This essentially means that the marketing team wants to include registration forms in the email body itself rather than the usual method of including a registration link in the email expecting the prospect to click on the link to enter his/her info in the new page. I realized that this is possible in MDM and thought of sharing my experiment on how this could be achieved. I hope this serves as a ready reckoner for others who get similar questions from their Customers and Partners.

MDM has two different types of email editors – the blank email editor and the blank email with html editor. The blank editor is for users who are not well-versed with html, while the html editor gives a lot of flexibility to use html code in the email editor directly. This might come in handy for users who work with external agencies where they get a ready-to-use html code from their agencies or the users can directly input html code into the editor if they are comfortable with html themselves. It also needs to be noted that in MDM, even when you are using a blank email editor, you still have the flexibility of adding an html code block in the editor, which I will be covering towards the end of this blog.

Adding a form within the emails is not very difficult to achieve because a 'form' is essentially an html with some actions (like the Submit button). So to add a form in the email, the idea is to add it as an html code in email editor.

Step1: Let's start with a basic html code for a form. Since it's a basic code, I found the html code for a contact form here: www.freecontactform.com/html_form.php.

<form name="htmlform" method="post" action="html_form_send.php">

<table width="450px">

</tr>

<tr>

 <td valign="top">

  <label for="first_name">First Name *</label>

 </td>

 <td valign="top">

  <input  type="text" name="first_name" maxlength="50" size="30">

 </td>

</tr>

<tr>

 <td valign="top"">

  <label for="last_name">Last Name *</label>

 </td>

 <td valign="top">

  <input  type="text" name="last_name" maxlength="50" size="30">

 </td>

</tr>

<tr>

 <td valign="top">

  <label for="email">Email Address *</label>

 </td>

 <td valign="top">

  <input  type="text" name="email" maxlength="80" size="30">

 </td>

</tr>

<tr>

 <td valign="top">

  <label for="telephone">Telephone Number</label>

 </td>

 <td valign="top">

  <input  type="text" name="telephone" maxlength="30" size="30">

 </td>

</tr>

<tr>

 <td valign="top">

  <label for="comments">Comments *</label>

 </td>

 <td valign="top">

  <textarea  name="comments" maxlength="1000" cols="25" rows="6"></textarea>

 </td>

</tr>

<tr>

 <td colspan="2" style="text-align:center">

  <input type="submit" value="Submit">   ( <a href="www.freecontactform.com/html_form.php">HTML Form</a> )

 </td>

</tr>

</table>

</form>

Step2. Now, to add the code in our email and to make it look good, let's go back to our email editor. Let's start with a blank email with html editor. This is what the email page would look like:

Enter all the mandatory fields, select the subscription center and forward to a friend (if needed). Now we can go to the editor screen (the middle button among the 3 button below the text 'New'). Enter the basic html code and insert the mandatory plug-ins like the 'Subscription Center', 'Sender Address' using the insert plug-in drop down at the top.

Once the basic framework is done, we are ready to copy-paste the html code for the form. If you are well-versed in html, you could also play around with the placement of the form and design of the email.

Click on the validate option at the top to ensure that everything is as expected.

Once the validation is successful, you could click on the 'Test Send' option at the top to ensure that everything looks good. You could send it to your own email id to test it out.

The email would look something like this:

Hurray! The email and the form gets sent to the prospect. Please note that the name is not getting populated after 'Dear' because we used a manual 'Test Send' option. In Campaign automation, the name should get dynamically picked up from the marketing list.

Step3: If you want to use the blank email editor instead of the html editor, the process would look something like this:

Now select the email editor (the second button below the text 'New'. A blank email form will open. You can drag and drop the Layout first, followed by the content blocks.

After the initial layout design, the email would look like this. To add a form, the idea is to drag and drop an html content block and add the code for the form there. Note that I have added an image at the top, a text block and an html block in the middle layer and a text block at the bottom. Let me enter the relevant information in these blocks. Remember to add a 'Subject' for the email

Remember to copy-paste the html code for the form in the html block. The final email design would look like this:

Let's do a Validation and do a Test Send.

And the email would look like this:

Obviously you can play around with the layout and come up with something good. But essentially, the point is that it is possible to send emails with forms in them using Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM).

• Budget could be set-up for a time period or interval - day, month, quarter, week or year. Whatever you select in the 'interval' field would be your default view, if it's a month, you will have to enter the budget amounts month-wise.
• Start and end date: Any expense that falls between the start and end dates (subjects to other conditions like Campaigns, Programs, Company etc.) will reflect in this budget
• The calendar could be a standard Jan-Dec calendar or you could have a fiscal year selected depending on how your organization operates
• You can have multiple worksheets within a Budget workbook. i.e. Budget Workbook > Budget worksheets
• A budget worksheet could also be linked specifically to a Company, Division, Department, Program, Campaign, Event, Job, etc. This will be quite useful for reporting purposes to correctly allocate the relevant expenses to the right budgets.

A budget workbook along with its worksheets could look like this:

Once you set up the budget, we could go ahead and run the campaigns, incur and track expenses, which would in turn get linked to the relevant budget worksheet. I will talk about managing and tracking expenses in my next blog post.

Its quarter/year-end and the company is planning to get its high-value prospects to purchase its product quickly. The marketing team plans to run a quick nurture campaign on these prospects and asks the sales team to come up with a list of high-value prospects. The sales team creates a marketing list in CRM (it could either be an excel import or marketing list creation within CRM) and saves it. The marketing list gets synced to MDM (In order for the marketing list sync to happen from CRM to MDM, modify the Marketing List form and add a new field named 'Sync enable'. This has to be set to 'Yes' for the automatic sync to happen). The marketing team gets the high-value prospect list in MDM and they run a marketing campaign on that list (including email, social media, landing page, etc.). They also set up campaign budgets and track their expenses against it. The nurture campaign generates some serious leads – people who are genuinely interested in purchasing immediately. Automatic lead scoring happens in MDM and based on the lead scores, the 'Sales Ready' leads are automatically moved to CRM for the sales people to engage with them (If you look at the lead scoring models, Settings > Lead Scoring and open an existing one, you will find an option to grade your leads based on their scores. If you have enabled MDM-CRM sync, only the leads that are in 'Sales Ready' grade will get automatically moved to CRM). The sales ready leads are now available in CRM and the sales people, after engaging with the leads, qualify the leads and create Opportunities. The Opportunities are then closed as 'Won' with their revenues updated. These Opportunity records in CRM get synchronized to the Opportunity records (or rather, creates new Opportunity records) in MDM. The marketing team takes a look at these Opportunities (in MDM) to understands the effectiveness of their campaign.

This scenario is quite easy to demo mainly because the marketing lists, Leads, Opportunities etc. get synchronized between MDM and CRM quite instantaneously. The only thing to note here is that the lead scoring model has to take into account the demo situation and have lower values for the 'Sales Ready' grade so the lead can be quickly moved into the CRM system.

The trouble happens when you try to figure out the ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) from MDM. Most of the queries I get from my Partners and Customers are around ROMI calculation or managing the campaign budgets the finances. I had to do a lot of research and engage with the MDM Product Managers to understand how that part works in MDM and I thought others might also benefit from my learnings.

Here are some of the points that you might otherwise take for granted:

In MDM, the 2 areas where you could check the 'Revenue Actual' or ROMI.

1. Open the campaign, click on the entity-picker at the bottom and select 'Budgets' so that you get to see the revenue

   

2. Go to Campaign Performance Report where you get to see the complete metrics for your campaign

   

   

   If you have to get the revenue values populated in these 2 areas, this is what you have to note:

• MDM's budgeting capabilities mainly include managing the revenue cycle through sales orders and invoices. The 'Actual Revenue' numbers picked up by the budget workbooks associated with a campaign (the first image above) are based on the 'Invoices' created for the campaign and NOT revenue values in 'Opportunities'. So updating the revenue in the 'Opportunity' record and closing it as 'won' will not have any effect on the revenue. Invoice entities can be associated with campaigns/opportunities (in the Invoice dropdown in the campaign/opportunities page) or directly through Home > Budgeting > Receipts > Invoices. Once you create an Invoice, the next step is to record the payments to ensure that the actuals are recorded.

  

  To make a payment, go to Budgeting > Accounts Receivable, and you will see a list of Invoices (Account Receivables). Select the relevant invoice (the invoice that is linked to the Campaign) and mention the payment details, Amount and the other mandatory fields.

  

  Now, the revenue actual will start getting reflected in the Campaign Budget area (example: Image1)

• The 'Revenue Actual' and the ROMI fields in Campaign performance report (second image from the top) are sourced from the 'Results' associated with a campaign. The creation of the 'Result' for Leads is automatic. However, creation of campaign Result for invoices/revenues needs an additional step. So, if you open the campaign and select 'Results' from the entity picker (drop down) at the bottom (see the image below), you will see that the 'number' of leads that got generated as part of the campaign are displayed there. But there will be no mention of the revenue generated by each lead who got converted into a Sale. As per the current design, this has to be added manually. So basically, if the marketers have to track the ROMI and Revenue actual for their campaigns, they should manually go ahead and add the generated revenue in the campaign. This could be done by clicking on the '+' symbol at the top and adding a new 'Revenue – United States Dollar' field. If there are more than one revenue values, you could import the list by clicking on the 'Upload' button.

   

  

   

The second point to note is that the campaign budget entities are not currently synced from MDM to CRM through the connector. So even if you set up the campaign budgets in MDM, the budget will not be synchronized to CRM. One way to report on the Amount attribute of an opportunity associated with a campaign would be through OData feeds which makes available the campaign-opportunity relationship.

If we take note of the above points, it should be easier to demo a very effective scenario of integration between Dynamics CRM and MDM. It helped me to a great extent, hope it helps you too!

Reducing this dependency on each other and improving transparency is one of the major highlights of an integrated approach. That is why I am a strong proponent of having a CRM-MDM integrated approach in organizations. As we start this discussion, you will realize that each of the above challenges will slowly wear off and turn you into a believer, if not a proponent.

Let's start with a simple CRM-MDM integrated scenario like this:

I create a multi-channel marketing campaign in MDM which generates some leads in MDM. Based on the lead scoring model that I have specified in my marketing campaign (in MDM), the leads will get scored. Once the leads are sales ready, they get automatically synchronized from MDM to CRM from where the sales people can pick them up. The sales teams start engaging with the leads and eventually, some get converted into Opportunities and ultimately result in Sales. The Opportunities are then synchronized from CRM back into MDM.

Problem1: Sales people complaining that they are getting quality leads from Marketing.

Solution: The sales team now has complete visibility on how many leads got generated from the marketing campaign. The Lead source field will display the campaign that generated the Lead. Depending on whether the lead gets converted into Opportunity or by looking at the ratio of leads that get converted to a sale, they can understand the quality of the leads that get generated via the marketing campaigns. They now have the correct data to back up their claims or the marketing teams now have the data to disprove the sales teams if need be!

Problem2: Marketing people lose visibility of their leads the moment the leads move to the sales teams. They have no real-time data to follow the lead life-cycle or to understand the number of leads that result in sale.

Solution: The Opportunities are synchronized back into MDM from the CRM system. The information includes the probability of sale, and the expected amount and the weighted amount based on the probability of sale. Any update in any of these fields by the sales person is reflected back into MDM. The marketing teams now know the exact impact that they are creating – how many leads, how much of revenue from their campaigns etc. It's easier for them to calculate the ROMI as well.

Problem3: Dependency on each other.

Solution: Both the sales and the marketing teams will have a complete 360 degree view of the situation. Using the 'Seller Portal' option, even sales people (from within CRM itself) get to understand the campaigns that are being run on their leads or contacts. They can then tweak their conversations based on what they find, to deliver maximum impact. Similarly, the marketing teams understand the work that the sales people are putting in to engage with the leads that were generated as part of their campaign. All this with minimal interaction between the two teams and none of them wasting their valuable time trying to get the information from the other.

Then the next question would be: 'We understand that attachments are not possible in email marketing messages. But is it possible to add documents in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing itself and send out the link via the email campaign? Will external users have access to it if the document is uploaded in Dynamics Marketing?'

Imagine your team is working on a newsletter that needs to be sent to your prospects. Microsoft Dynamics Marketing offers you the Digital Assets Management Functionality, which means that you can create, save and manage your newsletter within MDM itself, route it for review/approval and get feedbacks. So if you create your newsletter (or if you don't want to do that, work on your newsletter else where and upload the final version into MDM) within MDM, it makes perfect sense to share it from within MDM itself, right? Yeah, it is possible to upload the newsletter into MDM and use the link in the email marketing campaigns. Let's see how it can be accomplished:

In MDM, there is an option to publish a library for viewing by external users. A library is just like a folder that you can publish as a webpage to make its contents available to people who don't otherwise have access to Microsoft Dynamics Marketing. When viewed outside of Dynamics Marketing, libraries are read-only, so users can download the files but can't edit or delete the originals or upload new files. However, when working in the Files window in Dynamics Marketing, users can work with libraries and their contents just as they can with regular folders.

The following rules apply to libraries:

• Libraries must be located either at the root of the file structure or inside of another library.

• You can't create a library inside a folder.

• You can transform existing folders into libraries, provided the target folder is in the root or inside another library

• You must enable publishing for your site before you can publish any libraries. Go to Settings > Administration > File Options and mark the Enable Publishing checkbox to enable publishin

• You can't transform the Microsoft Dynamics Marketing folder into a library. This is a special folder that contains files that support Dynamics Marketing functionality.

Other than the above restrictions, and their ability to be published as a web page, libraries work just like folders.

So the idea is to create a Library, add the final version of the newsletter there and use the link in the email campaign.

Here are the steps.

1. Go to Settings > Administration > File options > Check the Enable Publishing checkbox                                                                                                                                                                                                               
2. Now go to Assets & Media > Files. A new pop-up window will open. Click on Files (root folder) and create a new folder by clicking on the + button at the top 
3. A new pop-up will open. You can name the folder as ‘Newsletter’ for example. Remember to check the Library and Publish checkboxes. Click on Submit.
4. Any file you drag and drop into this new folder will be accessible to anyone with the link. Drag and drop a file into this new library. To get the link of the file, select the checkbox next to the file and click on the Properties button at the top                                                                                                                                                                                                         
5. You will get the document link at the top
6. Copy the link and place it in your email as a hyperlink (the link might be pretty long; you could add it as a hyperlink behind something like 'Click here' to avoid including it directly in the email content). External users will also be able to access this link now.

The only thing that we need to be careful about is that this folder should have only the relevant files (since anyone with the link will have access to it) and it should not be used as a location to store all the files.

The service module in Microsoft Dynamics CRM has undergone a lot of changes in the recent times, keeping in sync with its ‘Care Everywhere’ concept. It offers multi-channel support and enhanced core features. The objective of this post is to bring more clarity into the Service Module functionality within Dynamics CRM 2013’s Leo release.

The feature enhancements are mainly in the following areas:

• Case Management
• Entitlements & SLAs
• Queues & Automatic Case Routing
• Unified Service Desk and Parature

This blog will primarily focus on the ‘Case Management’ area. I will include the other features in the upcoming blogs.

1. All the workflows that used to manually create to route emails to specific queues in the previous versions of CRM have become available as Routing Rule Sets and Routing Rules. The important points to note in this context are as follows:

• The Routing Rule set is an umbrella that can hold multiple routing rule items

• The routing rule items within a ‘routing rule set’ will determine the actual routing flows. The order of the routing rules matters, as the routing process starts checking the conditions from the first rule to the last. So always start from a specific rule to a generic rule. If you put the generic rule as the first rule, every case would satisfy that condition and will get routed to the Queue specified in that rule. This could lead to serious consequences.

• Only one routing rule set could be active at any point. So it would apply to all the cases created. Activating a second one will leave the first one inactive

• All case routings are managed through background workflows

The following would serve as an example:

Routing Rule Set: Routing Rule Set - India

Routing Rule Items within the Routing Rule Set:

• Rule for Critical cases (High Priority cases
• Rule for the other cases (Normal Priority)

Routing could be done based on many criteria. One solution which is easy to implement would be based on the ‘Subject’ field in the Case entity. The ‘Subject’ field helps in classifying the support tickets. The best thing is that multiple levels of classification is possible using the Subject field. In real-life scenarios, this would translate into something like:

If the case is related to Software-Break-fix support, send to one particular queue. If it’s related to Software-Migration support, send to another team. Or if it is Hardware-Product support related, send to the hardware team. The Subject field (To edit the values in the Subject field, go to Settings -> Service Management -> Subject) would look something like this:

This helps you to clearly categorize the service tickets and assign to queues accordingly. And depending upon the value of the Subject field, the cases could be automatically routed. You could also route cases based on other case related fields like Priority, Status etc.

Creating Routing Rule Set and routing rule items within it is fairly simple. Click on the Settings -> Service Management -> Routing Rule Sets, the pop-up will help you specify the condition and select the queue to which the case should be routed.

A Routing Rule set has to be active for it to start working. An active routing rule set automatically applies to all automatically-created cases. To manually apply the rule to existing or manually-created cases, in the list of cases, select the cases that you want to route using this rule, and on the command bar, choose Apply Routing Rule.

If you click on the ‘Background Processes’ tab in the open case record right after a case gets created (Click on the bottom arrow next to the case and select Background Process), you might be able to see something like this:

The succeeded processes are removed, so the ‘Routing Rule’ entry wouldn’t be available after some time. Once the routing rule succeeds, click on the ‘Queue Item Details’ button on the Case entity screen (the ribbon at the top) to confirm the queue. The pop-up as shown below will give you the details.

Alternatively, you could also open the Queue record and check if the case got assigned to it.

2. Some pointers while associating and merging Multiple cases

• Select multiple cases and associate/merge them. You could also open a case record and add child/associated cases within it (there are separate sections for Merged Cases and Child Cases within the Case record)

• In Parent-Child hierarchies, only one level is possible, which means that child cases cannot have child cases within them

• Only a maximum of 100 child cases are allowed for a parent case

• You could merge up to 10 cases – The case that is selected as the main case will retain its content and the rest of the cases would be added as the merged cases

• Once the cases are merged, the operation cannot be undone

• All the merged cases are marked cancelled and only the primary case will remain active. All the activities, notes and attachments of the cancelled cases would be re-parented to the primary case. No option to choose individual fields from the cancelled cases, but the cancelled cases would still be available in the ‘Merged Cases’ section in the primary case

• The Parent and Child Case settings could be changed from the Settings -> Service Management area