Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is a marketing tool from Microsoft that can be used with CRM 2015 to enhance its marketing capabilities. It is actually an enhanced version of the Marketing Pilot product that Microsoft acquired back in 2012 and it is a separate application. MDM is available only in the cloud model but can be integrated with both cloud and on-premise CRM deployments. Although the out-of-the-box CRM marketing module provides the functionality to design and execute our campaign effectively, MDM provides more features to analyze our campaign with additional options for automation, collaboration, and social media integration.
MDM's functionalities are mainly in the areas discussed in the following sections.
This section is about how organizations can handle different projects internally. This area mainly provides the functionality to maintain jobs and their approval, check job status, and work with the tasks and notes. Apart from this there are different reports to analyze information for different jobs.
This area provides MDM core features such as managing customers, marketing lists, designing campaigns, landing pages, and forms. This area also provides options to create and manage events and manage social media, websites, and calendars.
We can use the management console to design our campaigns easily by drag-and-drop campaign activities. With the release of CRM 2015, the campaign management console is enhanced; now it supports multi-condition triggers, and embedded cross-campaign offers. The new email editor enables the MDM user to use existing templates or design new emails using a drag-and-drop build process or an advanced editor for the CSS and HTML experts.
As the name suggests, this area provides options for resource management and media planning. Under the Files area, we can upload documents to MDM records, just like using SharePoint integration in CRM. It provides the same sort of file management features as Share Point.
Apart from that, we can use the media section to maintain media-related requirements such as serving media outlets, placing ads, and maintaining rate card details.
Budgeting is the key factor while working on marketing functionality, so this section provides different financial tools to maintain expenses, orders, payments, and invoices.
This area provides access to the reporting capability of MDM; using this area we can track the performance of the different marketing activities. We can track our project's performance and review the marketing results and campaign performance; this information can be also downloaded into Excel files using the Export to Excel option.
