Close

February 20, 2017

Why Using Dynamics CRM with Sitecore Makes Good Sense

If you manage a website, you probably use a content management system, or CMS. If you want to run an efficient sales operation, you better take advantage of a quality customer relationship management (CRM) solution. But too often, the two don’t connect well enough for you to make the most out of either’s functionalities. Fortunately, Sitecore and Dynamics are here to change that.

CRM and CMS, Explained

Frequent readers of this space know about the benefits of a CRM, and particularly Microsoft Dynamics, to optimize your sales processes. It allows you to keep track of each potential and current customer, providing you with more in-depth information on them as they move through the sales funnel.

A CMS, on the other hand, improves your website management ability. It offers you the opportunity to streamline, edit, and manage any content on your website, helping you build a website presence designed to gain brand awareness and audience attention. Rather than having to build the content directly in HTML, you get easy editors designed to create beautiful web pages. Today, almost 50% of the top 1 million most-visited website worldwide use a CMS.

5 Benefits of Integrating Dynamics CRM With Sitecore

On their surfaces, CMS and CRM solutions may seem like they don’t have much in common, or that your business is perfectly fine using only one but not the other. But if you dig a little deeper, using Dynamics CRM with Sitecore actually comes with a number of tangible benefits for your target audience.

1. Build Targeted Content Based on Contact Information

Personalized web content is becoming more and more important to impress and convert your website visitors. In fact, three quarters of consumers get frustrated when the content they encounter is not personalized to them. Of course, you need your visitors to convert in order to have a chance of turning them into customers, and frustration is not a great motivator to accomplish that.

Given that statistic, imagine being able to leverage the information you gather about each of your CRM contact into more relevant website content. That’s exactly what Sitecore integration can provide. Now, you can show each one of your contacts information tailored specifically to their needs as soon as they visit your website and contemplate whether they should become customers.

2. Automate Lead Generation Stream into CRM

As beneficial as a CRM can be for your sales efforts, it can be frustrating on the marketing side. Too often, there is no easily automated way to feed new leads into the software that then automatically assign to the relevant sales agents and territories.

But what if you could build your lead generation web forms in Sitecore, and transfer them over to Dynamics automatically? Now, an otherwise manual process becomes easily automated. In addition, you can even configure Sitecore to capture information from partially filled forms, increasing your insights into your target audience and web visitors.

3. Improve Your Email Marketing Efforts

Despite constant efforts to push it off its throne, email marketing remains among the most effective digital marketing tools available. Sitecore and Dynamics both come standard with integrated email tools; combining both allows you to maximize your success.

One of Sitecore’s biggest strengths is its Email Experience Manager, allowing you to create more beautiful and relevant emails. Integrating it with Dynamics allows you to target customer and lead groups dynamically, and feed the success of your efforts back into the contact profile.

4. Enhance Your Customer Service

Without a doubt, retention should be an important part of your marketing strategy and business growth. In fact, increasing your customer retention even a little bit comes with significant long-term benefits and positive ROI for your company. Of course, it isn’t possible with great customer service, which is exactly what using Dynamics CRM with Sitecore can provide.

For example, you can build customer surveys that dynamically feed back into your CRM. Now, you can use that information to improve your retention communication and efforts. Similarly, you can design feedback web forms that allow your audience to submit customer support tickets should they encounter any problem with your product or service.

5. Improve Your Analytics Capabilities

Finally, we’d be remiss not to mention the enhanced analytics and reporting components of combining Dynamics CRM and Sitecore CMS. On focuses on individual customer profiles, while the other tracks web activity. Combine both, and you get a fuller picture of your audience’s behaviors and intentions.

For example, you can track browsing habits of existing contacts. When they visit your pricing page repeatedly, they might be ready for a sales call. Similarly, you can combine the sales data from Dynamics with your marketing analytics from Sitecore, helping you gain a better understanding of the actual success and ROI of your individual marketing campaigns.

Bonus:  Integrating with Dynamics is pre-packaged for Sitecore!

While the previous reasons hopefully illustrate the business and marketing cases for integrating Sitecore with Dynamics, perhaps the best reason to do so is that the actual integration includes fully supported, out-of-the-box functionality developed by the Sitecore team.  By using a genuine Sitecore Connector, you get more than just an integration to a third-party system — each connector is built on a framework that provides a blueprint for how to deliver data and functionality to Sitecore. This ensures Sitecore Connectors are not custom-developed, one-off integrations, but are highly usable, consistent, maintainable, and upgradable, ensuring that all of your customer segmentation data co-exists in both systems.

Combining Dynamics CRM and Sitecore For Maximum Success

In short, both Dynamics and Sitecore can bring their own benefits to your business–but combine them, and you maximize the software’s potential. Now, you’ll be much more successful in attracting new visitors, building personalized content, generating leads, and providing effective customer service.

Of course, to take advantage of all of these benefits, you have to get the software right. In other words, you need to make sure that your Dynamics and Sitecore solutions are integrated and work well together.  Working with an external partner can be immensely beneficial in helping you accomplish that feat. So if you’re looking to make the most out of your CRM and CMS solutions, contact us. We have certified Sitecore and Dynamics engineers and we’d love to work with you in making sure that your customer experience improves, and your sales soar.