Guest Post: Unlocking the Hidden Power of Your Data with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and ClickDimensions

Thank you to Russ Powell, Head of Marketing at Innervate, for this guest blog post!

As marketers we’re constantly told that we need to be more data driven. But how many of us can say we truly are? If we’re being honest, it’s probably not as many of us as we’d like to think.

But making the most of all the data we have on hand – and there’s a lot of it – is crucial for marketing success. And there’s one tool we’ve found that really helps our marketing team do this – ClickDimensions.

Now, we’re not just saying that because we’re a ClickDimensions partner. We’re also a ClickDimensions customer, using the solution to run and manage all our marketing activities. We walk the walk.

In our experience, the combination of ClickDimensions and Microsoft Dynamics365 is incredibly powerful, with the native integration between the two allowing you to make the most of ClickDimensions’ functionality and really unleash its power.

That’s why we’ve pulled together this blog post/love letter; to give you the inside track on how the combination of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and ClickDimensions can unlock the hidden power of your data.

Work Your Data Harder

Raise your hand if you’re using spreadsheets and other static, disconnected files for running and managing your marketing activities. You’re not the only one. I see a lot of hands going up out there. And it’s a far from ideal way to do things nowadays. (You can put your hand down now.)

If you’re relying on spreadsheets to make sense of your data, you’re probably missing opportunities, misrepresenting that data and underselling the value that marketing can add to your business.

An “all-singing, all-dancing” marketing automation (MA) tool will get you some of the way and move you away from a spreadsheet-based existence, but it will only be as good as the data that feeds it. You need an effective CRM platform working in tandem with your MA tool. One that acts as the “straight man” so your MA tool can do it’s singing and dancing.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 and ClickDimensions are that duo. Because ClickDimensions is natively built in Dynamics, the two systems work in unison to make your data so much more useful.

Data is fed directly into Dynamics from the marketing activity carried out in ClickDimensions, which can then be processed and presented however you require – using the rich functionality of Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform solutions – to inform further marketing activity run through ClickDimensions that then generates more data that is fed directly into Dynamics, and so on.

No gaps, no missed connections, no “data leakage” (to coin a slightly odd term). It’s a seamless, integrated and altogether more productive approach to running marketing activities and making real sense of your data.

Slicing and Dicing

Sending out blanket communications to all your contacts at once is killing the performance of your campaigns. And it’s something that can easily be avoided.

Using native Dynamics 365 marketing lists, advanced find functionality and ClickDimensions subscription management, you can much more easily “slice and dice” your customer and prospect data for campaign targeting. You can take things down to a granular level with your data and marketing activity, and market to your customers and prospects at an individual (or very close to individual) level.

You can also empower your customers too. Using subscription management allows your customers to opt in and out of specific topics and let you know their contact preferences. They can be specific about what they want to hear from you and don’t have to bulk unsubscribe.

And thanks to the native integration between ClickDimensions and Dynamics, this preference information is then fed back into your CRM and made available for future campaign activity. This will all help reduce customer fatigue, decrease costs and effort, and give you far greater insight into your customers.

Which is what we all want as marketers, right?

Budget Goes In. What Comes Out?

Some of the biggest questions marketers have to answer are related to marketing effectiveness. How do I measure marketing effectiveness? Where do I spend my marketing budget? If I spend this much here, what’s it likely to return? How do I attribute a bottom of the funnel return to top of the funnel activity?

If you send a bulk email on a certain day and you get a customer sign up for a demo, for example, how do you know it was that campaign that generated the inquiry? Correlation isn’t causality. There could have been any number of touchpoints the customer had with your company that lead them to a demo.

ClickDimensions turbocharges campaign responses automatically creating a record in Dynamics when a user visits a web page, completes a web form or otherwise engages with your business. And it will do this every time they engage with you, so you can get a complete history of each customers’ interactions with your brand.

That gives you more useful, accurate insights into which campaigns and touchpoints generate the most leads and inquiries. And ultimately it will give you detailed reporting you can use to understand where to spend your marketing budget for the best return.

Enhanced Integration

The fun doesn’t stop there either.

Thanks to the new functionality of the Microsoft Dynamics Power Platform (with Power Apps, Power BI and Power Automate) and ClickDimensions’ own API, you can further integrate your systems, deep-dive into your data and provide a truly 360-degree view of your customers.

This means that all the information about a customer or prospect is in one place and presented in an easily understandable way. ERP systems, past purchase history, webinar attendance, live event handshakes, SMS messages. It can all be there.

Whatever data or information you have can be integrated, manipulated and presented without the need to re-key it or fiddle with spreadsheets. Which is ideal, right?

So, in summary, when you combine Dynamics 365, The Power Platform and ClickDimensions you can unlock the power of your data.

You can work your data harder, slice and dice it more effectively, better understand the effectiveness of your marketing and truly understand your customers.

And what marketer wouldn’t want to be able to do all that?