Constant Contact Integration for Microsoft Dynamics CRM
One of the out-of-the-box Microsoft Dynamics CRM modules is the marketing module, and one of the features inside the marketing module is the ability to create and manage marketing campaigns. In today's internet era, one of the most common types of marketing campaigns is conducted via e-mail marketing and is a must-have for most companies.
While Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides the functionality (via the marketing module and e-mail capabilities) to complete an e-mail marketing campaign, it is a very messy process and is missing some very common features that most companies expect, and need, when they talk about e-mail marketing.
While Microsoft Dynamics CRM and most other competitive CRM solutions all offer very basic e-mail marketing capabilities, there are other companies that only focus on e-mail marketing. Since that is all they do, they offer up a slew of features that you don't find with out-of-the-box CRM solutions. Most of these features are in high demand. This has led companies that are leveraging a CRM tool to select one of these third-party companies and run their e-mail marketing campaigns through the third-party solution. This has its downside because you are now working with two sets of data: one in your CRM database, and the other inside the e-mail marketing tool. Traditionally, companies will export a list from their CRM database and then import that list into their e-mail marketing tool. Every time they want to send out a marketing campaign via e-mail, they will go through this process. Additionally, the e-mail marketing solution offers up statistics (how many e-mails were opened, forwarded, etc.), unsubscribe features, campaign history, etc. that are important, and that customers would like to get back into their CRM database. Unfortunately, this very complicated. As you can already tell by now, this ends up being painful, costly, and complicated.
To help our customers, what we have done at hostedMScrm is researched the various e-mail marketing solutions available, selected the solution we thought was best, and integrated that solution with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We selected a product called Constant Contact based on some of the most common requests from our customers. Our integration allows you to use Constant Contact and Microsoft Dynamics CRM together, and keep them synchronized.
Features:
Here are some of the features our tool provides:
- Dynamic Marketing Lists.
- Select which Microsoft Dynamics CRM marketing lists should be synchronized with Constant Contact. This allows you to maintain legacy lists in Constant Contact without affecting your CRM data and vice versa.
- Create marketing lists inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM and have them be synchronized in Constant Contact.
- Update your marketing list in CRM, and synchronize it with Constant Contact.
- Add and remove members (contacts) via the marketing list, and have that be synchronized.
- Upon creation of a marketing list in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, our plug-in will automatically push the marketing list (and associated contacts/leads/accounts) into Constant Contact. If it already exists in Constant Contact, it will simply be updated, and if it does not exist, a new one will be created.
Essentially what we have done with our plug-in is make sure that Constant Contact stays synchronized with Microsoft Dynamics CRM contact and marketing list data.
Here are some of the features Constant Contact provides:
- Easily create the message that's right for you
- Customize it to make it look like your brand
- Build and grow your own e-mail list
- Get your e-mail in their inbox
- Track your results
- Get live help from real people
Technical:
Our Constant Contact Integration tool utilizes batch processes hosted on xRM.com servers. Because of this, your internal IT department will not need to do anything to configure the tool other than giving us access to a user account on your CRM organization. We will import the few customizations necessary for the tool to run on your Dynamics CRM organization. Those customizations add new elements to these existing entities as follows:
Lead entity
New ‘Constant Contact Identifier’ attribute (cc_constantcontactidentifier – nvarchar(100))
Contact entity
New ‘Constant Contact Identifier’ attribute (cc_constantcontactidentifier – nvarchar(100))
Marketing List entity
New ‘Constant Contact Identifier’ attribute (cc_constantcontactidentifier – nvarchar(100))
New ‘Active’ attribute (cc_active – bit)
New ‘Constant Contact’ ISV button with link pointing to xRM.com servers
The integration-connection information is hosted on xRM.com servers. The batch process connects to your CRM organization and to Constant Contact and tabulates the differences between lists. It then updates Constant Contact so that your Constant Contact lists match your CRM lists. (Legacy lists may be left undisturbed by the update process, if desired, by not setting them to be synchronized automatically when updates are performed.)
Pricing:
We make our tool available to our hosted customers for a one-time fee of $500 per organization. Our hosted customers that would like to take advantage of our plug-in will be required to create a new Constant Contact account upon use. Additionally, the cost of the Constant Contact service is borne by the customer. The following link will provide Constant Contact pricing:
Read about hosted Microsoft CRM and experiment with our running hosted Microsoft CRM demo.