Are you curious about Microsoft Marketing or other marketing automation products integrated with CRM? Confused about which automation tool would be the best fit for you and your organization? In anticipation of our partner ClickDimensions' November/December promo, we wrote a White Paper surrounding two of our marketing automation favorites: Microsoft Marketing Module and ClickDimensions.

1. CLICK DIMENSIONS OR MICROSOFT MARKETING
MODULE?WHAT TO DO,WHAT TO DO?
CLICKDIMENSIONS VS. MICROSOFT MARKETING MODULE
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2. AS A MARKETING PROFESSIONAL . . .
I know the importance of staying up-to-date on the latest trends, tools and strategies available to me. Truth told
it’s crucial to keep up on these topics. With constant updates to software and every time you turn around there’s
a new channel available to reach customers or your organization doubles in size, (which we always hope for),
every tool you use and approach you’ve learned can become outdated in two or three years. That is why it is
important to continually revise applications with useful updates, or reevaluate your approach.
A 2015 State of Inbound report, surveyed 4,000 marketing and sales professionals, asking what they felt were
their top marketing challenges. The survey revealed that one of the top five challenges marketers faced was
deciding on the right technology that met their needs. To me, the choice is easy. Our firm specializes in
information technology, specifically Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Available in the Dynamics CRM environment, are two modules that can transform your marketing department
into a vigorous campaign creating machine. Microsoft has their own Marketing Module, and ClickDimensions has
created an email marketing and marketing automation tool, that natively integrates into the CRM system and is
ONLY available to Dynamics CRM users.
If you make the great decision that a Microsoft product is right for you, the following compare and contrast
editorial should help you with your decision.
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3. MICROSOFT MARKETING MODULE
How they Differ
Microsoft Marketing Module
One of the three main components to Dynamics CRM, Microsoft’s Marketing Module allows you to maintain all of
your marketing activities within the same application shared by your sales and customer care departments. This
marketing area grants access to resources that will give campaigns an advantage. Microsoft’s Marketing Module is
also great at running the backend of the marketing business processes. The marketing module from Microsoft
would be a great resource for a marketing agency, where it is more of a challenge to manage multiple clients’
budgets, digital assets, event management, invoicing and media buying and planning.
Resource Management
Account & Contact: tracking internal/external communications and profiles of clients and vendors.
Workflow: create and assign tasks within your organization based on category: Programs, Events, Campaigns,
etc.
Event: outline every detail such as venue, facilities, session, speakers, etc. Invite and registration tracking, and the
ability to attach a marketing list directly into the event record.
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4. Digital Asset: internal and external access
to digital files either in development or
completed. The feature includes a
configurable review and approval process.
Media Buying and Planning: manage a
campaigns entire media buying and
planning process under one account roof.
Track your media vendors, outlets, markets
and segments, manage vendor rate cards,
build and track your media orders, and
execute your media plan.
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MICROSOFT MARKETING MODULE

5. Budgeting & Timesheets: use this tool to
process invoices, track expense and
internal/external billable hours per account.
You can also develop a Request for
Proposal method alerting you to bids
released by vendors.
Marketing Analytics: fairly straight
forward feature, tracks your return on
investment (ROI); however, with Microsoft
you can quickly judge performance with
analytical dashboards using Power BI.
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MICROSOFT MARKETING MODULE

6. CLICKDIMENSIONS
The ClickDimensions product has been
rated the highest marketing solution on
Microsoft's Dynamics Marketplace. With
ClickDimensions, organizations can learn
more about their prospects by seeing who
is interested in their products, quantify their
level of interest and then take the
appropriate actions. We use
ClickDimensions in our marketing
department, and it is a great tool for in-
house marketers who promote their
company through inbound marketing.
Web Forms: as easy to set up as an email template (which I will discuss later on), use the same drag and drop
feature to build forms you embed in your web page. Data submitted via the form is captured into the CRM
record or create new records from the data that is not already present in your CRM.
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7. Surveys: Surveys are a useful tool for getting your leads to interact and ClickDimensions form survey editor is
incredibly easy. Create a survey requesting feedback surrounding your services or an event you just hosted. Drag
and drop what information you want to obtain from your leads, clients, etc. pop your survey onto your website,
or send it out in a bulk email and voila! The information submitted is recorded and tied to the contact in your
CRM.
Event Management: ClickDimensions integrates with GoToWebinar, WebEx,
and Eventbrite capturing event registration and attendee information
automatically into Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
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CLICKDIMENSIONS

8. SMS Text Messaging: I get texts from my favorite stores letting me know of an
awesome sale that is going on. If you market with Text Messaging, use SMS to
send bulk text messages from your Dynamics CRM workflows. ClickDimensions
SMS Messaging will provide your clients with the option of opting out.
Campaign Tracking: ClickDimensions is embedded inside Dynamics CRM,
allowing you to effectively track your marketing efforts by creating links between
Microsoft Dynamics CRM campaign records and ClickDimensions emails, web
forms and landing pages. Making the connection is as easy as point-and-click and
allows you to track everything back to the CRM campaign.
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CLICKDIMENSIONS

9. HOWTHEY COMPARE
Email Marketing
Both products are going to offer you the same features: bulk emailing that tracks all sends, opens, clicks and
bounces in a marketing list, and also tracks individual recipient activity. You can set up these email sends to
deploy with triggers and timers, etc. The one thing that ClickDimensions will beat Microsoft over is the variety of
ways to set up an email template. You can use the Drag and Drop, or Block editor, referred to as the “wizard-
driven” way, or if you’re HTML savvy, take more control with the freestyle editor or the custom HTML coding.
Campaign Automation
ClickDimensions calls it Nurture Marketing, or putting
your prospects on “auto-pilot,” Microsoft calls it
Multichannel. Automate your campaign in a single
visual campaign designer. Set up triggers and timers,
drag and drop your email, social media, direct mail
and event content. Create an automational roadmap
that keeps campaign messaging in front of prospects.
At this point, one solution is not better than the other,
you’ll get the same features with either add-on.
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10. Landing Pages
I haven’t used either add-on to create landing pages, but both allow you to create and embed them within
Dynamics CRM. They both come with a drag and drop feature; you can decide what criteria you want to include,
what content is required and add CAPTCHA’s to make sure you’re not shelled with spam responses. Responses are
automatically tracked and captured into CRM.
Lead Scoring
Both products track lead behavior from all sources and these
interactions trigger a score based on a default value for a
particular market segment. When the lead reaches a “sales ready”,
score, they are transferred to the sales team where they can apply
their magic. The sales team can offer lead status feedback that the
marketing department can use to improve the next campaign
launch. Microsoft Marketing Module may have ClickDimensions
beat on this one. Aside from tracking activity from your website,
Microsoft can also track and score non-digital activity such as
event registrations. 10
HOWTHEY COMPARE

11. Sales Collaboration
Alternatively, web intelligence, as ClickDimensions refers to it, will help your sales and marketing departments
align. With a well-oiled sales and marketing collaboration machine, an organization can convert leads faster and
at a higher rate. In preparation for a call, the sales department can view all of the interaction with the client to
gain awesome insights. With marketing activity recorded in the account, the sales team will see these insights
and know which page the lead visited, forms they filled out and emails they interacted with.
Social
Whether you call it social marketing or social discovery, both products have a tool to amplify your content.
Microsoft teams up your multichannel campaign with social media posts all from the same platform. This
combination allows you to measure campaign impact and sentiment from all channels, including tracking
buzzwords that created impact in different geographical markets. ClickDimensions, on the other hand, uses social
discovery techniques that seek and finds publicly available information from social media sites such as LinkedIn,
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. These insights are retrieved and viewable in their ClickDimensions profiles
or embed these social accounts in the CRM record.
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HOWTHEY COMPARE

12. PRICING
Each add-ons pricing module is different. Each solution lacks key features that the other has, but it really depends
on what your needs are. If you need a system that has a little bit of everything, such as back-end backup,
Microsoft’s module will be a good fit for you. Microsoft Marketing is $125 per user, per month, but, you can use it
as a stand-alone product, or as a system integrated into Dynamics CRM.
ClickDimensions will be a good fit for a marketing department whose strategy is heavily dependent on inbound
marketing. Pricing is built by how many emails are sent per year. Based on how many emails you anticipate
sending, you will find your monthly pricing block and each level comes with unlimited users.
Awesome addition: ClickDimensions will be adding new features to their nurture campaign builder in
November. They have only released a sneak peak, so if you would like to know more, contact us, and we can walk
you through it. Trovare Business Solutions team members are certified partners with ClickDimensions and offer
the service as part of our solutions. In anticipation of the release, from November 15 – December 31, 2015,
ClickDimensions is offering a Promotion of 15. 15% discount for annual prepayment, or, 15% more emails when
you sign up.
Talk with us today and see how we can get you set up with a better marketing automation solution.
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