I’ve written a few times about integrating Internet marketing into your overall Dynamics CRM marketing efforts. In particular, one of the big gaps in the traditional feature set was the lack of a web-to-lead function so real “marketing types” could capture leads from a web form directly into Dynamics CRM…without having to write code to do it! So, let’s start with

A Review of Internet Lead Capture for Dynamics CRM

This problem now has some good solutions, and one that I particularly like — Web2CRM from CRM Innovation at http://www.crminnovation.com — is the starting point for this article.

To quickly review, what Web2CRM lets you do is create an Internet page with a form on it, into which a visitor can enter information, and from which you can pop the information directly into your CRM. One big advantage of the Web2CRM product, compared to (for example) the Microsoft implementation in CRM Online, is that Web2CRM lets you create a web form for ANY entity in your Dynamics CRM, including custom ones! So while the CRM Online approach only lets you accept Internet Leads into the new “Internet Lead” entity, Web2CRM gives you a sweet drag and drop form designer you can use to create a web form to populate any entity.

For example, here’s a look at the Web2CRM form design environment. In the next figure, I’ve already selected the entity I’m designing a form for, and I’ve got a nice drag and drop environment I can use to select any of its fields to place on the form. You get a nice design-ish view of your CRM form on the left hand side, from which you can drag and drop fields onto the Web2CRM form-in-progress in the middle. At the right, you can see which entity the form’s being designed for, and you get some other form-level settings I won’t go into here.

If you click the Publish button you get a very generic form that is hosted on the CRM Innovation servers — another example of the hosted “software+services” model. But if you click the cryptically named “Carry Code” button you open up a window with a bunch of script code you can simply copy and pasted onto one of your very own pages, and create a page on your site that looks like this one (or however you want yours to look!):

To review, the form is created for the “Info Requester” custom entity I created in my CRM organiztion. So if you fill out the form you will find here —  www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com/request-content — a new record gets created in my CRM with the information you provide.

So…on to the main point of this article…

What to do with those Internet Leads?

One good thing to do is to send an acknowledgment email — often referred to as an “auto-responder”. In Dynamics CRM, one of the seven actions a workflow can take (can you name the other six?) is to send an email, so I can create a workflow to run automatically when a new Info Requester record is created and send a nice auto-responder. But…you can’t email directly to a custom entity (yet!) in CRM 4, so the first thing my workflow has to do is create a Lead record based on the Info Request record. So here’s what my simple workflow looks like:

The “Create Lead” action simply takes the fields entered onto the web form, and pops them into the corresponding fields on a new lead record.

You can use dynamic values to configure the “Send e-mail” action, crafting a somewhat customized and oh-so-responsive response! Like this:

And last but not least, notice the Attachments tab in that figure. You can attach one or more items to a workflow-generated email in Dynamics CRM 4, so depending on what kind of information people might be interested in receiving — a white paper, say, or even a Dynamics CRM workflow all zipped up and ready to go — you can include that in the response as well.

If you want to see how it works, feel free to fill out this form, and I’ll get immediately back to you with a responsive auto-responder, attached workflow and all!

Richard

Here’s a trick you can use to make a “redirect” page — that is, a page whose only purpose is to send somebody to another page. This is a handy trick in many situations. I recently ran into a requirement for it when I wanted to push out a Twitter tweet with a link to a Trick Bag subscribe landing page.

Here’s the landing page: https://landingpage.dynamics.com:443/LandingPage.aspx?dl_lpai=41e05435-4218-4a33-ae43-a214bd49c8a5&dl_lpak=1949979038.

[Note: this landing page is generated by the "Lead Capture Pages" wizard in Dynamics CRM Online. If you've read any other recent Trick Bag posts, you may know this is a topic of interest to me. For example, here's a link to an article on the Trick Bag on the topic: http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/?p=163 ]

Anyway, that’s 117 characters all by itself, which only leaves 23 characters to convince somebody they might actually want to click a nasty-looking URL like that! Not enough characters for my poor persuasive skills, so I decided a shorter URL was in order.  

There are other ways to do this, but the easiest approach I’ve seen is to use Jscript code like this:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
window.location = “http://www.google.com/”
//–>
</script>

So I need some code like that on a page with a nice short URL. Here’s a SharePoint example:

I created a page in SharePoint, which on my site now has a URL of http://www.imginc.com/pages/linkedintbsubscribe.aspx, much shorter than the other one. I put a Content Editor web part on the page, then put that code in the HTML of the page.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
window.location = “https://landingpage.dynamics.com:443/LandingPage.aspx?dl_lpai=41e05435-4218-4a33-ae43-a214bd49c8a5&dl_lpak=1949979038”
//–>
</script>

– and all the user sees is what you get to here: https://landingpage.dynamics.com:443/LandingPage.aspx?dl_lpai=41e05435-4218-4a33-ae43-a214bd49c8a5&dl_lpak=1949979038

If you are reading this and had planned on attending the Dynamics CRM User Group Meeting on 2/26…I apologize. We had an unforutunate perfoect storm of server and connectivity problems, and I felt terrible about having to cancel at the last minute. But Live Meeting sessions without the Live Meeting part are inherently boring.

Anyway, I (finally!) recorded a version of what I’d planned on presenting at the meeting. I’ve written about this a couple of times, so for this post I’ll just provide a few comments here, but mainly link to the recordings.

I created this in a number of parts, rather than one monolithic file.

So here, without further ado, is the introduction. This is a narrated slide presentation:  Internet Marketing in Dynamics CRM Online – Introduction

The next part is a demonstration: how you create Lead Capture pages, and how the results come into CRM when a user fills out one of your forms: Internet Marketing in Dynamics CRM Online – Demo, Part 1

The next part is a demonstration also. What this one focuses in on is one of the most important bits: what can you do with these Internet Leads after they’re imported into CRM. In my view, this is where the power of this approach really becomes apparent: Internet Marketing in Dynamics CRM Online – Demonstration, Part 2 (not quite ready for posting yet…)

In the Dynamics CRM Online September Service Update, Microsoft introduced some new marketing features specifically having to do with Internet marketing. It was an interesting first step, but had a number of important limitations:

·         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!