Marketing automation solution options for Dynamics CRM platform
Marketing automation solution tends to make marketing process more efficient and streamlined. By implementing a marketing automation system, the marketer becomes more effective as it provides one more flexibility, helps in increasing efficiency and assists in achieving marketing goals faster. Marketing automation allows one to nurture leads through the entire buying process, deliver highly-targeted, personalized messages that address customer’s specific barriers to purchase across multiple traditional as well as contemporary touch-points. According to industry reports marketing automation software industry is estimated to reach $7.63 billion by 2025. The key challenge that most of the marketing heads across the globe experience is how to increase the ROI on the marketing initiatives by leveraging marketing automation solutions. There is a plethora of solutions available across the globe ranging from point solutions to the ones offering multi-media marketing capabilities for SMEs as well as large enterprises. Some of these marketing solutions work independently but can be integrated with other applications and some are available as part of the CRM offerings. It is advisable to use a marketing automation solution in conjunction with CRM so that it can be used throughout the customer lifecycle to monitor ROI. Specifically talking about D365 CRM platform, there are a lot of marketing automation solution options available in order to cater to various customer segments. These include, third party point solution add-ons, ClickDimensions, D365 for Marketing and Adobe Marketing which are all seamlessly integrated with D365 CRM platform. They offer various capabilities for one to choose from. Third party point solution add-on like Mail chimp is primarily meant for e-mail marketing, provides the capability to configure and execute e-mail campaigns and offers decent reporting capabilities. It offers ability to track bulk email statistics directly within to individual CRM contacts, leads and accounts in CRM. It also offers template editor for designing mails.
Third party point solution add D365 for marketing, launched by Microsoft sometime back, offers a lot more than just eMail marketing capabilities with ability to design interactive customer journeys to nurture leads with personalized experiences. It has rich features focusing on B2B marketing and empowers one to tap into LinkedIn's business prospects. It provides capabilities w.r.t lead generation, scoring, prioritizing and qualifying leads for sales. It also offers rich capabilities in organizing and publicizing events with ability to manage different aspects of event management - venues, logistics, ticketing, sessions, speakers, sponsors, and more in one place so your whole team can coordinate while working on them. One can publish online event portal where attendees can review event information and register online. It leverages VoC (Voice of customer) capability for creating and executing surveys to gather actionable feedback from customers. Key functions and capabilities of D365 for marketing are highlighted below: Webinars, Multichannel campaigns
Email marketing
landing
phone calls
pages &
&
forms
In-person
LinkedIn Connector
events degree
Behavior
Lead
Campaign
360
nurturing
designer
view
Embedded
Multiple
Dynamic
Customer
intelligence
lead scoring
segmentation
Insights
Event
Webinars
management
using ON24
Reporting
Dashboards
Events portal
Surveys
based lead nurture
Lead prioritization
Notifications
Attendance
Speaker
tracking
management
Embedded Power BI
Configurable
Objective of all these capabilities is to drive traffic to the website, convert that traffic into leads and close those leads into customers. The lead scoring model helps in defining
lead conversion parameters in Dynamics D365 and managing them effectively. D365 for marketing is available on D365 CRM cloud offering at present. It can be used independently as well as along with other D365 CRM offerings. ClickDimensions application add-on also offers competitive capabilities on all the aforesaid aspects and is available on cloud, though can be integrated with D365 CRM on-premises as well as online. ClickDimensions has been into this space for around a decade now, the product is relatively mature / rich and has a proven track record with several successful implementations. So if one is using on-premises or a partner hosted dynamics environment or is on a legacy version of Dynamics CRM then ClickDimensions will be a better fit. ClickDimensions has an edge over D365 for marketing when it comes to support over various Social media platforms, web site tracking capabilities where as D365 for marketing scores well when it comes to lead scoring, integration with LinkedIn and richer segmentation using customer insights data. On the other end of the spectrum is Adobe marketing cloud which offers very rich multimedia marketing capabilities and is primarily targeted towards enterprise segment with focus on B2C where the monthly e-mail volume is of the order of 500k to 1 million or so. It provides real time interaction management capabilities to make real time offers to customers. It definitely has an edge over other aforesaid offerings in terms of its ability to engage with customers over mobile applications, instant messaging and social media platforms. It also offers flexibility in terms of deployment options – on-premises, online and hybrid. With a wide variety of marketing automation solution options, available on Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform, for businesses to choose from businesses can take a call basis several factors including but not limited to their business needs, target segment, volumetric and price points of these offerings.
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