KOORB + Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Daniel Sykes of Koorb Consulting recently posted a blog on the Koorb website on Microsoft’s growing customer-oriented offering, especially around marketing and social media management, as follows.

“Team member, Jonathan has prepared this great overview in response the ongoing questions we get asking us, ‘What's the difference is between ClickDimensions and Dynamics Marketing?’ Dynamics CRM is now massively more powerful because of its connected, complimentary solutions: Dynamics Marketing and Microsoft Social Engagement. Dynamics Marketing provides a wide range of marketing management and automation, including digital marketing automation. Microsoft Social Engagement compliments this with a range of functionality around understanding and engaging with customers (and others) via social media.

“There are a number of popular digital marketing automation solutions existing for Dynamics CRM, including the well-regarded ClickDimensions solution. ClickDimensions was awarded the 2012 Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace Solution Excellence Partner of the Year Award - it's very easy to use, and sits seamlessly inside your CRM system, allowing you to design, execute and measure digital marketing campaigns right from your customer and prospect database. We're increasingly being asked, ‘What's the difference between ClickDimensions and Dynamics Marketing?’ (And, related to this, ‘What do these add to Dynamics CRM?’)

“Dynamics CRM includes basic marketing list and campaign functionality. You can segment your customers into lists, then create campaigns to market to them. To market to them, you can generate phone call activities for users to complete, letters to be sent, or send an email via Outlook / Exchange. You can also use standard CRM campaigns for simple event management. You cannot measure track and measure your email campaigns, or track your customers' activity on your website. ClickDimensions brings email broadcasts, tracking and measurement into Dynamics CRM. It also allows you to measure your customers' activity on your website, capture leads and manage email subscriptions via web forms, and design automated nurture programs of digital marketing interactions with customers. ClickDimensions also allows you to build multi-page, branching surveys to gather data from your customers.

“Dynamics Marketing is Microsoft's own digital marketing solution, which integrates with Dynamics CRM to utilise your customer data and marketing lists. It does essentially everything that ClickDimensions does, save for surveys. In addition to digital marketing automation, Dynamics Marketing also provides marketing resource management (MRM). Dynamics Marketing also enables you to manage all your marketing efforts from within a shared, single platform. Marketing Resource Management is designed to replace the multitude of Excel spreadsheets that marketers are often forced to use to manage their budgets, planning, execution and reporting - across marketing asset creation and approvals, usage, advertising planning and buying, brand management, programme management and so on. Because every marketer is using a shared system, planning, budgeting and reporting becomes easier over time. MRM systems have been used by marketing departments for years to provide an easier and more collaborative environment for users to work in.”

For more information on Koorb please visit their website at www.koorb.co.nz .