Vizola eMarketing (VEM)
In Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can create use email as your communication medium to your potential or actual customers in either Quick or normal Campaign Activities. Vizola’s eMarketing Add-in is closely integrated with these existing facilities but enhances them in several significant ways:
- Use templates to define content for the communication.
- Embed datafields which are merged for each recipient prior to sending.
- Insert monitored hyperlinks to enable you to track click-through activity.
- Know when (if) recipients recipient open / read your communications.
- Detect bounce-backs and automatically create (Error) Campaign Responses.
- Offer self-service newsletter subscription management
- Offer self-service personal information management
- Easily access and analyze the results of your email Campaign Activities.
These extra capabilities transform the usefulness of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in email marketing. You can immediately start to measure the reaction of your target audience and adapt your communications appropriately. You can begin to really harness the effectiveness of email marketing in a cost-effective manner.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM features Email Templates to assist users in sending standardized emails to customers or prospects, but normally these cannot be used within Campaign Activities. VEM adds this capability by using a special ‘merge-engine’ for out-bound processing of emails.
VEM templates are just like standard GLOBAL email templates, with the same syntax for recipient datafields. They are only differentiated by their name starting with ‘VEM’ which enables extra features in the VEM template editor.
Using the VEM template editor, you can also save other custom VEM datafield types like monitored hyperlinks and subscription status indicators, and even use the same template for addressing account, contact or lead recipients by ‘coalescing multiple entity datafield definitions.
You can use the VEM template editor ‘on-the-fly’ within the Compose Email screen of the Quick Campaign wizard (or Campaign Distribute Activity screen). Within the template selection dialog, you can optionally choose to edit / delete an existing template, or even create a new one. Alternatively, you can use the VEM editor via the standard route within Settings > Email Templates.
VEM uses standard Microsoft Dynamics CRM email datafields as merge replaceables in email campaign activities, whether embedded in a selected template or directly entered in the compose email. VEM provides access to the standard datafield editing dialog in order to add or edit datafields.
Datafields are not limited to names – most attributes of contact, account and lead entities are available for merging. Datafields can be multi-part, and may have a simple default in case no proceeding dynamic parts yield a result. Datafields allow you to personalize your communication.
In contrast to the standard ‘Request Read Receipt’, VEM on outgoing emails. However, you would never do this in an Email Campaign Activity because it is simply unacceptable in this context and would annoy a great many of those you are targeting as potential customers. Never-the-less, you would still really like to know how many of your emails are getting read and by whom and when.
VEM allows you to do this with reasonable accuracy in a non-intrusive fashion, by embedding a very small image in the email and monitoring HTTP requests for this. As MS CRM v4 sends emails in Base64 Encoded format makes this even more unobtrusive. The result is that each of your outgoing email activities has a ‘last read’ attribute that is updated as your recipient opens and reads the email.
It should be noted that most HTML email clients now prompt for image download, so your recipients must make a conscious choice – embedding material information in images can encourage them to do this.
Whereas you can embed normal hyperlinks in outgoing communications, you gain no information once your recipient clicks through to find out more. It’s obvious that having knowledge of your recipient’s behavior would be valuable.
VEM allows you to do this – you can set up any number of destination Email Links and use these within your email communication. The VEM merge-engine translates this into a redirect via your monitoring website, so all behavior is recorded in the CRM system.
The VEM merge-engine can also render subscription status checkboxes according to recipient membership of specific marketing lists. To complement this, VEM inbound email processing on amended replies can provide unassisted membership updating.
Use the VEM toolbar dropdown to select which lists you wish to use as subscription lists. You can even save these within an email template in order that you can easily ask subscribers to periodically re-confirm their subscription preferences.
VEM inbound email processing can also provide unassisted updating of recipient personal information on suitable tagged datafield-merged reply fields, whilst logging the change in an associated note. This means that you can also provide a service for your customers to be able to confirm or correct their own address, telephone, email etc. details.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM does a good job of identifying replies to outgoing email activities and creating appropriate Campaign Responses, and also handles UNSUBSCRIBE requests, but ‘bounce-backs’ are not handled and this can create a considerable manual burden in trying to ‘clean’ your marketing lists. VEM assists you by identifying bounce-backs and raising Error type Campaign Responses for emails that could not be delivered.
VEM checks incoming emails, using both native and custom matching techniques to link them with an originating activity, but most often bounce-backs are in the form of a DSN (Delivery Status Notification) from a mail server and cannot be directly matched. In these cases VEM can parse attachments of DSN messages in order to attempt matching and subsequent raising of error responses.
It should be noted that VEM does NOT require that tracking tokens are turned on, but can improve upon the standard heuristic matching capabilities.
VEM adds reports to assist you making sense of the data from your Email Campaign Activities. At the top level there are statistical summaries, breaking down categories of response type (e.g. Out-of-office, Undelivered, Unsubscribe, Read, Replies etc).
Drill-through these to retrieve detail on specific emails and recipient behaviors including monitored link clicking. And open records directly back into the CRM system to facilitate creating follow-up activities, address corrections etc.
VEM helps with these issues, and more…
- I have a number of newsletters to send to different marketing lists periodically – and I want to personalize them and track recipients responses. With MSCRM I just can’t do what I want. Bulk email lets me use templates, but I can’t track recipients responses effectively, and email campaign activities won’t allow me to use templates and personalization.
VEM will really help you out. Immediately you can start using templates and personalization., whether via Outlook or web client.VEM will also track actual recipient activity (email opening and link click-through) directly inside your CRM and give you the reports to analyze it.With VEM you can even give your recipients the chance to manage their own subscriptions to multiple lists.
- I want to be able to asses my prospect’s different product or service interests and allocate follow-up to particular specialists.
With VEM, you can monitor and report when recipients click-through from your email, BUT you can do more… VEM workflow allows you to automatically add recipients to specified marketing lists when this happens. So you can assign these marketing lists to your teams of specialists as qualified prospects.
- I am trying to compose a great-looking HTML eBulletin to send out to my customers, but when I paste it into the compose email window everything gets changed and on doing a test it doesn’t look nice in my email client.
The problem is you just don’t have full control over the HTML source. Our add-in simply adds a toolbar button to allow you to toggle between ‘WYSIWYG’ and source editing modes.
- I want to add some more detailed content in my eBulletins but have discovered that I can’t add attachments to campaign emails.
Actually, we think the ability to add attachments would be a BAD feature. In the great majority of cases it is far better to provide a link to more content on the web. This reduces the payload annoyance possibility, but also provides you with an opportunity to monitor interest… And with VEM workflow you can program the CRM to automatically send out an individual follow-up email (with attachment) in response to an expression of interest (e.g. recipient click-through)
- I need a way of reporting on important statistics associated with an email campaign activity – for instance I would like to know the numbers of emails actually sent, together with the number resulting in unsubscribes, out-of-office, undeliverables, real responses and so on.
The in-built campaign response tracking in the system simply is not easy to use and derive this kind of information, plus there is no coordination between outgoing email and response. VEM provides a top-level statistical report for email campaign activities with drill-through on each of the numbers to analyze in the closest detail.
- My response rate from email campaigns is very low, and I suspect a lot of the email addresses are not good, but I can’t tell whether email addresses are BAD or recipients are just not interested.
VEM offers a bounce-handling feature that allows you to determine which email addresses are definitely bad, by creating an ERROR campaign response against recipients for whom a Delivery Status Notification message has been received. This is a good start in the task of list cleaning.
- I have noticed that often UNSUBSCRIBE responses may be sent from a different email address to to that of the original recipient in the CRM. When this happens the CRM does not recognize the recipient and the resulting disabling of marketing activities within the CRM does NOT happen.
As this can result in unhappy customers this is an important issue to address. The problem results from the CRM doing the matching on email addresses rather than the outgoing tracking token (which would probably be more accurate). In any case, incoming UNSUBSCRIBEs are separately identified in the add-in reporting and verification/rectification can easily be made.
