Email Broadcast:
Dynamics CRM is unfortunately not best in terms of performing e-mail interactions, especially when it comes to e-mail marketing, the out-of-the-box features of Dynamics CRM don’t meet all the requirements which one would desire. Hence there is need for a third party e-mail broadcasting tool that would need to be integrated with Dynamics CRM.
So as part of our proposed solution we would like to recommend ‘CommuniGator’ as the e-mail broadcasting tool which would meet all of the e-mail broadcasting needs stated by Marketing Birmingham as part of their requirements.
We strongly believe by integrating Dynamics CRM v4.0 with e-mail broadcasting tool such as Communigator the following limitations of a 100%-pure Dynamics CRM e-mail marketing approach can be overcome.
- The e-mail editor is weak, and creating nicely formatted e-mail templates is difficult. It’s true you can use Word mail-merge, but that’s a bit clunky, and only really works well if you’re using the Outlook client.
- If you do send out an e-mail blast to hundreds or thousands of recipients, all of those e-mails will be sent out directly from your e-mail server, a fact that will neither endear you with the spam police nor get you a very high delivery rate.
- Finally, you will have no statistics on what happens to all those e-mails: How many are delivered, how many are opened, how many links get clicked and who clicks them?
All of these limitations can be overcome if you use Communicator, services of which are elaborated in detail under Section.
Support Services:
As mentioned in the tender, ABC would provide eCRM support services for a period Jun ’12 – Sep ‘14
Following are the various support activities covered as part of the proposed solution.
Ensure an effective and efficient Applications operations environment. This includes application as well as environment and performance monitoring, updating application configurations, and maintaining system documentation, monitoring production outputs, communication, notification and escalation of system outages.
Support would involve responding to on demand and ad hoc requests from the Marketing Birmingham user group ranging from answering queries, researching issues, generating ad hoc reports, participating in meetings.
Corrective Maintenance that are reactive responses to problems or incidents, including resolving all application and operational incidents of all severities that involve database, application or operational fixes, providing emergency break-fix support to correct production problems and abnormal program terminations; notifying and coordinating with third party vendors in obtaining corrections to Email broadcasting tool
Preventive Maintenance that involves proactive tasks including permanent fixes to frequently occurring incidents in order to reduce incident volumes and general software maintenance tasks.
Event Management:
Our comprehensive solution helps effectively generate landing pages into the email solution ensuring change quickly, regularly and cost effectively enough to keep pace with the way marketing campaigns look and read. Similarly event details can be easily published, changed and updated without cumbersome and costly involvement of other external agency.
Building the details of the event is very easy and straight forward by inputting a long and short description, attach supporting documentation such as agenda or directions and you are done. Select one of the event templates and hit publish and quickly and efficiently event details and booking form is available from the website, from emails or to an agent taking details over the telephone
Gatormail now has visibility of the event data, so in the same way you merge in first name, last name etc, you can create event templates where you have event name, event location, event date etc.
Booking URLs exist as database objects which are merged in at the campaign stage allowing the ability to re-use the same event email templates across multiple events.
All you need to do when you set up campaign is tell which event it relates to and the email template will have all the data merged straight in and a link through to the correct booking info created.
In order to maximise conversion from the email invites, when you click from the email to the booking form the details of the person you emailed are pre-populated to speed up the process for them.
Email Broadcast
Microsoft Dynamics CRM has a bulk email capability but is limited as an email marketing tool in terms of sophistication, functionality and reporting. Additionally, users should exercise caution if they are intending to send large quantities of mail using their main domain.
GatorMail is a proven email marketing application that integrates directly with Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s Marketing Campaign functionality. This integration provides seamless email marketing functionality within the MS Dynamics CRM system.
Through GatorMail we would help build target ‘Marketing List’ in Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Create the Activity and integration will automatically pass the target list, using secure web services, to the email marketing module for fulfillment.
Following execution and sending of the email marketing campaign, GatorMail returns selected email marketing results data back to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Contact record, including emails opened, click through, unsubscribe and undeliverable. We are also able to record accessing and completing of GatorMail electronic surveys. These activities are then fully searchable using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Advanced Find functionality, giving the perfect opportunity to segment the data based on the contacts interactions with email marketing.
CRM is designed to centralise data, into one secure and manageable system, and import and export data in a CSV format? With Communigator, integration to CRM improves productivity, allowing you to concentrate on email campaigns.
Create Target Marketing Lists Quickly – With Dynamics CRM, you can effortlessly segment your customer and prospect database, and accurately target new revenues
CRM Marketing Lists integrate with Communigator – Create the Campaign Activity and integration will automatically pass the target list, using secure web services, to the email marketing module for fulfillment
Full Campaign tracking within CRM – Following execution and sending of the email marketing campaign, GatorMail returns selected email marketing results data back to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Contact record, including emails opened, click through, unsubscribe and undeliverable.
Please find the few of the features which would meet the E-mail broadcasting requirements in the tender
GatorMail
GatorMail has been built from the ground up to be an easy to use and intuitive interface for the marketer, with little or no technical know-how or knowledge of programming languages, such as HTML, required. We firmly believe that creating email design and building campaigns should be the easy part of email marketing, with the hard parts (merging data or dynamic content, speed of send and deliverability for example) taken care of by us in the background.
Email Design
Design and production of HTML emails is often the most time consuming and expensive part of a campaign. GatorMail has been built to take away this pain, giving you the option of building HTML from scratch using WYSIWYG editor, uploading an HTML file that has been produced externally or selecting one of the bespoke reusable HTML template designs that are included in GatorMail starter pack.
GatorMail offers a number of components to ensure you get the maximum impact from the campaigns;
The Editor
Our WYSIWYG HTML editor requires no previous knowledge of writing HTML code to create fantastic looking designs that comply with best practice guidelines, as well as ensuring maximum deliverability through spam filter compliance.
The process can be simplified even further by dropping in one of the pre-built HTML template designs.
Dynamic Content
Once a set of email designs have been finalised, the next logical step is to move to highly personalised, one to one type communications. Through the use of dynamic content, sections of the email and the calls to action can be served up to each recipient individually, based on their preferences or their defined persona.
This means that emails and landing zones can be created containing content that is determined at the point the campaign is initialised. As a campaign audience is processed for sending, each email is automatically built (either in its whole or specific components) by pulling in certain content sources according to the user preferences and positioning them by relevance to each recipient.
Reporting
Arguably the biggest benefit of email marketing is the ability to track response and reaction to the campaigns.
This has always been hard to quantify for traditional media, such as direct mail or display advertising, and as such is the driving force behind the success that email has become today.
GatorMail’s reporting suite is designed to be clear, concise and easy to use, supported by a number of advanced features to help you achieve maximum ROI from the campaigns.
Campaign Results
Email marketing campaign may have many objectives. However, one of the primary objectives should always be to learn more about the audience you are communicating with and then use this information to plan for the next campaign. GatorMail prides itself on producing data to make decisions and measures all of the statistics as distinct figures (Unique Users) as well as totals, which is imperative in determining the real penetration and response rate of the campaign. It is perfectly reasonable that a target will open the email several times and so any real penetration analysis should be taken from the Unique User figure. However, the people who opened the email more than once are arguably sending us a message of interest.
As well as recording the standard email opens, click through, unsubscribe and undeliverable, GatorMail has the ability to track extended activity on the website and also to measure a campaign conversion, based on a defined rule or set of rules created by the user. For example, list any contacts that have opened the email, visited the campaign landing zone and completed the survey. As with any of the tracked activities in GatorMail, this conversion information can also be used to create segmented audience groups for follow up, either by email, or as an exported list.
Unsubscribe
Under the EU Guidelines of 2003 any marketing email sent should carry a clear and concise (in a font no smaller than the main body of the text) way of offering to unsubscribe. GatorMail offers a simple to deploy unsubscribe option, which can be either a single click or a two stage, preference based process.
For a single click setup, the user who opts to follow the unsubscribe link will be taken to a landing zone informing them they have successfully been removed from the list, and will be flagged as such in the database, ensuring no further emails are sent to that email address. However, under the EU guidelines, when an unsubscribe takes place you are perfectly entitled to offer an alternative. The objective is not to make this process difficult, but to ensure that the recipient wants to unsubscribe from all communications and not, for example, just the monthly newsletter. A high percentage of people unsubscribing often do not know that other, more select communications are available to them from the same source.
Bounce Management
In any campaign it is probable that a proportion of the original audience will not receive the message as the email is “Bounced Back”. Understanding the reason for the bounce is fundamental to reducing the constant rate of undelivered email and therefore improving data quality. Not forgetting that serious penalties can be incurred by an Email Marketer who continually tries to communicate with an email address that does not exist. GatorMail’s Bounce Manager not only reports on bounce backs, but analyses the reason in a series of standard categories. Contacts who return a ‘hard’ bounce message are automatically suppressed from audiences of future campaigns, as are those who return 3 consecutive ‘soft’ bounces.
Analytics
GatorMail email marketing software utilises Google’s API to integrate seamlessly with Google Analytics. Using a simple extension to the Google tracking codes on the website, GatorMail retrieves invaluable email marketing campaign data about which individual web pages were visited on the site once contacts had clicked away from the email. This delivers truly invaluable insight into what people like and don’t like on the site, as well as 100% accurate conversion (and therefore ROI) reporting.
Advanced Tools
Inbox and Spam Score Check
With an ever increasing percentage of emails being rejected by Spam filters, this powerful facility will identify key areas, phrases and content in the email which will score highly on a Spam Filter and ultimately diminish the chances of successful delivery. Being alerted to potential issues in the design phase allows for the optimum blend of content and successful delivery prior to sending the email. Inbox Check will also process the HTML in all of the major email clients and return images of the results, giving you the ability to check the rendering in each. The standard Inbox Check provides this for Outlook 2003 and Gmail, whilst the advanced Inbox Check extends to Outlook 2000, 2007 & 2010, Lotus Notes, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, Apple Mail, iPad and more.
Inbox Check also gives an accurate view of how the HTML design will render on handheld devices such as BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile. A revolution for B2B senders, this will almost certainly have a significant impact on how you structure the HTML content.
A/B Testing
GatorMail allows the testing of either two subject lines or two email designs to a % or a defined number of recipients prior to sending the live campaign. This can offer valuable insight into the factors affecting response and could therefore have a significant impact on the outcome of the campaign. Following the test, emails can either be sent manually, allowing the full A/B split results to be analysed, or automatically after a given time period, based on either the highest open or click through %.
Web Capture
One of the big challenges for marketers is obtaining accurate opt-in contact details for prospects. Many
organisations are missing out by not capturing details of those people who were interested enough to visit the website, but simply left after locating the information they were after. By using a web capture
form on the homepage of a website, offering relevant monthly news or an incentive, such as a prize draw, the opt-in contact database can grow on a daily basis. GatorMail’s web capture can be used on either a website or landing zone – enabling it to also become an integral part of the Email Marketing campaign. Data captured is fed directly back into the GatorMail contact database and also into the internal CRM system where the integration engine has been deployed.
Group Builder
Numerous books, articles and whitepapers have been written about segmentation and the dynamics of taking explicit messages to handpicked audiences. GatorMail’s Group Builder gives you the ability to do exactly that and select a campaign audience based on any number of contact criteria or previous Email Marketing activities. By holding traditional CRM data such as location, size, or company name, in the same place as online activity data the marketer now has the ability to build specific groups where criteria match interest, relevance and location.
GatorMail can also schedule a campaign to be sent at a future date with an audience that is automatically populated by their activities in a current scheduled campaign.
Lead Score Advanced Segmentation
With advances in email filtering placing a greater importance on the perceived relevance of the email to the reader (Gmail Priority Inbox for example), it is more important than ever that the messages are tailored to the contacts in the database and segment data by fields of known contact information or previous campaign activities.
GatorMail’s Lead Score feature enables to not only categorise every link in every campaign that you send, but also to attach a value score as well. So, for example, a contact reading an agenda link for a specific seminar may score 2 points for the relevant category, whilst someone completing a booking form may score 10 points. All of this ranking information is then accessible in the Group Builder tool, giving you access to one of the most powerful segmentation and targeting tools on the market.