Bootstrapping Dynamics Campaign or Marketing List

@Jim Clarke​ Jim Clarke - Scentsy​

FYI. I moved your post to the Products and Support​ section of the site cause you will probably get an answer to your product related question there faster.

Also, you have several accounts with us. Can you consider adding the word 'Primary' next to your title for the account you want us to treat as your primary account. ... and also consider adding an avatar too to your profile. Your call though: )

I hear this a lot. First, why do you want to maintain marketing lists and campaigns? That's a really key question to helping you figure out what solution makes sense. I see four main options:

1.) Use Marketo for marketing and stop using Dynamics CRM for marketing tasks. In terms of setting up campaigns and managing lists of members, Marketo handles this much better than Dynamics CRM does, from a marketing user point of view. Just one simple example - we can put leads and contacts into the same list; we don't require you to have two separate lists. For sales-related awareness, you have alert emails, reports and (soon) subscribe to smart list, and Sales Insight. This option is generally chosen by people who have very limited budgets and were only using the Dynamics marketing functionality before because they had no other option.

2.) Use custom fields and CRM workflows to transfer information from Marketo into CRM such that you can add people to marketing lists and campaigns from CRM. For example, I could put a campaign name into a custom field whenever someone became a member of an event program. Then I could use a workflow in CRM to take that campaign value from the field and add the record to a marketing list in that campaign (and vice versa). This option is generally chosen by people whose sales teams are using marketing lists (rather than their marketing teams), but it requires a lot of ongoing maintenance and setup. [I personally tried to do this for the first five or six months when I was a customer, but I eventually gave up and went with option 1 because it was a ton of work and I realized most of the salespeople weren't looking at the info anyway.]

3.) Create custom entities for marketing lists and campaigns to replace the ones you have in CRM now. This will allow you to use the custom entity sync and all associated functionality.

4.) Build a custom integration for just those objects, on top of the native integration. Most people seem to choose Scribe, although I believe they only support our SOAP API, so I personally would want to look into options that focused on the REST API, which might include building a custom web service or using some sort of middleware you already have such as Boomi or Informatica.

It has not been my experience that there's very robust reporting in Dynamics CRM on campaigns. I generally would advise people that they should be doing marketing reporting from Marketo and sales reporting from CRM (aside from people with BI tools, of course). I think once people see some of the analyzers and the program reports from RCE, there isn't usually a need to do that reporting from CRM.

I personally like to use the interesting moments with Sales Insight to pass some program information into the lead/contact records. If I want to send a larger set of information (like the webinar registrants), I might load a list manually into CRM the interim until subscribe to smart list is out. It's not really worth it to do the campaign workflow stuff, in my opinion. Building an integration would cost more up front but would save you a lot of money (time is money!) in the long run, so I would probably advocate for that route if my company was really insistent.

The main challenge is that Dynamics marketing lists have to be separate for lists and contacts and you need to check if the item exists first before creating a new one. But every CRM admin I've talked to about this has found it to be relatively straightforward and not significantly time consuming.