How to Use ClickDimensions Email Campaigns with Microsoft Dynamics 365

ClickDimensions is built right inside of Microsoft Dynamics 365, which means it gives you the ability to email existing contacts and accounts inside of your CRM, but really – it’s a lot more than that.

ClickDimensions is a full-service marketing automation platform focused on the Dynamics environment that offers features like:

• Email Marketing
• Event Management
• Social Marketing
• Campaign Automation
• SMS Messaging
• Reporting
• Form Capture
• Survey
• Landing Pages
• Training and Support
• Web Intelligence
• Lead Scoring

ClickDimensions is fully native, fully supported, and fully committed to Microsoft Dynamics. This is a benefit to Microsoft Dynamics users as you never have to worry about ClickDimensions’ focus going elsewhere.

When you first open up Microsoft Dynamics 365, you see “My Campaigns.”

It is important to use the Microsoft Dynamics campaign functionality since ClickDimensions is tied into CRM, which means you’ll be able to see the ClickDimensions data at an individual level, at a Dynamics campaign level, and at an organizational level.

Campaigns are one central location for you to tie all of your marketing activities back to a specific marketing initiative.

If you were launching a new product, for example, and sending emails related to this product, created a new form for it, created a survey in relation to it, and so on, all of these marketing activities can be tied back to a certain campaign so that you can see how each of these activities is working in relation to your launch.

As you can see, there are many related activities that will help you in Campaigns, which will help you ensure a successful product launch.

In the planning area, you also have a Marketing Calendar, which helps you stay organized as a marketer.

It shows you all of your current marketing activities.

If you click on an individual date, you can see everything that you have scheduled for that specific day.

One of the great things about ClickDimensions is that you can create Dynamics dashboards based on the data you have in ClickDimensions.

There are also Intelligent Dashboards offered as an add-on.

Where a lot of the ClickDimensions functionality comes from is the messaging tab.

Messaging is where you will create an email template, send an email, create a social post, send an SMS, and so on.

When you jump into Messaging, to create a New Email Send, the first thing you will want to do is select an Editor Type.

There are a variety of different editors that ClickDimensions offers. The new “Drag and Drop” type is the most popular according to ClickDimensions Specialists.

Customers have found it to be user-friendly and intuitive, but they may also take advantage of:

• Block Editor
• Free Style
• Custom HTML
• Drag and Drop

We recommend using whatever you are most comfortable with. For this post, we will describe what’s possible with “New Drag and Drop.”

Once you select that, scroll down and start filling out your fields. First, add your subject. Then, select who the email is coming from.

This is a beneficial feature if you are sending an email on behalf of someone, for example, like your CEO.

If you don’t want your CEO to have to receive or reply to all of these messages, you can still make it look like it’s coming from them, but assign someone else to manage all of the incoming messages and handle the workload.

For this example, marketing will manage the emails.

This functionality is available whenever you are creating an email using ClickDimensions.

Once you decide who the email is coming from, what editor you’re using, and have filled out all of the other relevant fields, you can save your email.

After you save, you will have the option to open your editor tool.

Before you start playing with the editor tool, if you want to send this to a marketing list you have in Microsoft Dynamics, go to Recipients, and click “Add Existing Marketing Lists.”

If you did have a suppressed marketing list that you didn’t want to receive your email, for example, you can do that too, but ClickDimensions does have a filter so that you don’t send the same contact an email twice.

ClickDimensions has several basic layouts for you to start with when using “New Drag and Drop.”

However, if you’ve created a template, you can use your own.

To add an image, for example, simply drag and drop the “Image” icon (top, right) to whatever Empty Column you’d like it to appear in. Then, click on the icon once you’ve placed it, and locate the image you want in your system or upload a new one to it.

Click “ok” once you have the image you want selected.

You can add different personalizations in Microsoft Dynamics to help your messages resonate with audiences better.

You may select any field in Microsoft Dynamics to add to your emails, whether it be the contact’s first name or last name, the company name, etc.

This will help it feel like it was sent as a one-off.

You have all of your standard formatting options, but something that is especially helpful to marketers is adding formatting conditions so that only people who meet your criteria see certain parts of the email.

This may be helpful if you are targeting contacts in two different locations, like Chicago and Atlanta. If an event is only in Atlanta and you want to target people specific to that region, you can set conditions where only people in or near that area will see that part of the email block.

Before you send the email, you probably want to see what it looks like.

Before you test and preview your email, click save.

Then, click “Preview” under “Test & Preview.”

This will let you see what the email will look like in different email clients. It may take a long time to load. You can see what it looks like in iOS vs. Android, Chrome vs. Firefox, etc.

Perhaps one of the most useful tools is the SPAM filter, which will help you make sure your email is ready-to-go and won’t miss the inboxes you’re targeting.

For this example, it looks like we passed, but if you do fail, the system will tell you and provide insights into how you can correct the SPAM problems.

Once you’ve previewed it and confirmed that it has passed your SPAM filter, you can send your email and see how it’s doing via your Dynamics Campaign dashboard.

Once you go back to that screen, you will navigate to your email campaign, and then click, “Email Statistics.”

It will show you many different things, like your open-rate, click-rate, unsubscribes, bounced emails, where your contacts are opening the email, the conversions from your email to your website, the links people are clicking on within your email, and more.

You can even drill down into the email statistics for each individual recipient under “Recipients.”

You can also measure the success of Split Tests (A/B Tests) in ClickDimensions.

As you can see, there are a lot of possibilities with Email Campaigns in ClickDimensions.

But, that’s not all the technology is capable of!

Discover its true potential when you watch the full demo on-demand.

If you would like a personal demo of the software or have questions about marketing automation technology like ClickDimensions, reach out to our team.

We are excited to help you on your business journey!