When it comes to Marketing Automation, there are a lot of great solutions out on the market to consider. Customer Effective has worked closely with Silverpop. Silverpop is a digital marketing technology provider that offers two marketing automation solutions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers, CoreMotives (thru acquisition) and Engage. CoreMotives is embedded within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, leveraging the familiar user interface, workflow, and database.
Engage is an enterprise class marketing automation platform and provides an integrated connector to the Dynamics CRM platform. Depending upon your marketing automation requirements, Customer Effective can determine which solution is right for you and your organization.
During the discovery process with clients, many questions get asked and below are some of those introductory product/solution questions and answers.
Q: What is Marketing Automation?
A: Marketing Automation refers to software platforms designed for marketing departments and organizations to automate repetitive tasks. Marketing departments, consultants and part-time marketing employees benefit by specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes which are then interpreted, stored and executed by software, which increases efficiency and reduces human error. Originally focused on email marketing automation, marketing automation refers to a broad range of automation and analytic tools for marketing.
Q: Can you explain all of the different “Mailings” terminology in CoreMotives?
A: Mailing Subscriptions—used with subscription centers to allow customers to subscribe and unsubscribe to various emails. You can think of your subscription as a filter on who will receive your email:
- Opt-In: People must join the subscription before they will receive your emails
- Opt-Out: Everyone will receive your email, unless they have opted out
- Double Opt-In: At signup, a confirmation email will be triggered that must be accepted
Mailing Templates—creates an outline of your mailings. Mailing Templates provide an easy way to create one outline to re-use with new content. This is a very common use for a Newsletter or similar Mailing that will be sent every week/month/etc.
Mailing Definitions—used for one off sends. Mailing Definitions provide an easy way to send repetitive emails, or to store commonly sent items like a price list, or product information. These are especially powerful when used with our Single Tracked Emails, Triggered Emails or Quick Mailings. Mailing Definitions can also be used as Auto Responders for Web Forms.
Mailings—used for creating mass mailings
Q: Is there a standard logo size recommended in an email send?
A: No, graphics can vary in size. You can edit them on the fly in the CoreMotives Library. For example a large sized logo can be resized within the mailing itself.
Q: Is it easy to reuse a template from a previous mailing so I don’t have to create it from scratch?
A: Yes! Templates in CoreMotives can be “cloned” to create efficiencies so they don’t have to be built from the ground up each time.
Q: How do I know what Mailing Definitions already exist?
A: You can create an Advanced Find or CRM Report to review all of the mailing definitions. You can also view all sends under closed activities within the contact record. This includes as any interactions (open, closed, click-thru) as well as it was a bulk or one-off email.
Q: How do I know how many times I’ve reached out to a particular Contact?
A: CRM has the ability to create a counter for the contact so you don’t reach out to a contact too many times per month. For example: If we have contacted them more than 3x this month, set a flag to remove them from the Marketing List. Important to note that is impossible to account for all scenarios so this is limited.
Q: How frequently does CoreMotives release new features?
A: They operate on a Quarterly Release cycle. This next release, scheduled for December 2013 includes A/B Testing. This includes sending completely different mailings to test including HTML, Subject Lines, etc. This could possibly be used in the future for staggering emails.
Please contact Customer Effective to learn more about how you can further increase the value of your Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution with Silverpop’s Marketing Automation Products.
by Customer Effective
