Marketing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM - ClickDimensions Blog

ClickDimensions CEO John Gravely to speak at two Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference Sessions

ClickDimensions CEO John Gravely (@johngravely) will speak at two Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference sessions. Both sessions are on Monday, July 11.

The first session titled 'Lessons from Startup ISVs' (ISV06) will take place on Monday at 3 -4 pm local time and will feature the founders of ClickDimensions, StorSimple and Exceedra who will each talk about their experiences starting a cloud based business. See details and description below:

The second session titled 'Selling What's Next – Hot enterprise Applications from Cool Companies' will feature "Microsoft's best 10 emerging, disruptive and enterprise ready" ISVs. All are members of Microsoft's invitation-only BizSpark One program.

Please come out and hear John at one of these events or visit us in booth 1207. See you in LA!

How to make fields searchable in Microsoft CRM

Have you ever tried to search on a field in CRM only to find no records? But, at the same time, you know what you are searching for exists? The reason you can't find what you are looking for is that not all fields in CRM are searchable by default. To make a field searchable you need to add it as a 'find column' to the entity's Quick Find View.

Here's a great example. In a trial version of Microsoft CRM online where no customization has occurred I can see that the Lead pictured below has the email address someonel1@example.com

However, when I enter that value into the Lead search box and press enter I get the message that nothing is found. Why?

The reason that nothing is found is that the E-mail field is not searchable. To make it searchable go to the Customize Entity option on the navigation ribbon

This will launch the customization screen where you can then choose the 'Views' option under the Lead entity

Open the view whose type is 'Quick Find View' and select the 'Add Find Columns' option

Then simply put a check mark next to the E-mail field so you can now search on it.

And you will need to publish your customization for it to take effect. Happy searching!

Want to make a great landing page? Take the Craigslist test

I hear the word landing page used by a lot of people in a lot of ways. Some people use it to mean any web form where a visitor can enter information, others use it to mean any page where you direct (i.e. land) people when they click on something and still others think of what I would call a landing page; a page specifically designed to convert a visitor by causing them to take some action. Landing pages are pages that you send people to so that they will be able to get more information on a specific topic and then convert in one fashion or another. Specifically, a landing page in the purest sense consists of three things:

1. Content on a specific topic designed to drive a conversion event
2. A singular action a visitor can take to convert (e.g. download, registration, form submission, purchase, etc.)
3. No unnecessary navigation which would make it easy to distract or pull the visitor off topic

Thinking about it this way, when you implement pay-per-click advertising you can land people on any page on your web site but having a specific landing page will drive higher conversions. For example, if you have a Google or Bing ad on birdfeeders and you land people on your hardware store home page when they click the ad they theoretically could look around and find the path to the birdfeeders section. However, it is more likely that they will lose patience and leave.

Now, no doubt, it is a lot of work to create a specific landing page for every ad or event you do. However, it can make a difference in conversions. If you don't believe this think about Craigslist ads. Specifically, think about the times when you searched for an item and clicked on a relevant listing only to find that the marketing genius (strong sarcasm) who did the posting didn't take two extra minutes to upload pictures. Will you call them, get directions and drive over to see the item? No way. So you see, every ad on Craigslist is a landing page in the purest sense because every ad has content on only one item (hopefully including good photos), a single call to action (call or email and buy) and no extra distracting navigation.

Let's look at an example. Below is an ad for an Airstream camper. There is no detail and no pictures. In fact, the seller even makes it a point to tell you he hasn't checked everything out.

In contrast, below is an ad where the seller provides lots of details (I cut most of the text out to save room), includes pictures and even gives a link to more pictures since Craigslist limits the number of pictures you can upload. If you think about ads like this when you create your landing pages it will help you to put yourself into your buyer's shoes and provide the right content, a clear next step and no unnecessary distractions.

Oh, and, in case you are an Airstream fan and want to see the linked photos, click here https://picasaweb.google.com/100050191037213075216/RV6?authkey=Gv1sRgCJ-tq7edtYLeOg. This seller did a really good job by even including photos of dents and imperfections. What a great way to let people know that they are getting the whole truth about what they'd be buying.

Happy marketing!

ClickDimensions Survey Feature

On July 11 the ClickDimensions Summer release will be available and will include our new survey feature along with our drag and drop form builder and subscription list capability. All new features will be available in Microsoft CRM versions 4.0 and 2011. To give you an idea of how the survey capability works (we are already using it internally) below I have created a survey to gather feedback from ClickDimensions customers.

The types of questions we currently support are:

• Rating scale
• Radio (only one answer)
• Multi-Select checkbox (more than one answer)
• Text box (comments)
• List (choose one)

Below is a question creation form for a multi-select question. The respondent may choose one or more of the available options:

Below is the survey creation screen where the survey is named and an email template is chosen to be sent automatically once the survey is submitted:

The survey designer allows the marketer to create a header and footer and arrange the questions using simple drag and drop. Questions can be required:

It is easy to configure your header and footer:

Confirmation text may be added. This will be displayed to the respondent when they submit their responses:

The survey is presented in a clean formatting. It may be emailed via ClickDimensions email so the responses will be linked to the CRM Leads and Contacts that completed it.

It may also be posted in a web page or provided as a link to a free-standing page so anonymous visitors can complete it.

And, because we link the survey responses to the Survey, Respondent (i.e. Lead, Contact or Anonymous visitor) and Question it is easy to create a CRM workflow to take action whenever someone submits a certain reply to a survey. For example, in our survey example here we could send internal notifications anytime someone gave us a rating of less than 7 on a survey.

You will also notice below that our surveys can be linked to Case records in CRM so people can be surveyed upon case completion.

We are very excited about our July 11 release and hope you are too. Anyone attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference July 10 – 14 in Los Angeles should visit us in booth 1207 to have us show you the new release. Happy Marketing!

 

 

 

ClickDimensions Survey Feature

Post updated.  Please go to http://blog.clickdimensions.com/2011/06/clickdimensions-survey-feature-1.html

Join ClickDimensions at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July

Visit ClickDimensions in booth 1207 at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles California July 10 – 14. At the event we will be awarded as a finalist for the CRM 2011 Solution of the Year Award. Members of our staff are registered in WPC Connect so please reach out to us to schedule a meeting. We look forward to seeing you there.

We will be showing our new form builder and survey features at our booth so please come see it. Our new release will go live on July 11 with drag and drop form builder, surveys, subscriptions lists and many other enhancements.

Recorded webinar: True Stories of Marketing with Microsoft CRM

After presenting this webinar 8 times to hundreds of people worldwide we have captured a recording that we are publishing here. Below is the overview of what the webinar covers and you may click here or the screen below to view the recording.

Webinar Overview

Since he authored the first book on Microsoft CRM in 2003 John Gravely, founder of ClickDimensions, has been using Microsoft CRM to manage sales and marketing teams. Having used every version of Microsoft CRM and a variety of add-on marketing solutions over the years, John has discovered and refined successful tactics for a variety of sales and marketing situations.

This recorded video includes examples of real world campaigns where Microsoft CRM was used to:

• Double a newsletter list using a unique approach toward email marketing and lead scoring
• Develop an easy way to improve web traffic by understanding the quality of visitors by traffic sources
• Implement a strategy for creating great content that positions your firm as a leader
• Apply simple tips for search engine marketing and search engine optimization
• Provide sales with easy to use automated prospecting and marketing tools to make them more effective and efficient

Click the screen above to launch the recording

ClickDimensions named a finalist out of over 3,000 entrants – CRM 2011 Solution of the Year!

ClickDimensions is proud to have been named a finalist for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Solution Partner of the Year Award for 2011. You may read the official press release here; ClickDimensions press release, Microsoft Press Release.

We are extremely honored to receive this distinction and would like to extend special congratulations to our friends at CWR Mobility for also being a finalist. The Top honor went to proMX GmbH of Germany. Congratulations; we'll see you all at the awards dinner in LA!

Link your landing page to a CRM campaign and analyze what is driving traffic to your campaign

If you are promoting an event, product launch or other initiative it is helpful to create a landing page that contains content specific to that event to drive your visitors to a singular call to action like registering for the event, downloading collateral or watching a video. If you can link that landing page to a campaign in CRM using ClickDimensions then you can see in one place all visits to the landing page. Since a big part of any campaign involves driving traffic to the landing page this technique will allow you to understand which traffic sources bring the most traffic. Let's look at an example:

For our True Stories webinar campaign we created a landing page which gave an overview of the event and invited people to register…

Using ClickDimensions we linked the landing page to a campaign record we created in CRM (we do this by placing the campaign code in inside the landing page)…

Note that the campaign code in the landing page body matches the campaign code from CRM…

With this in place all visits to the landing page become linked to the CRM campaign record and we can easily group them together in CRM using an Advanced Find view…

Using CRM's inline charts we can look at a pie chart of how the traffic was referred to the landing page…

Drilling into the 'unknown' segment we can see which referring sites brought the most traffic…

This makes it clear to us that certain blogs drive more visitors than others. With that in mind we will know who to focus on for help promoting our events in the future. Clearly three bloggers exert much more influence than the rest. The results were unexpected to us but very helpful.

We can also see which social channels brought the most traffic…

This one is no surprise to us as we have a business oriented audience. However, it is helpful to see that many people do view our content via our Facebook page.

Conclusion

It pays to measure everything you can as long as the cost of measuring doesn't outweigh the value. This is where we come in. We make it easy to measure and track so you can really understand how your ideas and efforts translate into results. Happy marketing!

Google simplifies the process of deleting Flash cookies

In our recent blog post titled "Tips for ruining your brand: trick your customers and prospects with deceptive web tracking techniques" we explained how some web sites can use the storage area in Adobe's Flash player to deceptively track you even after you have cleared your browser cookies. In that same post we applauded Google for making it easy for users of their Chrome browser to detect and delete flash cookies in the same settings where users delete normal browser cookies. The post showed the screen shot below which is the Google Chrome screen for clearing browser data. On the screen you can see that Google added a link to the Adobe Flash player storage settings so that Chrome users could easily access them and clear data stored in Flash. This was a great step forward in helping users control their web experience. However, it still required users to be aware of Flash cookies and their use or misuse.

Now Google has taken consumer protection a step further by working with Adobe and others in the web community to make it possible to delete Flash cookies directly from within the browser itself. The 'clear browsing data' screen no longer has a link to the Adobe Flash Player storage area because, as you can see below, when you choose to delete cookies it automatically deletes all Flash cookies (i.e. plug-in data) along with all browser cookies.

For a more technical explanation of this topic visit the Google Chromium blog post titled Providing transparency and controls for Adobe Flash Player's local storage

Want to see what Flash cookies are in your browser? Click here http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html to launch the Adobe Flash Player storage area.