to further your sales and marketing goals, in which the Internet is the key enabling technology. This is pretty broad brush, but I think it works well. It would include, for example, activities such as:

·         Search word and other pay-per-click ads

·         Email marketing

·         Traditional media (billboards, TV ads, print) with the goal of driving traffic to a web site

·         Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and other Web 2.0 and social networking efforts

It would not include activities like:

·         Traditional media without mention of a web site or an email

·         Telesales campaigns without mention of a web site or an email

I realize this defines almost everything we do these days as “Internet marketing”, but I think that’s a measure of how important the Internet has become in our marketing rather than a problem with the definition! And one of the most important reasons Internet technologies have come to play such an important role in marketing is because they are so inherently measurable. Traffic to a web site, page views, form submits, ad clicks…these may or may not be the best ways to further our marketing efforts, but they certainly are something you can quantify! For an example, let’s walk through a classic Internet marketing scenario, which I’ll use to define some terms. Suppose you’ve bid on Google Ad Words, or you’ve purchased a banner ad on a web site.

1.       When a potential customer sees your ad, that’s an “impression”.

2.       If they click it, that’s a “click-through”.

3.       The link they clicked takes them to a “landing page”, often but not necessarily on your web site.

4.       If they fill out a form you’ve got on the landing page, that’s a “conversion”.

Now the form they filled out might be a request for information, or an event registration, or a newsletter subscription, or even an e-commerce transaction. Whatever form it takes, it’s a Good Thing from your standpoint…or at least it better be, since it was the primary goal of the ad you purchased!

In any case, it’s inherently measurable, since you got some data volunteered to you in the form of whatever required fields you placed on the form. 

Which brings me in a roundabout way to the point of this article. The new features in CRM Online allow you to create landing pages of the kind I just described, and to associate them with a marketing campaign. In Dynamics CRM-speak, they let you associate a Landing Page with a Marketing Campaign. When somebody goes to the Landing Page and clicks submit, you can have Dynamics CRM create a Campaign Response record.

Note: I bolded the terms that are “entities”, in Dynamics CRM-speak. If you’re an experienced Dynamics CRM hand, please skip to the next paragraph; if not, here’s some background information: In Dynamics CRM marketing, we talk about executing a Marketing Campaign by “distributing” its Campaign Activities.  These might be emails, phone calls, letters, faxes, but the important thing is that they’re the customer touch-points of a marketing campaign. After you distribute campaign activities, good things can happen in the form of a Campaign Response. For example, a campaign response will be automatically generated by CRM if a campaign email recipient replies directly to the email. Suppose the reply does NOT include “Unsubscribe” in the subject line, and they’re actually interested in what your campaign was pitching. An alert sales rep will see the campaign response, convert it an Opportunity, and if that opportunity results in a sale, it’s a beautiful thing: not only did you sell something, but the generated revenue can be tied to the campaign via the campaign response. I like to think of the Campaign Response entity as being the link between marketing and sales in Dynamics CRM, and it’s important to plan your campaign activities so these responses can be created automatically (or with as little manual effort as possible!)

In the Dynamics CRM 4.0 on-premise software, the only way to create a campaign response record automatically is if the recipient of a campaign activity email replies. What this meant was that the only real “Internet Marketing” supported out of the box was the email variety. But the new features in CRM Online mean you can create a campaign response for any campaign that drives your target audience to a landing page and motivates them to click “submit”. In turn, this opens the door for all kinds of interesting and important Internet Marketing activities to be part of your integrated marketing efforts. I’ll talk about the implementation details in another article, but for now I’ll give you a final high-level example of how you can put this to work.

Part of the new CRM Online functionality is a wizard that walks you through the creation of a landing page. The flexibility is somewhat limited, but the pages look great, and since with this approach no code is required my guess is a lot of marketing managers will be fine with it. Microsoft hosts the landing pages – this is the whole idea of hosted software, so this part isn’t surprising. Once the landing page is created, suppose its URL is something like the following:

I can drive traffic to that page from anywhere I want to – an email blast, a Google Ad Words campaign, my Linkedin profile, a Twitter tweet – and if somebody goes there and clicks submit, I’ve got the data they entered in my CRM Online.

That’s how the landing page concept works. It’s simple and elegant, and I’m glad to see it’s along the lines I suggested in my earlier article about the first version of this functionality!

That’s it for now. I’ll sign off so I can concentrate on Kate Winslett hyperventilating. (that’s an Oscar reference, btw)  More information on implementation details soon!