The Marketing module within Microsoft Dynamics CRM can help your business pre-empt and react to customers’ needs in a more discerning and efficient way. It enables you to create and implement well-defined, targeted and strategy-driven campaigns and monitor their performance in terms of lead to sales conversions and ROI. By giving you the tools to generate, capture, assign, track and nurture sales leads and opportunities (including access to templates, quick campaign wizards and workflow engine) you can shorten the sales cycle and improve close rates for both existing and prospective customers. A successful CRM implementation with intelligent use will improve and foster the customer relationship from contact to contract and for post-sales customer service.
Key Features
Single customer view: intelligent lead handling with single-click conversion to account, contact and opportunity**
List import
List creation and management
Quick campaign and multi-activity campaign creation, delivery and performance measurement
This screenshot shows how a lead could be converted into a choice of entities. If all boxes are checked, the lead information is automatically transferred to generate and populate the relevant fields in the three entities (contact, account and opportunity which are all inter-connected). The lead is then automatically closed (inactive) and becomes an opportunity.
Figure 1 shows the inactive lead, Figure 2 shows the new Account, Figure 3 shows the location of the new Opportunity in the new Account, Figure 4 shows the Opportunity entity.
Key Benefits
Dramatically reduce time, effort and money managing relationships and campaigns (Great marketing ROI )
Deliver quality leads to your sales colleagues with intelligently and professionally executed campaigns
Make tactically more sound decisions aided by brilliant SQL (Server) Reporting Services
Holistic Customer / Stakeholder Contact Management System
In common with the Sales & Service modules, the Marketing module provides instant access to a single and holistic view of prospects and customers (or citizens in the case of government bodies or in fact any type of stakeholder). All "customer" touch points, ie e-mails, appointments, tasks, fax, letters, phone calls (grouped as "Activities"), can be effectively maintained and managed. Key to contact management is the ability to associate an activity with a CRM record and retaining this link with clever, automated tagging throughout the contact history. Detailed profiles of customers can be built and opportunities qualified. Interwoven with the Sales Module is the ability to qualify and assign leads, progress and monitor these to a conclusive outcome.
Intelligent Mailing List Creation and Management
Mailing or "Marketing" lists can be created based on accounts, contacts or leads.
The Bulk Import Wizard offers a method of quickly adding contact data to CRM (as account, contact, lead or campaign response).
Figures 1 and 2 show the Bulk Import Wizard
Individual lookups or Advanced Find can be used to very quickly sort your data by (single or multiple) specified criteria, such as geography, size, product sales history, job title of contact, account relationship type (hot or lukewarm prospect, recent or established customer) and so on. This helps generate mailing or marketing lists against which you can deliver a timely and meaningful message.
Marketing lists can be modified by drawing from campaign feedback and re-used for future campaigns.
Campaign Management
There is a facility to quickly set up campaign templates which, when merged with the appropriate marketing lists, enable rapid execution of campaigns, the delivery of which can be timed to suit the organisation, eg synchronised with product launches, events or special offers. In addition, there is an option to automate delivery of reminders to those who have not replied by a given deadline. As with the sales module, the marketing module makes for easier campaign management: results are tracked and reviewed against costs and budgets. Through the setting up of campaign codes it is a simple enough task to determine the more effective campaigns and thereby use the outcome of these to devise future strategies.
There are report templates available in the system (generated by SQL Server Reporting Services) to help you monitor and measure campaign performance. Figure 1 points to where you can access the report templates, Figure 2 shows that you can use the Lookup function to pick a particular campaign and Figures 3,4 & 5 show how the findings are presented.
Event Management
Because of the ability to effortlessly create targeted mailing lists with sort and selection tools as well as the capability to effectively manage campaigns with tracking of internal and external communication and all implicated costs, events involving customers, partners, employees, shareholders or any other stakeholder can be very easily managed. All participants are kept informed and reminded of important diary dates.
Telemarketing / Call Centre Functionality
Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be easily integrated into a telephony system so that all call activity is captured in CRM. A recommended product is Objectronix’s Contact Sensor™ which is administered and configured through the Microsoft Dynamics CRM GUI. It simplifies and automates the process of call data capture for the end user.
Contact Sensor™ sits between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and your telephony switch. As a result:
No customer call will go unrecorded
All interactions are automatically assigned to a client/customer
There is no possibility for operators to evade call capture
Audio recordings can be played back from the corresponding note/client record inside CRM
Audio recordings are embedded with meta-data from your system
Accurate reports can be generated from CRM, regarding call activity
These reports can be joined with your own business objects to give more depth
A compelling feature of Contact Sensor™ is Intelligent Activity Matching, an heuristic process that ties new calls to either an existing activity or creates new activities:
Matching activities are stamped, validated and corrected to the accurate time
Undocumented groups of activities create workflow forcing agents into action
The system can be tuned to give agents variable response windows
Phone numbers are matched using fuzzy logic and tuneable pattern matching, helping to handle real world data issues
Numbers called are de-duplicated in real time inside CRM
Competitor Analysis
Tied to both Marketing and Sales Modules is the option to build competitor profiles (including SWOT analysis) and the ability to track and report on what type of business is lost to the competition. This information can be retained and re-used for planning and honing future business growth strategies.
Document and Product Repository
Shared across both sales and marketing modules there is also the facility to create your own reference library of product and company literature which are easily attached to any correspondence, whether from a sales perspective to "warm up" a prospect or from a marketing perspective to inform a lead of what is on offer.
