Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation in Microsoft DynamicsTM CRM enables you to extend the effectiveness of a key group of employees — your marketing department.
Marketing staff members now have tools to help them identify, execute, and replicate effective marketing initiatives across sales channels. Staff can assign, schedule, and track marketing campaign activities and measure campaign performance. With Marketing Automation in place, you can integrate your sales, marketing, and service processes more effectively and present one professional company image to your customers.
Marketing Automation in Microsoft CRM addresses five common marketing scenarios:
- Target the best customers: Your sales representatives need a way to easily target their best customers with promotions, call-downs, and email communications.
- Run quick sales campaigns: Sales representatives can use this tool to help them quickly and easily connect with business prospects and customers — perhaps to improve business quickly to make quarter-close numbers. Your representative wants to quickly create a list, send a mailing, and track responses to keep connections up to date.
- Launch a corporate marketing campaign: With responsibility for several well-organised marketing campaigns each year in support of new product launches, your marketing staff might want to automate task planning, list creation, task assignment, cost tracking, and the many other tasks involved in complex campaigns. Now they can.
- Enable cross-department handoffs for sales-driven campaigns: Sometimes your marketing staff plans a campaign that your branch office or sales team executes. These efforts require cross-department collaboration, execution, and tracking.
- Send bulk email messages: Every company wants an easy way to gather a list of leads or customers, send a mass emailing, and track responses.
Microsoft CRM provides the following capabilities to meet marketing business needs:
- List creation: Microsoft CRM enables you to create and manage lists of accounts, contacts, and leads. You can create lists using the Advanced Find feature, a built-in search capability, or import lists from other sources.
- Quick campaign: Once a sales representative creates a list, he or she can create a Quick Campaign. This feature creates phone call, email, and appointment activities for later execution, sends bulk mail-merged emailings, and creates mail-merged letters and faxes. Microsoft CRM automatically tracks responses and makes it easy for representatives to see what actions are finished versus outstanding.
- Campaign management: Microsoft CRM makes it easy to run sophisticated marketing campaigns involving many people, deliverables, and deadlines. The Help and Assistance Pane walks your marketing manager through the steps of planning and executing a campaign, including planning tasks, marketing lists, focus products, follow-up activities, supporting literature, and cost and revenue goals. The marketing manager can assign tasks to different staff members import leads, convert leads to opportunities, view costs and results, and more.
- Campaign response: Track campaign results with built-in reporting and analysis tools based on Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. Link responses to campaigns (ad versus seminar), automatically assign appropriate follow-up (salesperson calls), analyse costs versus payoff, and create customised campaign tracking reports.
- Microsoft CRM makes it easy for your marketing staff to take advantage of the customer data you already have. It's easier to join efforts with sales and easier to judge the success of marketing efforts. Overall, Microsoft CRM works well for marketing because it works the way you already work.
For a Microsoft Dynamics CRM demonstration, please call us on 0845 850 1550, or email us sales@pythagoras.co.uk.