Microsoft CRM Exposed -
Marketing Management

Microsoft CRM Marketing Management

Best of class CRM systems offer marketing management as one of the clear areas where a CRM initiative can deliver measureable ROI. By analyzing the detailed data tracked on customers in the CRM system, marketing professionals are able to better refine product offerings, develop more focused campaigns, and conduct marketing programs across a wide range of media and channels. The payoff for leveraging the rich data is the ability to better position specific products to specific customers which should lead to increased revenue.

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True with most full suite CRM solutions, Microsoft CRM 4.0 also lacks the sophistication of best of breed marketing solutions, but offers the benefits of an integrated solution with limited but useful marketing functionality.
MS CRM allows you to create and manage Campaigns, define multiple Marketing Lists that can be used to apply Activities or Distributions that might include Email, Phone, Fax or Hard Copy. Microsoft CRM also allows you to setup third-party vendors and assign Activities to them. This is a nice feature since many organizations use third-party print, bulk mail or email providers as participants in the campaign delivery. MS CRM 4.0 also allows you to assign a cost per contact for each Activity. This is a nice feature for tracking costs. Each Account and/or Contact targeted for the Distribution will have an Activity automatically created for them in the application that may require disposition by a sales or telemarketing person (Appointment and Phone Call are two that are logical for this).

Campaign Responses can be captured automatically through email link tracking or can be entered manually as well. These responses are recorded and available as part of the Campaign metrics.

A few Marketing Management features of Microsoft CRM 4.0 that stand out are Quick Campaigns and the Marketing Lists. Quick Campaigns are somewhere between a simple mail merge and a full blown multi-channel Campaign. They allow a user to leverage one or more Marketing Lists and generate a specific type of Marketing Activity or Distribution. This is a convenient feature that also has the ability to assign user access to help guard against an unauthorized mail merge to 10,000 prospects.

Another useful feature is the ability to create, save and manage multiple Marketing Lists. This function allows you to put Accounts and Contacts into specific groups that dynamically grow as new Accounts or Contacts meet the criteria. These lists can be published for use by other users in the organization and can be used singularly or combined for use in mail merges, Campaigns and Quick Campaigns. Naturally you can add or delete individual contacts from these lists and well as search through them. Duplicates are automatically eliminated when combining lists in order to avoid sending more than one email or calling a contact more than once for a given campaign. This is a fundamental function that all CRM systems should have as a core feature.

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Despite all of its nice features, the Marketing Management module of Microsoft CRM is by far the lightest. For example, while you can track Campaign Responses and designate Campaigns as a lead source within Accounts and/or Opportunities, there is limited out-of-the-box reporting of campaign effectiveness. There is also no reporting that compares budgets to actual for anything other than basic costs, revenues and Account and Contact reach percentages. MS CRM does not support Pay Per Click (PPC) and web landing page based Campaigns that incrementally add Accounts and Contacts into the system. Nor does it track the effectiveness of search engine organic or ad-word based PPC Campaigns. There are a number of on premise and SaaS CRM solutions that offer marketing management features, including Salesforce.com and Aplicor.s

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