CRM Reviews: Dynamics Email
Dynamics
Microsoft has a huge email arsenal, with both the enterprise-class Exchange server and the popular Outlook client. Outlook is a very effective personal management tool, tying together email, calendars, notes and contacts. Add the plug-in for Dynamics CRM, and you have a quick and intuitive information management system. If your organization has dynamically changing and people have flexible roles, the flexibility of Outlook and Dynamics CRM may be a compelling proposition.
Transactional Email
If your goal is to send transactional email from your customer sales and support processes, Dynamics CRM gives you lots of options. The email template builder has the typical merge feature to get info from your accounts, cases and other CRM tables, tucked into a ‘Data Field’ module. Right now the Data Field page seems to have limited features, but I expect this is where Microsoft will put logic for computed fields and database access.
Another useful option is the selection of different Send, CC and BCC groups. You can pick the typical accounts, contacts and leads as recipients, and you can also send email to a Queue or a Facility. Some other groups could be helpful (or vital) for you, such as sending emails to the user’s Team or Business Unit, the contacts associated with an account, or the owner of an account.
Marketing
Outlook and the native Microsoft Dynamics CRM email are good for routine business correspondence, but they are not designed for bulk marketing email campaigns. You will need the help of an Email Service Provider (ESP) to do bulk email properly. Fortunately, most of them have interfaces to Dynamics CRM. When you evaluate ESP’s, there are a few things you should look for. Does the product have a native Outlook plug-in, with intuitive controls? How well does the contact and email activity information sync? Does the ESP have ‘drip’ campaigns and other features that you like? The last question leads you into the Marketing Automation field, which is beyond the scope of most CRM’s.
Management
Inbound mail can be handled by the Queue system. You can attach inbound email to Accounts, Leads, Contacts and any other email-enabled CRM record. The slick Microsoft user interface makes this manual process a little less tedious. An email can also trigger a Workflow or Dialog process, which lets you set up efficient and standardized response procedures. Email can be filtered to process only responses to CRM emails, but if you want more advanced routing you will probably engage an Exchange Server expert.
Mobile communications are a mixed bag. Since Microsoft doesn’t have a smartphone CRM client, all those iPhone and Android users will have to squint at a tiny web browser to send email from the CRM. On the other hand, laptop users can take advantage of the superb offline sync capabilities of MS-Outlook.
The Microsoft Exchange server gives you unlimited access to sending email. This is especially helpful if you need to send large amounts of transactional email for sales and support. Exchange (and its’ companion Active Directory) give you a slew of management features for complex organizations. That’s helpful if you have a lot of users that only need email and won’t be logging into CRM.
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