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.