Best Marketing Automation tool for Microsoft Dynamics 365

I am involved with the Microsoft partners ecosystem for more than ten years, and I've worked on hundreds of projects for Microsoft Partners and customers. Those experiences made me realize that marketing managers in mid-market companies that leverage Dynamics 365 as their CRM platform may have a small team and need to maximize their investment in marketing strategies and activities like digital events or drip e-mail marketing. 

Marketing managers looking to automate marketing activities or customer engagement do quite a lot around webinars, educational and networking conferences for their customers promoting Microsoft technologies. As events used to be their main source of generating new customers and deals last year, most Microsoft ecosystems pivoted to the digital space, looking to automate in order to maximize engagement and optimize effort and budget invested. 

If you are wondering which marketing automation systems integrates natively with Microsoft Dynamics 365 look no further! Even if I am a fan of HubSpot, and as we are also HubSpot partners, if Dynamics 365 is your CRM platform, ClickDimensions may be a good option for you. Integrating dynamics and HubSpot is not that great, while integrating Dynamics 365 and ClickDimensions for marketing automation is seamless and provides an excellent user experience. Pricing on ClickDimensions is not based on the number of contacts and is overall more competitive and features reach. 

Features such as event management and automating processes are great, especially since ClickDimensions natively integrates with most Microsoft tools and technologies, making it a seamless experience if you run digital events from Microsoft teams or customer communications through Outlook. It is an effortless to use solution, completely integrated inside the Dynamics 365 platform.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration is the ClickDimensions backbone

I dare to say, that they do a better job than even Marketing for Dynamics does in terms of automating the martech stack for Dynamics 365 customers. For over one decade, they've been building on that integration, so it's very strong, simple, and usable. The data is on Azure, of course, and all your data get processed there. All ClickDimensions data seamlessly integrates and flows between the system and the Dynamics 365 CRM. 

If integration is a big deal to you, using ClickDimensions is a straightforward way to address pain points and quickly solve them. It's no wonder to me that this system is the default marketing automation platform for most Microsoft Dynamics customers and partners.

Contacts

One of the advantages is that the contacts sit safely on a global Azure installation. Also, the database natively and seamlessly integrates with the Dynamics CRM contacts database. All information collected in ClickDimensions features is easy to find in your Dynamics CRM contact records about your prospects and customers throughout your campaigns. Everything is pushed in real-time in your contact activity records and Dynamics 365 campaigns.

How to execute campaigns in ClickDimensions?

You can capitalize on the convenience of having ClickDimensions native inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform by linking your e-mails, web visits, page views, and form captures directly to CRM campaign records.

Automation allows you features like set up dynamic paths for a contact or lead to follow based on that contact or lead's actions. For example, if the contact fills out a form, you can send them an e-mail then wait to see if they click on Link A or Link B. If they click on Link A, send them Email A, but if they click on Link B send them E-mail B.

Since ClickDimensions is embedded inside Dynamics CRM, your activities and conversions can be associated with a campaign record in CRM. This allows you to view and analyze your marketing efforts in one convenient place. Creating the link between CRM campaigns and ClickDimensions e-mails, web forms, and landing pages is as easy as possible.

Not e-mail centric but e-mail strong!

Contacts in your database can receive all sorts of e-mails and sequences, so we can easily access delivers, opens, clicks, sent data, etc. All sent e-mails will be pushed back to the contact record for robust reporting.

You can add different types of e-mails and types of subscriptions, group or individual e-mails, change the owner names, and change the different domain names. 

It's pretty straightforward: what you would do is tie your e-mail template to your e-mail send record. Give it a subject line, a header, and then will  the option to connect any type of activity back to a CRM campaign. 

This marketing automation tools has a powerful Template Designer and multiple graphical templates for e-mails and landing pages, as well. A neat feature is the Survey designer, which you can customize.

Attribution is key to demonstrating ROI and marketing-sales alignment

The most significant marketing leader's pain points will always be justifying their initiatives to company leadership, and explaining their quality leads, deals and customers to sales by being able to tie their activity back to a CRM campaign. 

Attribution features will clear up those pain points, but again we can see leads generated tied to different lists, we can see a full timeline, see the budget invested, and the leads generated opportunities closely tied back to the campaign's cost, so that you can see actual revenue or return on investment tied back to your estimated revenue, demonstrated by different campaign reports. 

One of the challenges we often met with dynamics customers and their marketing departments is the attribution of revenue to a campaign. This is really easy in ClickDimensions, where attribution can be split based on a scorecard, account records, and contacts. Marketing automation done on Dynamics platform is very complex. ClickDimensions uses lead scoring and attribution to be able to identify effective and revenue-generating activities.

Beautiful buyer journeys and funnel flows

The powerful automation seamlessly integrating with your Dynamics 365 CRM data will help you craft amazing buyer journeys. The workflow automation feature is one of the most powerful out there. I can only compare it with the Salesforce one.

Automating Events

Automating event services, sending the email as reminders, post-event communications, surveys, and additional information, completely automated can be easily handled.

Website traffic and tracking

ClickDimension comes with out-of-the-box tracking and scripts that can easily be added to your website's global template. 

Visitor information records are sent as with any activity directly in the contact records library in Dynamics 365.

Robust campaign reporting

We can see forms page views, opportunities, performance, and any digital touchpoint. All of them are pushed back to that CRM campaign, getting you real-time stats. What you want to do next is control the loop, right? So this brings up the e-mail template. The next thing you want to do is set the form settings. As your team creates the content, you can send the e-mails on behalf of your CEO name, but the e-mail answering part remains your marketing team's responsibility. So, your CEO isn't getting any responses, and your marketing and sales team can directly react.

With ClickDimension you get out of the box  e-mail stats, reports displaying if a contact just clicked on an e-mail opened or take any action and much more. You also get complete status reports, generated for every single e-mail, contact, customer etc., displaying all your interactions, your bounces or unsubscribes, unique clicks, total clicks, total opens, or your deliverability.

If you run a split test, you can see all of your e-mails relevant for that campaign, desktop vs mobile usability, your conversion analysis, website traffic and patterns generated, surveys filled in via e-mail, send, etc. 

Heatmaps will quickly and visually assist you in overseeing e-mail events, what type of activities they do, like clicks, what they click on, and what content was more engaging. 

Regarding the contacts, you will get reports on associated website traffic, the entry page, how many pages they view, the duration in terms of seconds, the browser, and whether they use a mobile device. Was it an iPhone, Windows, or Android device?

Social Sharing

The Template Designer has specific features on social sharing that you can insert into your e-mail templates. All the social activity would be pulled back into your contacts database up to the contact activity level. 

Easy and powerful A/B tests

ClickDimensions allows you to send to e-mail campaigns to static and dynamic lists, to leads and contacts inside of dynamics, easy add suppression. 

A/B tests allow you to test multiple strategies when you're releasing multiple products or services. A really cool way our clients are using this technique is when they try colour schemes or new branding and messaging, for example. But you can add completely separate templates and choose from different ones.

Also, you can automatically select the winning strategy based on unique clicks or unique opens or based on minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months. The system will automatically send the winning version to your designated list.

Powerful dashboards

The ClickDimensions intelligent dashboards are some of the best ones I've seen.

More than 150 standard reports and KPIs, which would take a team 1000 hours of work to develop, are available at your fingertips for your easy real-time reporting and updates. 

ClickDimensions recently acquired Sweetspot to integrate top-class analytics and dashboarding functionality. It may cost you a bit extra, but the ClickDimensions premier bundle includes intelligent dashboards as well.

However, if you are a user of Dynamics, you can build your own reports and dashboards directly in Dynamics 365 CRM. 

ClickDimensions is the tool of choice when it comes to Microsoft Dynamics 365 clients and partners. If you need help to understand the best marketing automation tool based on your tech stack or you are just at the beginning of your marking automation journey, reach out, and we would be happy to assist you.