B2B Marketing ROI

Less than a week after Salesforce.com announced it’s partnership with GoogleApps, increasing the offerings of it’s on-demand CRM suite, Microsoft announced Dynamics CRM Online, a full marketing, sales and service suite on an Internet-based model.

“At Microsoft, we’re revolutionizing how companies deploy marketing, sales and service solutions to users within their organization,” said Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM at Microsoft. “Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivers the power of choice to customers, with a familiar and productive user experience and a multitenant platform that enables fast on-premise implementations or ‘instant-on’ deployments over the Internet.”

Targeted toward small-to-mid-sized businesses, Dynamic CRM Online integrates with Microsoft Office and boasts a $59 per user per month price point, slightly lower than Salesforce.com. Focused on creating a flexible and affordable tool, Dynamics CRM has performed well with 500 participants in the Microsoft Early Access Program, offering more storage capacity and configurable entities than Salesforce.com, as well as incorporating workflows.

Learn more about Dynamics CRM Online here.

This week, CRM giant Salesforce.com announced a partnership with Google Apps.

The convenient new platform allows communication through popular Google tools Gmail and Google Talk. Sales teams will also have access to applications such as Google Docs and shared calendars. The partnership aims to create an efficient way to manage schedules and maintain up-to-date versions of documents and sales tools.

This partnership embodies the trend of technology moving away from installation-based softwares, as two of the largest advocates of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) join forces.

“Salesforce.com is thrilled to be offering Google Apps integrated with our Salesforce applications and Force.com Platform-as-a-Service to the millions of businesses looking to manage their entire office in the cloud,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. “The combination of our leading CRM applications and Google’s business productivity applications pushes forward the transformation of the industry to cloud computing. The end of software is here.”

This month, DMNews is featuring In perfect harmony: e-mail works in-sync with other channels, a piece about integrated, multichannel marketing campaigns. The article, quoting a JupiterResearch study on combining e-mail marketing with other advertising outlets, focuses on the increased results marketers have seen by creating consistent messaging across many medias. An emphasis is placed on building a brand within a campaign as well as testing elements of the marketing program.

Using an effective web marketing suite can help you easily create, test and measure many aspects of an online marketing campaign by:

Presenting a Consistent Brand
Providing uniform email templates will ensure that you’re putting your best brand forward with every piece of correspondence. In addition to making sure you have the last word on all consumer interaction, the sales team will appreciate the templates because saves them time. This way, you can reign your more “creative” sales staff, let them think it’s all to benefit them and still get clean, concise communications. Plus, using templates gives you the option to create HTML emails that will tie-in with your other campaign initiatives.

Integrating Paid Search Campaigns
With emerging technology, you can go way beyond simple cost per click and cost per conversion. New programs are available that can calculate cost per vetted prospect, cost per opportunity, cost per sale, and marketing ROI by tying your paid search costs to yourCRM opportunity data. This will show you what’s working and where to cut the fat - letting you improve your campaigns and boost the bottom line.

Testing Landing Pages and Emails
If you use programs that provide the right metrics, it can be easy to test the effectiveness of your customer-facing communications. Landing pages can be tested using multivariate testing. This works in conjunction with paid search campaigns, automatically directing traffic to multiple landing page locations. By monitoring traffic to different the sites, you’ll be able to see which page has a better conversion rate, helping to determine the stronger campaign tactics. The same theory applies to emails - try out different subject lines, times of day and days of the week to see which combinations most successfully attract opens and click-throughs from prospects.