Email Tracking for Microsoft CRM
November 14, 2008 by JFerguson · Leave a Comment
In the new era of electronic marketing, tracking email statistics, specifically when an email was opened, has become a marketing imperative.
So using Microsoft CRM, how can you track email opens?
The PowerObjects CRM Blog has an excellent suggestion:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM does not track if a person opens an e-mail or if they clicked on a link. One way to handle this is to pay an e-mail tracking company to send the e-mails for you. This can be expensive and take time to plan and send out an e-mail campaign.
Sounds like a business problem, lets find a solution.
Whenever we solve problems we solve 80% up front then enhance the solution as needed. In my case I wanted to simply know who is opening our e-mails. We send out 5000 e-mail every month, who should my sales people be calling first, the people that have opened the e-mail of course.
A simple way to track who has opened an email is to use an HTML e-mail that pulls an image with a tracking token. Sounds easy. Lets look at what has to be done.
You can read more on their site and feel free to contact us for assistance, if you’d like to implement this solution!
Microsoft CRM 5.0 - What’s planned?
November 12, 2008 by JFerguson · Leave a Comment
CRM 4.0 has only been with us for less than a year, but already Microsoft Dynamics CRM 5.0 is being discussed, and the new features being discussed and worked on by the Microsoft CRM development team.
Of course, this is very early in the development cycle, and not all will be released … but at least gives us a nice taste for what is planned!
Microsoft Dynamics CRM UK Blog has a lot of information, which is summarised below:
Ribbon Navigation
Taken from Office 2007 (love it or hate it!) the implementation of the ribbon navigation system is slated for CRM 5.0 to make it easier for users to pick up and find key areas - and this will be completely customisable.
Data Filtering
Navigate to the “DataView”, click the “Filter” command, and perform in-line filtering.
Team Ownership -
Team Owned entities are added in CRM5, which allows for major security benefit
Native SharePoint Integration -
Full, out-of-the-box integration with Windows SharePoint Services for document management
In-line Visualizations -
CRM5 allows you to visualize numeric data using in-line charts. This is not SQL Server Reporting Services currently.
There are many more administration and development features available to read at Microsoft Dynamics CRM UK Blog.
We’ll keep you up-to-date as more information appears publicly available!
The Top 5 Tips for CRM Strategy
November 6, 2008 by JFerguson · Leave a Comment
An excellent article on techtarget.com around CRM Strategy:
Researchers such as Gartner Group and Meta Group have chronicled failure rates of 55-70% for CRM implementations in general, and point to a lack of clear strategy as a key contributor to this dismal industry track record. So, it would seem only rational to turn to these same industry watchers for their answers to the obvious questions that arise out of this: which CRM strategies work, and why?
Click here to read the article in full.
Microsoft CRM Accelerators - Release …
November 5, 2008 by JFerguson · Leave a Comment
Microsoft have released to market two of their CRM Accelerators, for Microsoft CRM 4.0 and these are:
- Extended Sales Forecaster: enriches the out-of-the-box sales forecasting capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.
- CRM Notifications Accelerator: allows users to subscribe to the CRM “business events” that are significant to them, e.g. a salesperson is interested in new leads and opportunities assigned to them whereas a customer service representative is interested in new service cases assigned to them, via RSS.
These accelerators can be downloaded now by existing Microsoft CRM 4.0 Customers - for more details of their location, and how to deploy this to your system, send me an email!
How to Categorise Email in Microsoft CRM
November 3, 2008 by JFerguson · 1 Comment
Joel Lindstrom a Microsoft CRM MVP has written a great article about managing your flood of emails with Outlook and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
To quote:
You are a busy professional who sends and receives a large quantity of e-mail messages. Fortunately, you have Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so you track these messages from Microsoft Office Outlook and associate them with the account, contact, or opportunity that they pertain to.
But say that you want to further categorize these e-mail messages, so that when you look through a mile-long list of e-mails on a contact record, you can see those tagged as, for example, “Product Question”.
Learn how by clicking here to read the whole article!
-
Subscribe in your RSS Reader
-
