Marketing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM - ClickDimensions Blog

ClickDimensions invited to join Microsoft BizSpark Plus program

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Marketing Automation vendor recognized by Microsoft for its work on a groundbreaking new Windows Azure platform to be launched in July

ATLANTA – May 30, 2012 – ClickDimensions, developer of the most reviewed and 5-star rated email marketing and marketing automation solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM (as reviewed by users on Microsoft's Dynamics Marketplace) announced today that it has been invited to enter the Microsoft BizSpark Plus program launched in January of this year.

The BizSpark Plus Program is an extension of the BizSpark Program, designed to provide high potential startups with additional offers, products and services from Microsoft, available through select incubators and accelerators and by invitation only.

In December of 2010 ClickDimensions was recognized by Microsoft to become one of less than 100 companies worldwide to be invited to join the prestigious BizSpark One program. Now ClickDimensions is expanding its Azure technology footprint with an additional Azure platform that will be launched at this year's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

"ClickDimensions is the only marketing automation vendor focused exclusively on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform and with no integrations to other CRM systems like Salesforce.com" stated ClickDimensions CTO Koren Tako. "Our commitment to continue to expand our use of Microsoft technologies will be evident when we launch our second Azure platform at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner conference in July. No vendor in our space has the complete Microsoft story that we do and we're honored that Microsoft is choosing to reward our choices."

"ClickDimensions is a perfect example of the collaboration offered to promising startup companies" says Shmulik Goldstein, Platform Strategy Advisor of the Microsoft MEA Azure Team, "Leveraging Microsoft's cloud services with Microsoft BizSpark Plus programs and benefits enables organizations like ClickDimensions to more rapidly fulfill their vision".

About ClickDimensions

ClickDimension's Marketing Automation for Microsoft Dynamics CRM empowers marketers to generate and qualify high quality leads while providing sales the ability to prioritize the best leads and opportunities. Providing Email Marketing, Web Tracking, Lead Scoring, Social Discovery, Campaign Tracking and Forms and Surveys ClickDimensions allows organizations to discover who is interested in their products, quantify their level of interest and take the appropriate actions. For more information about ClickDimensions visit http://www.clickdimensions.com, read our blog at http://blog.clickdimensions.com, follow us on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/clickdimensions or email press@clickdimensions.com

Blocking free email addresses on ClickDimensions web forms

Because the ClickDimensions form designer allows the use of custom regular expressions it is possible to block specific email domains form being entered in the email address field on a web form. By placing the script below in the regex box for a web form the domains gmail, yahoo, Hotmail and Live will be blocked on the form.

/[A-Z0-9a-z._%+-]+@(?!.*gmail.*)(?!.*GMAIL.*)(?!.*yahoo.*)(?!.*YAHOO.*)(?!.*hotmail.*)(?!.*HOTMAIL.*)(?!.*live.*)(?!.*LIVE.*)[a-z]*[A-Z0-9a-z.-]+\.[A-Za-z]{2,4}]*/

Start by opening the form designer for the form you want to modify. Select the email field and double click to see its properties or click the field properties button…

Select the formatting tab and paste the regular expressions script into the regex field. Also, change the error message to something descriptive. We went with "Please enter a valid address from a corporate (i.e. non-free) domain"…

Save the form. Now when people try to enter a gmail, yahoo, Hotmail or live email address they will see the following error. Note that our script also validates that any email address has the proper format…

The Newest ClickDimensions Certified Professionals

ClickDimensions is proud to introduce the newest ClickDimensions Certified Professionals! These folks have been friends and partners of ClickDimensions for some time, and we’re jazzed about them joining this select group!

Lon Orenstein

If you were to look in the dictionary for “CRM”, you should see Lon Orenstein’s picture. Lon has been helping companies manage their sales, service, and marketing software for over two decades. His company, Living Business Online, is a Microsoft CRM Partner, an Office365 Partner, a Microsoft ISV, and a ClickDimensions Partner. “We specialize in moving small businesses’ computer systems into the cloud. We’ve been through huge changes in our 30+ years in the computer industry but this move to the cloud is the most exciting!” says Lon. “ClickDimensions has nailed the marketing functions needed by a modern business and we’re proud to implement their software for our clients.”

 

Kris Nyreen

As Director of Marketing at Avtex, Kris manages content and brand marketing across webinars, events, conferences, and online and offline marketing communications. His background in consulting allows him to creatively solve problems and create marketing and business development opportunities. Kris’ hands-on experience and strategic direction of successful marketing, social media, advertising, and business development campaigns has helped develop Avtex into a successful results-driven organization.

“The integration of ClickDimensions will allow us to completely automate many of our marketing processes and bring even more value to our customers.”

Using ClickDimensions surveys and CRM workflow for real time exception notification

At ClickDimensions we use our own survey tool to gather feedback from our customers regarding their satisfaction with our onboarding, support and training execution. In fact, we have recently written two blog posts on the subject. They are linked below:

• Creative application of a multi-page ClickDimensions survey
• Measure customer satisfaction with surveys and a survey KPI dashboard

To closely monitor the results of these surveys we complimented them with a Microsoft CRM workflow which notifies us whenever we receive ratings of 6 or lower or 10. This way we will immediately know when someone is not happy or very happy. Here's how it works…

We start by creating a workflow that will fire every time a survey answer record is created…

Our workflow can check for survey answers where the rating field (a whole number field) is less than or equal to 6 (not good) or equal to 10 (good!)…

When one of these conditions is encountered, the workflow sends an email with data from the survey answer in the email…

Now when a survey rating question receives a rating of 6 or below we get the following email instantly…

Or, more commonly here J, when we get a rating of 10 we see the following email…

Happy marketing!

Building dashboards to simplify the process of capturing metrics

At ClickDimensions we monitor a number of metrics that we like to record over time. During our weekly sales forecast call we look at the number of customers we added, partners we signed, demonstrations we did and more. With CRM 2011 it is easy to build dashboards that calculate these metrics. Once you've built these dashboards you can simply run them every time you want to capture the metrics. The metrics we capture on a weekly basis are:

• Current month's weighted revenue (overall and by sales person)
• Total weighted and overall pipeline by sales person
• Total weighted and overall pipeline by month
• Number of demos each sales person has done in the current month ('demo' is a custom activity for each product demonstration we do)
• Number of current customers, partners and prospective partners
• Breakdown of partners by sales person

We capture this data in a spreadsheet so we can see how it changes each week. Below is a section of the spreadsheet where we log this data every week…

To easily find the numbers we built a couple of dashboards that pull it together. Below is a chart in our dashboard which quickly sums the number of partners by sales person. For each metric we track we can easily pull it from a different chart in a dashboard…

Because you can easily create a chart of anything you can count, sum or average in Microsoft CRM, you can combine these charts into dashboards and then record the metrics on a predetermined frequency so that you will be able to look back and see how metrics like your customer count or overall pipeline grew over time. By making it very easy to pull your metrics each week you reduce the barrier to collecting this data and you can begin to see meaningful trends.

ClickDimensions invited to join Microsoft BizSpark Plus program

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Marketing Automation vendor recognized by Microsoft for its work on a groundbreaking new Windows Azure platform to be launched at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July

ATLANTA – May 18, 2012 – ClickDimensions, developer of the most reviewed and 5-star rated email marketing and marketing automation solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM (as reviewed by users on Microsoft's Dynamics Marketplace) announced today that it has been invited to enter the Microsoft BizSpark Plus program launched in January of this year.

The BizSpark Plus Program is an extension of the BizSpark Program, designed to provide high potential startups with additional offers, products and services from Microsoft, available through select incubators and accelerators and by invitation only. Because ClickDimensions' development organization is based in Tel Aviv Israel the company is working directly with the Microsoft Israel Research and Development Center, home of the first startup accelerator in Microsoft's history.

In December of 2010 ClickDimensions was recognized by Microsoft to become one of less than 100 companies worldwide to be invited to join the prestigious BizSpark One program. Now ClickDimensions is expanding its Azure technology footprint with an additional Azure platform that will be launched at this year's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

"ClickDimensions is the only marketing automation vendor focused exclusively on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform and with no integrations to other CRM systems like Salesforce.com" stated ClickDimensions CTO Koren Tako. "Our commitment to continue to expand our use of Microsoft technologies will be evident when we launch our second Azure platform at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner conference in July. No vendor in our space has the complete Microsoft story that we do and we're honored that Microsoft is choosing to reward our choices."

Creative application of a multi-page ClickDimensions survey

The customer team at ClickDimensions has a very tight process in place for bringing on new customers, training them and monitoring their satisfaction. Part of this process is a multi-page survey that is sent out after a new customer's training is complete. The survey takes advantage of our survey designer's ability to have custom formatting. Let's take a look…

The goal of the survey is to have a page for each phase of the onboarding process. The onboarding phases are Welcome, Install, Train and Succeed as depicted in the flow graphic below…

The survey uses different versions of this graphic on each page. For example, page 1 looks like this…

And page 2 looks like this and so on. Note how the graphic changes on each page to depict the onboarding phase related to that page…

This is implemented using the HTML and page break components in the ClickDimensions survey designer…

Page break components cause the survey to be divided into multiple pages while the HTML components can be used to simply upload and insert an image as shown below…

On each page there is an HTML component with a different version of the onboarding graphic. By the final page the survey respondent sees this…

Cool, eh? Happy marketing!

The ClickDimensions survey report

If you are a regular user of the ClickDimensions survey feature you may have noticed that we recently added a new survey report. When you open any Posted Survey record in Microsoft CRM you will see the survey report button on the Posted Survey record's ribbon menu…

Clicking the button runs the new survey report which gives you a bar graph of each questions responses as well as the response percentages and response counts…

Of course, since we store all our survey response data in your Microsoft CRM you can also use CRM's advanced find, charts and dashboards to report on the data as we did in this example blog post.

New features in the ClickDimensions block editor

We have just added several new features to our block editor. If you are not familiar with the block editor you may read more about it at http://blog.clickdimensions.com/2012/02/the-clickdimensions-block-editor-is-now-available-to-all-customers.html.

The new features are:

• New layouts for extended columns
• New block for view as an HTML page (top of the email)
• New block for unsubscribe link (bottom of the email)

Let's first look at the new layouts. When you click the layout button on the block editor screen you will notice two new layouts…

Using either of the new layouts you are able to create a single column to span the email body…

To the right or left of this column you can add as many individual blocks as you want to have even more layout flexibility.

Moving on to the view as a web page and unsubscribe block features, when you click the page menu option on the block editor you will see two new options; add microsite block and add unsubscribe block…

Clicking the 'add microsite block' option will add a new 'view as a web page' block at the top of the email…

Clicking the 'add unsubscribe block' option will add a new unsubscribe block at the bottom of the email…

Introducing the ClickDimensions custom HTML editor

For those of you that are more advanced with HTML and email design we have created a new custom HTML editor that allows you to place your own HTML into your email templates. This is useful for those of you that use an outside program like Dreamweaver or notepad to build your own HTML. This new editor will not modify the HTML you have created in any way.

Let's take a look. From the ClickDimensions email template entity you will see the new value 'simple' in the Editor Type field…

When you select this value and save the template you will see our new custom HTML editor appear…

You may open this editor in full screen mode using the full screen button on the email template record's ribbon menu. From here you can past in any HTML you have created and you can rest assured that it will not be altered in any way…

The buttons on the editor will allow you to insert the HTML for images, the 'view as a web page' link, and the unsubscribe link. You are also able to test how your email will appear in different email clients using the inbox preview feature. You may also use the preview tab to quickly see how your HTML will render…

Note that this new custom HTML editor is designed for more advanced email designers. The rest of us will be better off using the drop dead simple block editor or our traditional freestyle editor.