In our 5 Questions blog series, we profile our team members, customers and partners to help the ClickDimensions community become better acquainted. We hope you enjoy getting to know these individuals, and if you’re interested in being featured, send us an email at marketing@clickdimensions.com.

Michael Taylor
Vice President of Global Customer Success and Operations, ClickDimensions

1. What do you like best about your role at ClickDimensions?
   

   I have the distinct pleasure of being able to work with great colleagues and customers, in a rapidly growing and dynamic company. It’s a fantastic culture where everyone is committed to the evolving needs and success of our customers. In particular, I’ve been able to see the growth and evolution of our customer team, as we have launched our product consulting, onboarding customer success and higher impacting support teams. Every day creates a new opportunity for us to continue to evolve to meet the needs of our community, and I’m thankful to be a part of that growth and change.

2. What’s new in your department or area of the company that’s exciting for ClickDimensions customers?
   

   We strive to empower our users while ensuring they have a team dedicated to their success when needed. We recently transformed our support team, allowing us to respond more quickly and effectively to our customers and ensure that we are their voice back to our product teams to continue to drive improvements. We are also expanding our onboarding and customer success teams. I’m excited to see this growth as our aim is for all users to effectively leverage our solution as quickly as possible, and fully realize their strategic goals. Our changes have just begun and I’m looking forward to our continued journey with our users and community.

3. What is one piece of advice you would like to share with ClickDimensions customers?
   

   We measure our success by the success of our customers, and to ensure this, we have a tremendous team standing behind you at ClickDimensions. I want to ensure that everyone takes advantage of the resources available to them so they fully leverage our solution and see results with their campaign strategies. These resources include the customer teams, webinars, as well as our increased focus on interacting with our community at large. We are committed to continuing our focus and investment to ensure your continued success.

4. If you could live anywhere on this planet and take everything that you love with you, where would you choose to live and why?
   

   My wife and I both love to travel, visit new places and have new experiences. We really loved Lisbon, Cape Town and Barolo, Italy to name a few; so, I really cannot name one location. Ultimately, we would live out of a suitcase and see as much as we can!

5. If you could meet any historical figure, who would you choose and why?
   

   My undergraduate degree is in music history, so I would lean in that direction. There are personalities that are larger than life, and I would love to meet and understand who they really were. A couple of instant thoughts are both Mozart and Clementi who had a great piano duel in the late 1700s, and Beethoven who not only was a genius but had an incredible wit that would wreak havoc on his colleagues. Above all, Charles Ives, who is still the great American modern music pioneer. He managed to compose free of any influences, and created musical ideas and works that we are still catching up to today.

The post 5 Questions: Michael Taylor appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

ClickDimensions’ surveys give you a variety of ways to collect information from your customers with many different types of questions, including rating bars (stars), checkbox questions and radio questions. What many people don’t know is that even these specialized questions can be customized and styled in creative and engaging ways to match your brand guidelines or to simply engage customers and prospects in an unexpected way. All it takes is some simple CSS. In this post, we will cover how to use CSS to target and style these input fields as well as give some visual examples and recommendations of how you might use these CSS tricks.

Rating Stars

Stars are typically a great way to communicate a rating question. Their meaning is clear to anyone who encounters them. However, sometimes, it can be good to shake it up. Maybe you’re running a campaign to solicit new reviews and want to test to see if you get higher or lower ratings with different graphics or maybe your survey is meant to be good fun and you want to incorporate something comical (a few emojis come to mind). Either way, a rebooted rating question is just a few lines of code away.

First, we need to create a new sprite with the graphics we want to use. This should be a transparent GIF or PNG that is 16px X 80px. I’ve included my modified sprite and the default stars sprite in this post. You can download these and use them as jumping off points if you like.

Original:

Likes:

As you can see, there are five icons in these sprites. The bottom three handle unselected, selected and hovered ratings respectively while the top two are for the button that clears a selected rating. Once you’ve created your own sprite, we want to upload it to the image manager in an HTML component on our survey.

From here, we can temporarily embed the image into the HTML component and get the reference URL out of the Source view.

Click OK to embed:

Copy the source attribute out of the IMG tag in the HTML block:

Now that we have that, we just need to add a few lines of CSS to the code editor. There’s a whole block we need to add, but you only need to customize one line of it. So, first paste this CSS in the top of the CSS section of the code editor:

Then, find the block that looks like this:

Then, update this line with your URL:

Simply copy and paste the URL, save in the code editor and refresh, and you should see your sprite in place of the stars.

Checkboxes and Radio Buttons

Most browsers set default styles for checkboxes and don’t let custom CSS override them without special keywords. This is generally done to protect the user experience and keep checkboxes and radio buttons from being hidden. You can overwrite this with just a few lines of CSS, though, by targeting the input type of checkboxes. Back in the survey’s code editor, add:

Then, inside this selector, set the prefixed and unprefixed appearance attribute to “none.” This completely resets this element’s default browser settings. This looks like:

You will notice that the same statement was made three times with different attached prefixes. This is important because appearance still doesn’t have 100% adoption across all browsers, but by including the -webkit- and -moz- versions, you can get up to 94 percent coverage within the US and 91 percent coverage globally (these are rough numbers gleaned from https://caniuse.com/#search=appearance). If a customer isn’t on a browser that supports these statements, there’s no need to worry. Modifying checkboxes and radio buttons this way fails very gracefully. The customer will just see the default radio/checkbox inputs as their browser styles them by default.

Now, you can introduce a few styles, changing the checkbox when it’s checked and active as well as adding your own custom checkmark using an :after statement:

Finally, radio buttons function in much the same way as checkboxes. You just need to target the inputs of the type Radio instead of Checkbox:

Now, you will need to create a new “dot” for the middle of our selected radio button. To do this, use similar code to creating a custom checkmark, but instead of using encoded text as the content, use an empty string. This creates a blank section that can be styled using border-radius and a background to create a perfect circle.

Now, you’ve created a new ratings bar, restyled your checkboxes and created snazzy new radio buttons to spice up your survey. You’re ready to share your creation with the world!

The post Customizing ClickDimensions Surveys: Rating, Checkbox and Radio Questions appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

As discussed in our last blog post about the GDPR, the new European Union regulation will bring about significant changes for marketers around the globe when it takes effect on May 25, 2018. To help our customers in their compliance with current and future consumer privacy regulations, including the GDPR, ClickDimensions will be adding new functionality to our product.

Below is a summary of the new privacy functionality you will see added to the ClickDimensions product ahead of the May 25 GDPR deadline. We will provide additional details about these features – including specific release timing – in upcoming emails, webinars, release communications and user documentation.

Support for leads or contacts who have provided prior opt-in consent

The most common question we hear from customers is whether they can continue to market to their existing leads and contacts after the GDPR takes effect in May. The ClickDimensions system will consider any lead or contact that previously opted-in via a web form and who is currently on a marketing list connected to a subscription list as being opted-in. When you enable the new privacy features, our system will automatically append details about the lead or contact’s prior consent to their record as required by the GDPR. You can continue to send messages to these previously opted-in leads and contacts with no additional changes or effort.

Enhanced list import for leads or contacts who provided opt-in consent outside of ClickDimensions

Organizations wishing to be GDPR-compliant, and who gathered opt-in consent from leads or contacts using processes outside of the ClickDimensions system, will be able to use an enhanced list import tool that will allow ClickDimensions customers to manually import those leads or contacts into a marketing list within ClickDimensions. During the import process, the user will indicate that opt-in consent was received and can also provide details on how/when/where they obtained that consent. This process can be used on both existing or future leads and contacts gathered outside the ClickDimensions solution.

Obtaining opt-in consent in the future

After your ClickDimensions account is enabled with the new privacy functionality, leads or contacts who do not have a valid opt-in consent on record will not receive messages sent from your account. You can gather opt-in consent from future leads and contacts by having the lead or contact complete a subscription management form that contains an opt-in consent or by using the approach detailed above for leads or contacts whose opt-in consent is obtained outside of the ClickDimensions system.

Managing “Right to be Forgotten” and requests to view or update a lead or contact’s information

The GDPR allows individuals to request that a company provide them with a copy of all information stored about them in the company’s systems — including in the company’s marketing systems. They can also request that the company modify that information or delete it from their systems, known as the “Right to be Forgotten.” We are adding new functionality and processes to help our customers more efficiently comply with these requirements.

• Responding to data requests from leads or contacts. ClickDimensions customers will be able to submit a request for a data lookup using the lead or contact’s email address and the ClickDimensions’ customer’s account key. We will then perform a search for that lead or contact’s information – in the context of their relationship with the specific ClickDimensions customer making the request — across our data sources. We will then return the results of that search to the customer. Customers will need to combine this information provided by ClickDimensions with other information from their systems (including CRM) and return it to the individual who made the initial request.
• Modifying lead or contact data. ClickDimensions already provides its customers with the ability to search for and modify a lead or contact’s information in our system. That data can also be modified directly in the CRM system. Changes will take effect from the time of change and going forward. Historical information, such as reporting data that references a contact or lead’s email address prior to the change will not be updated retroactively.
• Deleting lead or contact data from our systems. ClickDimensions’ customers can also request that we delete all information about a lead or contact from our systems. ClickDimensions will confirm when the deletion has been completed and will keep an encrypted copy of that information on our systems along with an audit trail of the deletion as required by the GDPR. Customers will want to ensure they honor the lead or contact’s request by also deleting that lead or contact’s information from CRM or other marketing systems as prescribed by the GDPR.

Consent to and opt-out of web tracking

The GDPR requires companies to allow leads or contacts to opt out of having their web activity tracked while on a company’s website. To make it easy to comply with this requirement, we’re making enhancements to our web tracking functionality. These changes will allow our customers to include a web tracking opt-out pop-up anywhere the web tracking script is present on their websites, landing pages, surveys or web forms. Leads or contacts who elect to not be tracked by clicking on the opt-out button in the pop-up will immediately be removed from future web tracking.

Opt-in vs opt-out subscription management

The ClickDimensions solutions currently operates in an opt-out configuration – allowing recipients of messages to opt-out or change their subscription status using a link contained in an email message. The GDPR requires that companies only market to data subjects who have opted-in to communications. We’re adding new functionality to our subscription management feature that will allow our customers to choose between the current opt-out configuration or a new opt-in configuration for their marketing database. These preferences will not apply to transactional messages.

Subscription management support for SMS

We are adding SMS subscription management to the versions of our product that support SMS functionality. These changes will allow a lead or contact to opt-in to or opt-out of specific SMS lists in the same way they can with email communications today.

Collecting opt-in consent via campaign automation in the future

We’re making enhancements to our campaign automation functionality to allow users to specify an opt-in consent step in the campaign process. These changes will allow opt-ins to be collected and recorded across interactions with landing pages, surveys and web forms. Users can also obtain a lead or contact’s consent outside the ClickDimensions system, such as at a trade show. That lead or contact information can then be imported into the ClickDimensions application using the manual import tool described previously.

And while this isn’t a product enhancement, it’s worth addressing here due to the number of customers we have asking about it. What if you don’t have opt-in consent from an existing lead or contact? Now is a great time to address that issue, and you can use a ClickDimensions email send to do so. Customers wishing to be GDPR-compliant, and who have leads or contacts in their database for whom they do not have opt-in consent to the required GDPR standard, will need to send an email to that segment of their database before the GDPR takes effect. This applies only to leads that do not fall into one of the two categories listed in the sections above. The purpose of sending this email should be to gather the required opt-in consent from the lead or contact that is necessary to continue marketing communications in the future.

While our goal in providing this information is to help our customers and prospects understand and comply with the GDPR relating to the use of our services, we recommend our customers consult their legal counsel regarding their compliance and obligations under the GDPR and other consumer privacy regulations.

The post ClickDimensions GDPR and Consumer Privacy Product Enhancements appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

Would you like to send out the same weekly email to your leads or contacts on a certain day each week? Some businesses, such as financial institutions, need to regularly send the same email to their customers to check in with them or keep them abreast of certain information, such as their account balance. If you’re using dynamic marketing lists, this previous blog post talks about how to achieve this using a workflow. This blog post will look at how to achieve the same results using static marketing lists and a simple looping campaign automation.

Here is what the final automation will look like:

Let’s walk through the campaign automation action by action.

The automation will be triggered by adding your lead or contact to a marketing list. I have set up a marketing list called Loop List for this automation. As members will be continuously added and removed from this list, I recommend setting up a marketing list specifically for this purpose.

The first thing the automation will do is remove the participant from the marketing list using the Remove From List action. Make sure to set the action to remove the participant from the loop marketing list. This will allow us to re-add the participant at the end of the automation.

Next, we will set up the wait timer that will ensure the participant does not move forward until the desired day:

I have set up my automation to send an email every Monday. My wait timer above will only allow the participant to move to the next stage on Monday between 8 am and 9 pm EST.

When the participant has reached the designated time, we will then send the appropriate email. It is important to note that the Send Email action can only be set up to send a set email template. This means that if you need to send a different email each week, either the template record will need to include FreeMarker for custom copy, the template will need to be updated or the campaign automation will need to be updated with the new template. I recommend using this method to send regularly scheduled transactional emails where the template never changes.

Once the email has been sent, the participant will move into a second wait timer for 24 hours. This will ensure that when the participant is re-added to the automation, they will not receive the same email again.

The final step in the automation is an Add to List action. The action is set up to add the participant back to the loop marketing list, which will trigger the participant to run through the automation again, starting them back at the beginning:

It is important to note that the only way to prevent emails from being sent to someone in the automation is to manually stop them in the automation or if they globally unsubscribe. As each Email Send action is not tied to a marketing list, you cannot use subscription management in conjunction with campaign automation. Please be aware of your recipients’ email preferences when using this method.

Happy Marketing!

The post How to Set Up a Recurring Email Using Campaign Automation appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers the ability to create visually interesting and useful charts and reports on records in your system. One easy way you can put these to work for you is by creating a handy dashboard to get a customized look at the ClickDimensions data you and your company want to focus on or analyze specifically, like survey records.

With ClickDimensions surveys, we provide a built-in report that contains information organized in bar charts and a wealth of survey statistics data that can be used to understand the submissions you are receiving. In addition to this, CRM reporting allows users to query for the data that is important and unique to them, like a blank canvas. We provide the paint (the data) and CRM provides the brushes (reporting tools) to allow you to create additional reporting that suits your organization’s reporting style.

In this blog post, we identify how you can build some quick and easy components that highlight your use of ClickDimensions surveys.

To start, here is an example of a system-wide dashboard that can offer a quick overview of the level of interaction your surveys have received so far:

System-Wide Survey Reporting Dashboard

To build a dashboard like this, you need to know how to make the individual components. We will walk you through the process of building some components that can be helpful for your company’s survey reporting below.

List

One of the simplest, but often most helpful resources is a list of your records. It allows you to get a quick glimpse at important information, like the date a record was created or whether it is expected to create contacts or leads.

The list we’ve included on our survey dashboards is especially helpful because the list does not include other types of web content records: subscription management pages, landing pages or forms. The list gives us a quick overview of only the survey records we are interested in. Additionally, with our “personal” dashboard, we are able to specify that we wanted the list to only be surveys that are owned by our user record.

When you want to add a list like this one to your dashboard:

1. In your dashboard, click Insert List.

2. Enter the criteria you need to pull together your list. Here you can see our criteria:

For a list that only contains your surveys or your team’s surveys, you can create a view on the web content record that contains surveys where you or your teams are the record owner.

You would then choose the new view you’ve created instead of the Active Surveys view when you are setting the list’s criteria.

Number of Responses

Another handy component you could add is a chart that indicates the number of responses each of your surveys has received to date. This chart would allow you to monitor your customer’s interactions with your content and compare your surveys to determine which is receiving the most submissions from your contacts and leads. To build it, you would need to:

1. Make a custom Count field to count the number of posted surveys for each survey. When you’re setting that up, the field record should look like this:

We are using a rollup type field to count the number of posted surveys that are associated to a given survey over time. This field will give us an actual value upon which we can built our chart.

To configure a rollup field, you need to specify what it will be counting. For our field, we gave it this simple configuration:

2. Next, we need to build the chart that will display the data for each of our surveys. You will likely be able to build your chart with the following criteria:

As you can see, the Series is our custom Count field and we let the function be the sum of that field’s value(s) for each of the categories. For the category, we wanted the count for each survey, so we have chosen the Name field. Now, for each name (aka each survey) we are getting the value of the custom field we built represented as a horizontal bar chart.

3. The last step will be to add our new chart to our dashboard. This is as simple as selecting one of these two chart options.

But you can take the opportunity to make this chart more personalized for your particular dashboard by running it on a specific web content record view, which you can select here:

This is what allows us to narrow down the chart to show only our team’s surveys or only surveys that the user personally owns. You don’t need to build a completely new chart; you can just toggle to the more limited view right from the dashboard’s editor.

Source

Sometimes it’s helpful to see the origin of the responses to your survey. In this component, we built a chart that can identify if the survey responses are submitted after the survey was received in an email versus if they are submitted from the survey’s inclusion elsewhere for example, if it was embedded on your website.

This specific chart is possible through the conversion email statistics that ClickDimensions automatically tracks to identify activities like visits to your website, form submissions and, more importantly for this chart, survey submissions that occur in ClickDimensions emails. Because of this process, any email recipients who submit a survey automatically populate this Email Send field on their posted survey record with the name of the send.

1. Build a Custom field to calculate the value of Email and Not Email for your posted surveys.

Knowing that the population of that field indicates the source of any posted surveys that originated from emails, we built custom field to specifically calculate if the email send field contained data, creating an Email and Not Email field on the posted survey entity.

This two-option type field will use the following logic to determine if the field should be Not Email or Email.

With that configured, we now have a field on the posted survey entity that calculates the response’s origin and we’ll be able to build a chart with that value.

2. Build a chart based on our custom field’s value.

To build our chart, we will navigate to the posted survey entity and make a chart that counts the posted survey records that have the Email and Not Email values. You could structure yours like the following:

3. Add the chart to your dashboard.

This is the same process as the component above. You will click on one of the two Add Chart options when you are in your dashboard editor.

And, like before, editing the view when you are applying the chart allows you to narrow the focus of your chart to only your team’s posted surveys or only posted surveys for surveys that you own.

Average Rating

Here you can see the component we built to contain the average values of our rating type survey questions. This allows us to gather a quick sense of the response to our rating type questions. Because rating type questions used in our surveys are typically used to provide feedback regarding customers’ experience with the organization, this chart allows us to visually monitor the average rating value for each of our rating questions.

1. Make a view of just the survey answers that are associated to rating type survey questions.

This view will allow us to focus our component only on rating type survey questions, whose average numerical answer is a meaningful value. We aren’t including fields like text areas because the system cannot provide an average numerical value for those answers. To build this view, you simply select survey answers where the related survey question’s type equals a rating field.

2. Make a chart.

Next, we build the chart that will display our average answer for each of our survey questions that meet these criteria. This can be easiest to visualize if you are already within your new custom view. When putting together the criteria for our chart, we chose to get the average value of the survey answers’ numerical Value field. The horizontal axis will be gathering this average value by each survey question.

3. Add to dashboard.

Once our chart is prepared, we can add it to our dashboard. Remember to select your custom view for the component. If you want to be more specific about which of the rating type survey questions you want to include, you can adjust your custom view. The structure of the chart will remain the same.

Reviews – Good vs. Bad

One last component we feel may be useful for our survey dashboards is a more specialized version of the rating chart above. In this scenario, we have one rating question that we use in several of our satisfaction surveys. We consider a score of zero to five to be a bad rating and a score of six to 10 is considered a good rating. With this in mind, we are able to build a chart that keeps track of one specific rating question’s responses and tallies them against one another. This provides more detail than the simple average score value we had above. We’re able to determine if we are receiving more good reviews or bad reviews and focus in on any customers who expressed a bad experience.

1. Create a custom field.

First, we built out a custom field to calculate and contain the value Good or Bad when a survey answer comes in for one of these rating fields. Because not every survey answer will utilize this field, we included an NA (not applicable) option for this field. The NA value is our default. Only when the answer is for our specific rating survey question will we calculate the response’s good or bad value.

Here, you can see the calculation process. For our organization, a score of six or more was considered good, but you can configure the calculation as your organization sees fit.

2. Create a view.

Next, we created a view that only showed us survey answers that responded to our company’s important rating question. We want this view in place so that our chart will only show us the survey answers for this particular question.

3. Build the chart.

Then we build the chart on our survey answers so that it counts the number of good and bad responses that question has received so far.

4. Add the component to your dashboard.

Finally, as with our other components, we can add the chart we built to our dashboard. It is important to choose the custom view we built in step 2 to ensure the NA value survey answers don’t appear in our chart. Those survey answers do not provide insight into the responses our special rating field has received.

The steps we’ve taken to build the components above can be adjusted for your company’s personal reporting needs. Using the native dashboards in your CRM allows you to get a quick view of your CRM’s data.

Personal

To learn more about how surveys and responses to your surveys exist in your CRM, we encourage you to review these articles:

http://help.clickdimensions.com/survey-statistics/

http://help.clickdimensions.com/creating-survey-questions/

And to learn how to pull a CRM report with all your surveys’ answers, you can read this post:

http://blog.clickdimensions.com/use-the-report-wizard-to-create-a-survey-response-report/

Note: Please be aware that the above components are Microsoft’s native charts and dashboards. For additional help building these kinds of components, we encourage you to reach out to your CRM administrators and/or CRM partners. They will best be able to assist you with the advanced features and limitations of these native tools.

Happy Marketing!

The post How to Create a Survey Reporting Dashboard appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

The most efficient method to find a group of people who have been excluded on an email send due to hard or soft bounces is through a series of quick and easy advanced finds. We will start with how to pinpoint your intended recipients who have previously hard bounced or marked your email as spam. Since hard bounces represent permanent errors, ClickDimensions will immediately block this person after a single hard bounce. Moving forward, this person will always appear on your excluded emails list.

To keep your excluded email numbers down and your delivery rates high, we recommend removing anyone who has hard bounced from your marketing lists. Similarly, it’s good practice to avoid further sends to spam blocks in order to protect your sending reputation. Repeated deliveries to a spam folder are detrimental to your reputation and can have a negative impact on your delivery rates.

1. Open your marketing list and click Manage Members.

2. Select Remove Using Advanced Find.

3. Look for leads or contacts depending on the target entity of your marketing list.

4. Scroll down until you see RELATED > then click Excluded Emails.

a. Select Email Send | Equals | your most recent email send to this marketing list.

b. Select Reason | Equals | Blocked.

5. Now go back and click Select at the top.

6. Scroll down until you see RELATED > then click Email Events.

a. Select Type | Equals | DNS Failure, Generic Bounce: No RCPT, Invalid Recipient, Spam Content.

7. Click Find.

8. Remove these individuals from your marketing list.

Here is what the entire advanced find should look like:

Advanced Finds for a Group of Excluded Emails

To pinpoint which of your intended recipients have been blocked due to soft bounces, you’ll want to start with a new marketing list. Soft bounces represent temporary errors that can be resolved, which is why ClickDimensions will only block someone after four soft bounces in a 90-day period. To do this is, compile a list of everyone excluded for being blocked, then remove those who have hard bounces or spam complaints. So, in this scenario, the marketing list serves as a container to easily review and export the email addresses that were excluded due to soft bounces.

1. Open your new marketing list and click Manage Members.

2. Select Add Using Advanced Find.

3. Look for leads or contacts depending on the target entity of your marketing list.

4. Scroll down until you see RELATED > then click Excluded Emails.

a. Select Email Send | Equals |your most recent Email Send

OR Select Created On | On or After |Date of Last  Unblock Request.

b. Select Reason | Equals | Blocked.

c. Click Find.

d. Add these individuals to your marketing list.

Here is what the entire Advanced Find should look like one of the below options:

5. Now, go back to Manage Members and select Remove Using Advanced Find.

6. Look for leads or contacts depending on the target entity of your marketing list.

7. Select Type | Equals | DNS Failure, Generic Bounce: No RCPT, Invalid Recipient, Spam Content.

8. Click Find.

9. Remove these people from your marketing list.

Here is what the entire Advanced Find should look like:

10. You can export your marketing list to Excel for further analysis.

Happy Marketing!

The post Advanced Finds for a Group of Excluded Emails and How to Keep Clean Marketing Lists appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

Marketing dashboards are designed to provide teams with instant and continuous visibility into marketing performance. Taking this data-centric approach allows for specific email marketing campaigns. Instead of simply blasting an audience with a range of emails, you can focus on relevant, meaningful content that pertains to that specific group. Like dashboards, saved account views in Microsoft Dynamics 365 are also designed to provide visibility into a certain group.

A saved account view allows you to use views to define how a list of records for a specific entity is displayed. Saved views are owned by an individual user, can be assigned and shared with other users, and can be viewed by other users depending on the query’s access privileges.

Using the Add to Marketing List button on the navigation pane allows you to select specific contacts, accounts and leads to add to a marketing list. However, if you have a personal saved account view and would like to add all active contacts from the account view, not just the primary contact, the best way to pull the data is to create two separate marketing lists. Since accounts and contacts are separate records, create one list targeted at accounts and another list targeted at contacts.

Note: A marketing list can only contain members from one of the following record types: lead, contact or account. You cannot have members from two different record types in one list.

Let’s walk through the steps for adding contacts from a saved account, with an example of creating a list of old contacts that we would like to nurture.

1. Create a new marketing list, with the list type of Static and target as Account.

2. Once you have saved the marketing list, add members to the list using advanced find.

3. Use the saved view in the dropdown and click on the appropriate view. For our example, that view is Accounts by Old Reps.

4. This procedure will trigger the query to auto populate. Then click Save.

5. Now it’s time to create a new static marketing list targeted at contacts. Use the advanced find to query this list by using the drill down below. This will pull all active contacts from your saved account list.

That’s it! You have successfully created a marketing list from a personal saved account view with all active contacts.

Would you like to avoid recently e-mailed contacts? Below is an additional drill down to eliminate contacts emailed within the last month.

Happy Marketing!

The post Adding Primary and Related Contacts to a Static Marketing List from a Saved Account View appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

In our 5 Questions blog series, we profile our team members, customers and partners to help the ClickDimensions community become better acquainted. We hope you enjoy getting to know these individuals, and if you’re interested in being featured, send us an email at marketing@clickdimensions.com.

Brianne Galli
Assistant Vice President, Marketing Manager, New York Business Development Corporation (NYBDC)

1. What do you like best about your job?

I love being able to tell our clients’ stories and promote their businesses in the process. We provide alternative financing options for small business owners, and their journeys and unwavering perseverance are very inspiring! I’m glad to be able to be part of an organization that supports their success.

2. What are the biggest professional challenges you face, and how does ClickDimensions help you address those challenges?

Lead nurturing was a challenge for us as our data was previously siloed among different systems and applications. Now that we’re using ClickDimensions and Microsoft Dynamics 365, it’s easy for us to see how our leads interact with our different outreach tactics, and we can better guide them down the path to conversion.

3. What was your background before landing in your current role?

I started in marketing and journalism through various internships while in college, then worked in marketing for an organization called ASCAP in New York City after graduation. ASCAP collects royalties for songwriters and music publishers, and while there I had the opportunity to write for their website and magazine, produce their email newsletters, and learn about event management in the music industry. From there, I dabbled in SEO and public policy before returning to marketing with my position as Marketing Manager at NYBDC.

4. If you woke up tomorrow as an animal, what animal would you choose to be and why?

I love animals, so this is a tough one for me. I’d have to say a cheetah. I’m a long-distance runner and I’d love to be naturally faster!

5. What book has had a big impact on your life, either professionally or personally?

Both professionally and personally, it’s Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg. This book gave me the confidence boost I needed to work toward my professional goals. It also inspired me to do more to build up my colleagues and help them reach their goals too!

The post 5 Questions: Brianne Galli appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

A great feature of ClickDimensions’ landing page block editor is that it provides a simple method to embed form or survey iframes directly into the landing page. This is handy, but as some of you are likely aware, the form, survey and subscription page editors also provide the option to embed these records as widgets. iframes suffice in most scenarios, but some customers have wanted to also have the option to embed widgets onto landing pages since they can inherit styling from the parent page and redirect the whole page on submission instead of just redirecting within the frame.

There’s a silver lining to this scenario, fortunately: widgets may not be able to be directly embedded through the landing page editor UI, but they can still be added to the landing page thanks to the landing page block editor’s external resources tool. Let’s take a look at the process.

Step 1: Copy the Form Widget Embed Code

Begin by opening the editor for the form, survey or subscription page you want to embed by clicking Embed, selecting Embed as Widget, then copying the widget embed code.

Once you have the widget code, open the landing page block editor.

Step 2: Place the Widget’s JavaScript into External Resources

Widgets utilize JavaScript, and the body of the landing page does not support JavaScript. As such, we will need to split the embed code in half to have the widget display on the landing page. To begin, in the landing page editor, Click Page > Add External Resources, then paste the widget code into the header section.

The first two lines of the widget code that begin and end with <script> and </script> are the JavaScript component of the embed code. These two lines need to remain in External Resources since the Landing Page editor’s body does not support JavaScript.

<script type=”text/javascript”>var loc = “http://web.tomatogardens.org/clickdimensionscom-as6rw/pages/”;</script>

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://az124611.vo.msecnd.net/web/v10/CDWidget.js”></script>

To allow the widget to embed properly, the second line will also need to be updated from https to http by manually deleting the “s.”

…src=”https://az1246… → …src=”http://az1246…

The last line of the widget code, beginning with <div>, needs to be added to the landing page body instead. Highlight this line of code and cut it out of the external resources:

<div pageID=”h4d6kyeeeazqanohswza”></div>

Click Save to close external resources and return to the editor.

Step 3: Place the <div> Code into an HTML Block

The <div> code that we removed from external resources will be used to indicate where on the landing page the widget will display. Use the right click menu in the landing page block editor to add an HTML block to the page, then use the right click menu again to edit the block.

Click the HTML tab at the bottom of the editing pane, the paste in the <div> code that was cut out of the external resources.

Click Next, then Finish to return to the landing page editor, then click Save.

Step 4: Viewing the Widget

The widget is now officially embedded in the landing page, but something may seem off initially: it doesn’t show up in the editor.

This is expected behavior which occurs because the landing page editor is not officially designed to support embedding widgets. However, if you save the landing page, then go to its Embed menu and click the Embed link to open a live copy of the page…

…you will see the widget display normally on the live version of the landing page.

Congratulations! You are now the proud owner of a widget embedded onto a landing page. This will allow the full landing page to be redirected if the embedded widget is set to redirect on submission.

Happy Marketing!

The post Getting the Most Out of Your Landing Pages: Embedding Widgets appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

For those of you who have been with ClickDimensions for some time, you are likely familiar with how we have handled ClickDimensions certification in the past. A user would register for a series of training webinars, take a certification exam and then would be certified indefinitely. That process served its purpose while it was in practice, but the times they are a changing.

In conjunction with other changes made to our training processes to ensure that users get the most out of their usage of ClickDimensions, such as the introduction of the ClickDimensions Academy eLearning Portal last year and our recently redesigned Help Center, we have updated our certification process to a new tiered model.

ClickDimensions now offers three certifications designed for varying skills levels and roles:

• Fundamentals: Designed for the marketer that wants to quickly get up-to-speed with the essential functions of ClickDimensions.
• Advanced: For advanced marketers and administrators who need to take the next step beyond a simple email blast to better understand how to build robust campaign automations and how those emails get delivered.
• Admin: Designed for administrators who install the solution and need to understand the mechanics of how ClickDimensions works.

Each certification tier is accessed from the ClickDimensions Academy eLearning Portal and are comprised of their own curriculum and exam. Whereas the previous certification model required users to attend several hour-long webinars that occurred at specific times on specific days, the new ClickDimensions Academy provides comprehensive self-service learning paths incorporating interactive and engaging learning resources. Each lesson in the certification courses is less than five minutes in length and available around the clock so users can complete their certification whenever they are ready or have some free time in their day.

Both new and previously certified users may have a few questions about how this change to a tiered certification model affects them:

Q: What if I’m already ClickDimensions Certified?

A: For those who are already certified through our previous certification exam, we will honor that certification for six months. After which, you must complete one of the new certifications in order to still be considered ClickDimensions Certified.

Q: If I am already familiar with ClickDimensions functionality, do I still need to complete the lessons in a certification tier before taking the exam?

A: No, you can jump directly to the exam without completing the relevant lessons if you want. However, we do release product updates monthly, so it might be worth you time to go through the lessons to make sure your knowledge of the product is up to date.

Q: Do I have to pass all three exams to be considered ClickDimensions Certified?

A: No, you will only need to complete one exam to be considered certified, but we recommend going through as many tiers as you can to ensure that you have a firm grasp on all the ClickDimensions product functionality (after all, knowledge is power).

Q: How many attempts do I get to pass a certification exam?

A: You can attempt the exam as many times as necessary; there is not a limit.

Q: How long does my ClickDimensions certification last?

A: Each of the new certifications will expire one year from when the learner passes the exam.

Q: Is there a cost involved with becoming ClickDimensions Certified?

A: There are no additional charges or fees required for the certifications; we want to enable our customers to use the product in the best manner possible.

If you have any other questions regarding changes to the ClickDimensions certification process, feel free to reach out to the ClickDimensions Training Team at learning@clickdimensions.com.

If you would like to register for the ClickDimensions Academy, you can do so here.

Good luck and happy marketing!

The post Introducing ClickDimensions’ New Tiered Certification Model appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

You love a good challenge. Who doesn’t, right? Marketing automation is right there with you. These all-in-one solutions that feature email marketing, automated nurture campaigns, web forms, landing pages, web intelligence, surveys, social marketing and more are ready to step up to help solve several significant challenges that businesses today face.

Whether you’re in the market for a marketing automation solution or looking to ensure that you get the most out of your existing one, here are five of the top challenges marketing automation can help you overcome:

1. Lack of lead conversion. In an ideal world, every potential customer would become a paying customer as soon as they express interest. In reality, businesses today rarely find themselves in that situation and more often encounter consumers that want to be educated and informed, not given the hard sell. Organizations can easily deliver using marketing automation, allowing them to nurture prospects via multiple channels until they are ready to buy, thus increasing conversions, rather than losing touch with these individuals as they move through the buying cycle.

2. Unengaged customers. Marketing automation isn’t just for marketing. It’s also an essential tool for engaging customers today and fostering brand loyalty. Customer service and account management teams need to deliver personalized communications to their customers across a wide variety of channels, and understand customer needs at any given time. While email is a preferred communications tool for companies and consumers alike, the customer experience can be enhanced by marketing automation tools such as SMS messaging, web intelligence, social marketing and subscription management, to name a few.

3. Marketing inefficiencies. Time is one of the most precious commodities today, and marketing automation can help organizations make the most of it. Marketing automation can help reduce the time marketing teams spend creating, scheduling and sending many types of emails or other communications. This means less time devoted to routine tasks and more time executing big ideas and strategies. Marketing automation can also help sales teams increase their efficiency by helping them to focus on the hottest leads rather than on those that need more nurturing.

4. Lack of sales and marketing alignment. Technology can help with a great number of business initiatives today, including sales and marketing alignment. Utilizing marketing automation with a CRM solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a great way to align your sales and marketing teams. Combining these two powerful technologies gives each team insight into the same data and access to the same tools, allowing for more effective sales and marketing activities. It can also help the two teams more effectively collaborate on campaigns to ensure that prospects get the right message and right attention at the right time.

5. Generating more revenue. Email marketing platforms – which many organizations use before graduating to marketing automation – give you a lot of basic statistics, like open and click rates, that show you how one email campaign performed. While these are useful in shaping your future email marketing efforts, they do little to tell you the overall health of your marketing initiatives and how those efforts are impacting your company’s bottom line. Marketing automation allows you to track prospects and customers throughout the buying cycle, giving you big picture results. This can help you determine the effectiveness of your individual marketing programs and the impact on revenue.

Happy Marketing!

The post 5 Challenges Marketing Automation Can Help You Overcome appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

In my last blog post, I showed you how we can put together CRM functions to identify ClickDimensions sources of our contacts and leads. With our sources identified, we can start looking at how we want to use these. Today, we’re going to look at utilizing what we know from our Source field to help reach compliance with anti-spam laws for existing contacts and leads. Our compliance goal will be accomplished via a double opt-in process.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, a double opt-in means that you have given those on your marketing lists two opportunities to opt-in. A good example would be an opt-in form with a checkbox that has explicit information about how you will use the customer’s consented information, which is then followed by retrieving their subscription preferences before you can email them. This is particularly important with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) set to take effect in May 2018. You can read more about the GDPR here.

Now many of you may already have a process in place for double opt-ins, say something like the campaign automation set up in this blog post. If that’s the case, then you should be in a spot where new contacts and leads are double opted-in. That process is similar to what I will go through here, but the big difference is that we will be looking at your existing leads and contacts.

With existing contacts and leads, their source gives us insight into ways to tailor the double opt-in process to them. In this post, my scenario will focus on contacts and I will go through two campaign automation examples where the automations will be targeting contacts from two types of sources.

The story here is that I have a good number of contacts that were added to my CRM before I set up a full-fledged double opt-in process. The good news is that by utilizing what we made in my first blog post, contacts from ClickDimensions content in my CRM have the Source field filled out, letting me know more specifically where I acquired them. So, I’m going to utilize that Source field in addition to the contextual data I used in building it to sort them into groups and get them into the correct campaign automation.

One campaign automation will be focused on getting contacts to fill out a ClickDimensions form and the other, a ClickDimensions subscription page, as both groups of the contacts we will locate within our CRM have only completed one half or the other of the double-opt in process.

For each automation, a static marketing list will be created using the Source field and it will serve as the starting point. The main goal of each automation is nurturing contacts so they become double opted-in, while keeping the customer experience in mind. By only having contacts of a certain source included in the automation, we’re able to tailor the interactions with them. How we interact with contacts from one source could be different with how we’ll interact with a contact from a different source, right? We want to make sure the contacts are double opted-in without making them feel bombarded.

So, without further ado, let’s get to it.

This first marketing list is going to be for those who, based on my source, came from my subscription management page, but haven’t submitted my form for opt-ins. I know that there will be contacts that fit these criteria as I haven’t always had a double opt-in process in place, though my subscription management page has been published for quite some time. In my new marketing list, I will want to add members via an advanced find.

Once there, by utilizing my Source field as the foundation for my search, I’ll be able to locate these contacts efficiently. So, by setting the Source to equal the name of the subscription page’s value in the Source field, I’ve narrowed my list down quite a bit; in fact, we’re halfway there. What’s missing is a way to sort it a little further to make sure who we’re going to add to our marketing list HAS NOT finished the form yet.

*Note: Because the static marketing list members who met your criteria at the time it was queried won’t change dynamically, new people meeting your criteria will not be added automatically. So, until you have a double opt-in process set up for newly created contacts and leads from ClickDimensions sources like forms and subscription pages, you will need to add them manually to the marketing list, so they can go through the automation for the double opt-in.

So, to filter a little more, I’m adding the Form Does Not Equal and selecting my form, so I will get everyone who hasn’t filled out the form before.

Let’s make the second marketing list for contacts who were sourced via the form, indicating that they would like to be contacted, but have not necessarily filled out a subscription management page as we weren’t using a double opt-in process at that time (though we did have a link to the subscription management page in all our emails). We will want the other half of the opt-in, so let’s get that set up. This is set up in the same way as we began on the other list, but we’ll change the Source option to equal the form value instead, and then we’re good to go.

With our marketing lists out of the way, let’s make our campaign automations. Same order as before, so here’s the first one that utilizes the list of those who haven’t filled out the form. I’ve numbered each step and have corresponding descriptions below.

Let’s break it down piece by piece:

1. Start off with the marketing list we made. Using the Added To List trigger and making sure Run on Entire List is selected, we get everyone on that list running through.

2. Then, we send an email with a link to my form. In the example below, I’ve hyperlinked that in the body as Click Here. You can put what you like here regarding text explaining what you’re doing, though you will probably want to consult with your legal team for suggestions before sending it.

And just in case, I’ve made the bottom link in this particular email a little special. When clicked, it goes to a different subscription management page than the one used for my source. This different version has a redirect rule that sends you to the registration form so, even if someone clicks the bottom subscription link instead of the Click Here form link, they will still have an opportunity to fill out the form.

3. Now we have the Submitted Form trigger. This goes into effect once the recipients fill out the registration form. We want this here so we can continue into our next step which will start sorting people down different paths depending on how they interact with the form.

Let’s talk about that form a little more. A good, compliant double opt-in process form has a statement informing the potential recipient exactly what they’re signing up for. Note: You may want to consult your legal team regarding exactly what your form needs to say, as each organization is different and so are their marketing strategies.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at my version of a form made in the ClickDimensions form designer with text specific to my company and what I will do with the customer’s data:

4. Decision node. Depending on how each participant interacts with the form can determine which of the three paths they go down: two to the decision node and one as the negative path. Below is a look at what the decision node looks like on the inside:

The Ideal Participant (Accepted Terms): They have submitted the form and accepted the terms I have in the form about wanting emails and clicked the “Yes” checkbox. The decision node puts them through a campaign automation series that removes them from the original marketing list via a Remove From List action. I want them removed from this original list because if they accept, they have completed the full double opt-in process now and I can now email them normally.

The Non-Ideal Participant (Declined Terms): The good news is that they filled out the form, but decided to decline terms. It’s unfortunate, but it was their choice. So, they are removed from the first list just like the ideal participant was, but afterwards, I put them on a different marketing list. This list is static and I made it for the sole purpose of holding everyone who either declines terms, unsubscribes or does not respond before May 25. I’ll refer to it as my Declined list. This way I have all those records compiled in one place for use as a suppressed marketing list or simply for deletion if I want to remove them from my CRM.

The Inactive Participant (Did Not Respond): This bottom negative path is for those who get the email, but don’t respond, fill out the form or really do anything. I’ve set my form trigger to advance any participant who hasn’t filled out the form into this step on May 25, 2018. From there, just like the last one, they are removed from the first marketing list and added to my Declined marketing list. I’ve labeled it here as Suppression.

5. For recording purposes, my automation ends with a Workflow action. This runs an on-demand workflow I made that updates a custom CRM field on the contact record to show if someone completed this portion of the process. The positive path workflow action sets the field value to Yes and the negative path workflow action sets the field value to No.

Now let’s go over the automation for those who haven’t filled out subscription preferences, though you may have noticed that the first two steps are very similar:

1. Added to Marketing List trigger with Run on Entire List checked.

2. Send Email action (I’m using the same email as before, though you could change it if you wanted it to start differently).

3. The next step is now a Submitted Subscription trigger. And just like our other campaign automation, I have set the negative path to enable itself for those who don’t respond by May 25, 2018 that then removes them from the original list and puts them on the same Declined list that I mentioned earlier. After that, I have another Workflow action that runs another on-demand workflow just like in the first campaign automation that marks a custom CRM field for me, indicating that the contact did not fill out a subscription management page.

4. Decision node. The next part may look a little weird if you haven’t done this before, but it isn’t difficult. By dragging the same positive path multiple times to each series (four in this case), I get a decision node. This allows me to send people into different series based on their submitted subscription preferences. Here’s how the decision node looks on the inside with two of the options expanded so you can see how I have it all set:

Based on what they pick, they get added to the correct marketing lists and subsequently tied to the appropriate subscription lists. I also have a Send Email action in the series for opt-ins that sends an email confirming subscription status for each topic. Here’s what one of the opt-in series looks like on the inside:

For the opt-out series, I only included remove actions. In this case, Remove from List actions, where appropriate.

5. After the decision node, no matter what the participants filled out, they are removed from the original marketing list via the Remove From List action. They have completed what we needed them to do, so there is no reason for them to be on that list anymore.

6. Finally, just as before, for recording purposes, I have a separate on-demand workflow that will run and update a custom CRM field for me to ‘Yes’ when they complete it.

I do want to note that if for any reason, when participants are filling out the subscription management page from the email they receive in the campaign automation, they decide to check the Unsubscribe All box, they will globally unsubscribe, meaning they won’t receive any further ClickDimensions emails from my CRM. As for their progressing through the rest of the campaign automation, their participant timeline will continue to flow to the end of the automation through the opt-out paths, completing their timeline.

With all of this in place, we will get our contacts in our double-opt in process according to their source. And for those who do complete the process, each one will have an associated posted form and posted subscription record, meaning that if we need to look back to verify their opt-in at any point, we can see exactly when they finished the process. This means we will have a fresh record of expressed consent from our existing contacts that will allow us to email them confidently and in a compliant, permission-based manner.

Happy Marketing!

The post The Double Opt-In Process: Existing Leads and Contacts appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

Anonymous visitor data from ClickDimensions web tracking is an often under-utilized, yet very valuable source of historical information about visitors’ navigation on your website. This web tracking data provides insight about a visitor before they were identified and became a contact or lead record in CRM. Having anonymous visitor information is great, but first knowing what it means and how you can integrate it into your marketing decision-making process is key. With the contact/lead record identification being a conversion, it gives us a starting metric to work with.

Anonymous visitor conversions are a treasure trove of information on how visitors’ interactions with your company’s website are resulting into actionable data. For the life span of the anonymous visitor itself, we only have an IP address to associate tracked web activity. Until we get this visitor identified, the anonymous visitor data is based on the activity of the visitor from a specific IP address. Converting your anonymous visitors to contacts or leads has tremendous upside in how you plan for future marketing campaigns. You can also get actionable metrics using CRM reporting features such as an advanced find to create new views, charts or dashboards. In this blog post, we will show how to collect the historical anonymous visitor data of your existing contacts and leads to see the quantity of conversions and start utilizing the data further.

First, to better understand the data we will be gathering, it’s good to know when anonymous visitor data will be associated to contact and lead records. There may or may not be anonymous visitor data tied to a record and it is more complex than a simple yes or no answer. For contacts and leads with the data, there are a couple of reasons for that. If their contact or lead record was created in CRM before they started visiting your tracked website OR they started visiting your tracked website before a contact or lead record was created in CRM for them. Not having anonymous visitor data associated to a contact or lead record would indicate that the person either wasn’t ever identified as one or it’s possible their web visits haven’t yet been associated with their record (meaning they haven’t been identified yet). Examples of this would include the contact/lead record being created manually, imported into CRM from a list or other reasons that would not create an association between the activity for an IP address, visitor key, and the contact or lead.

Anonymous visitor data resides in a couple of different locations, depending on whether the anonymous visitor record is active or inactive:

1. The anonymous visitor entity, by navigating to Marketing > Anonymous Visitors. This contains current anonymous visitors who either haven’t been identified yet, so the records in this entity are still active.

2. Navigating to a Contact or Lead record > related records > Anonymous Visitors. Where the data will be anonymous visitor records that are now inactive. The records turn inactive since the person has been identified and is no longer an active anonymous visitor, but instead they’re now a contact or lead.

Historical anonymous visitor data associated to contacts or leads is the data we will be focusing on in this post. So, to start analyzing your conversions, you will need to query for the contacts or leads that were once anonymous visitors, using an advanced find. Since we can only choose Contacts or Leads as the entity to query on in one given search, let’s focus on contacts for now (you can also follow these instructions while looking for leads). Before going further in setting the criteria for your query, it may be a great idea to add additional columns to your advanced find results tab so you can better analyze your queried results. First, click Edit Columns in your advanced find then click Add Columns. The recommended columns to add would be: Full Name, Created By, Created On and Identified On. You aren’t limited to these columns and if you have any additional columns you would like to add, they may help provide insight specific to your business’ needs.

For the criteria, it’s pretty simple. You will reference the anonymous visitor entity, where Status Equals Inactive. The advanced find will appear like this:

If you are converting your anonymous visitors to Leads, you can use the same criteria. You will want to run your query to Look For: Leads in your advanced find. With that, the advanced find criteria used is a good foundation for looking at overall conversion numbers in your CRM. More criteria can be used of course to get narrower results, like looking for specific date ranges, days, months or years that conversions occurred.

After you have created your advanced find, click Results and you will see this:

For your results, it will tell you the number of contacts returned that have anonymous visitor data, meaning at some point they were an anonymous visitor to you as far as their web tracking data goes. These results are key to using your anonymous visitor data to discover how many conversions have occurred, who the conversions were, what worked in identifying them and turning them into a lead or contact.

You can see date/time values in the Created On and Identified On columns, which can tell you when the contact record was created versus when their web tracking data was associated (identified) with their email address. When a contact’s Created On and Identified On values are the same, it can mean that the source of the contact was also what identified them. For example, filling out a form or survey being tracked by ClickDimensions. If you’re interested in learning more about sources, we have a great blog post about that here.

When a contact’s Created On and Identified On values are different, depending on which one has a date/time before the other, the contact record could have been created first or the person could have been identified first as a lead before they were qualified into a contact (which created a Contact record for them in CRM).

Contact record was created first:

They were identified first before the contact record was created:

To see the associated anonymous visitor data for one of the contacts, you can hover over one of the result’s records to double click it and it will take you to the contact record where you will navigate to its related records and choose anonymous visitors from the menu. From there you can see the contact’s associated data in several different views by clicking the down arrow next to the current view name. Below is an example of a contact’s anonymous visitor record appearing in their anonymous visitor associated view where the now inactive web analytics reside.

From this, we know when the anonymous visitor record was created (by looking at the Created On column above) and the IP Organization they are under. This tells us the first time the person visited a tracked web page of ours. You can then double click into that record and see the related visits, page views or posted forms of that “anonymous” visit.

With the overall advanced find results and then looking at contact-specific data to better understand the results, there is a lot of great information to use for anonymous visitor metrics and this is just the start. With the relevance of your campaigns being important to building your relationship with contacts and leads, using anonymous visitor data can help you identify trends and add to your collection of quantifiable analytics data. In turn, these metrics can help you more effectively plan to target your current audience as well as your future converted contacts and leads.

The post Understanding Anonymous Visitor Data and How it can Enrich Your Customer Data appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

If you’re a regular user of the ClickDimensions campaign automation builder, you’re probably pretty familiar with campaign automation entry points. If you aren’t, you can read all about how to choose a campaign automation entry point here. But what if you want to bring people in mid-way through your automated campaign?

In this blog post, we will look at an example scenario where a company is holding a networking event and will be using the ClickDimensions Eventbrite connector to record registration and attendance in CRM through event participation records. The campaign automation starts with an Added to List trigger that includes a list of contacts who regularly attend events. However, we do not want to add just anyone to the list as it has been compiled based on attendance frequency. To preserve the list for future use, the campaign automation requires a secondary entry point. This second entry point also allows sales reps to invite contacts on the fly to the event that don’t regularly attend or anyone who may become a new lead after the initial email has been sent out.

The campaign automation will send participants an email that includes a link to register for the event. The campaign automation will check to see if people have registered for the event or not.

Start of the Campaign Automation

Again, in this scenario, the company has sales people who want to invite individuals to the event after the initial email has been sent. To accommodate this, but not include the new invitees on the marketing list, we’ve leveraged a Manual Add trigger after the first email invitation has been sent and after the first check to see if anyone has registered. Sales reps will be able to manually add leads or contacts to the campaign automation from the respective record in CRM, which will place the lead or contact in the campaign automation and send them an email invitation.

Midway through the Campaign Automation

Once a participant has been manually added to the campaign automation, we have leveraged a Date Timer to ensure that they will receive their first invitation a week before the event – at the same time the second email invitation goes to original group of those yet to register. Then we will check again to see if anyone has registered for the event.

End of the Campaign Automation

If at any point in this campaign automation, participants register for the event, they will hit a Date Timer controlling a follow up email to remind them of the upcoming event. But, if participants are not able to attend after receiving the invitations, they will enter a separate Date Timer to be sent a follow up email saying they will be missed at the event.

In the campaign automation statistics, you will be able to view how many participants were added by the sales reps and how many people in total attended the event.

Happy Marketing!

The post Utilizing a Midway Entry Point in a Campaign Automation appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

In our 5 Questions blog series, we profile our customers, partners and team members to help the ClickDimensions community become better acquainted. We hope you enjoy getting to know these individuals, and if you’re interested in being featured, send us an email at marketing@clickdimensions.com.

Rotem Ayalon
UI/UX Designer, ClickDimensions

1. What do you like best about your role at ClickDimensions?

User experience design is all about the user. I love making a difference, seeing the results and seeing the effect it has on our users.

2. What is one piece of advice you would like to share with ClickDimensions customers?

Be on the lookout for great things! The company is putting a big emphasis on user experience. Know that you are heard, every feature request and feedback is taken in consideration, and that we care and listen. Also, feel free to reach out! Through our forum or any other channel. You can even email me directly if you’d like. We truly appreciate any feedback!

3. What’s new in your department or area of the company that’s exciting for ClickDimensions customers?

We are currently working on the new drag and drop email editor. It is currently in beta testing, but will soon be available to everyone. It is highly flexible in layout and styling options, and it will take your emails to the next level! We are also planning UX improvements for campaign automation and other editors very soon.

4. What sound or smell do you love?

One of my favorite sounds is my son waking up (after a full night of sleep) and calling out to me to start the day. At the same time, I appreciate the quiet that spreads throughout the house after he falls asleep after a long, busy day.

5. If you could choose to be one age forever, what age would you choose and why?

I like growing up. We evolve each year and I wouldn’t pass that up. But I just turned 30 and so far, so good…so I’m willing to stick with this one.

The post 5 Questions: Rotem Ayalon appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

One of my favorite parts of a marketing project is the design work. It’s so satisfying to prepare an email or form or landing page with just the right look for leads or customers. That’s why in this post I wanted to highlight some customizations that you can make to a ClickDimensions form so that it fits with your brand design seamlessly.

The design elements I’m showing here are intended to enhance a standalone form, a ClickDimensions form that is accessed via the Embed as Link URL. This would be a scenario of sharing a link to the form itself via email or call-to-action on your site. Embedded forms should be designed with your specific web page (and location on that page) in mind. So, in this post, we will just look at styling standalone forms so they can be viewed as a landing page.

This post provides custom code that you may use if you wish. ClickDimensions cannot support or troubleshoot use of this code. If you need assistance implementing it, you will need to work with a web developer/designer on your team.

Getting Started

The example I’m using here is a referral form that includes a 600px wide image and a ClickDimensions form. I recommend you set your form’s Web Responsive option to Yes. We will look at using web responsive design today, and having that field set to Yes is imperative. We’re also going to use Google Fonts on our form.

Step 1: Create the Form

Go into your form and add your form fields. Our referral form is shown below with the fields grouped together a certain way so our design will focus on how the fields are grouped.

I recommend not putting your fields side-by-side and instead laying them out vertically as I have done. Since we may have customers access this form from their mobile devices, we want to keep the layout simple and adaptable for mobile.

If you’re including a header image as I am, it would be best to put it in its own HTML component in the form builder and set that component to a width of three columns. This will allow the image to look like a true header.

Then we will put sections of text (that are acting as headers for our form’s sections of our form) in separate HTML components. Our form’s fields are set to two columns so we will also set our text HTML components to that width.

Also, in our text HTML components, we will add a class to the <div> that contains the text. This is so we can reference it later for styling. You can see in the example below what I called my class, but you can name yours whatever you like. More instructions on how/why to do that here.

After text is added to the HTML components and they are saved with a two-column width, we will want to update the rest of our form fields to be two columns as well. My form needs all fields to be required, so now would be a good time to add that setting to your fields that need it. You can also do your mapping set up before moving on to the next step.

With our fields set up, the form is starting to take shape and looks like this.

Not a bad start, but we can spruce it up even more.

Step 2: External Fonts

Part A: Adding the External Fonts

In a previous post, I covered how you can include Google Fonts (or other external fonts) in a ClickDimensions landing page. The good news is that you can add Google Fonts to forms (and other ClickDimensions web content) too! You just have to use a slightly different include method to pull the fonts in.

ClickDimensions forms include a code editor that you can access to insert custom CSS or JavaScript. When pulling in an external font, such as those from Google, you will need to use the @import method. That will allow you to use CSS to pull in the font instead of trying to use a <link> tag which cannot be done in a form’s code editor.

So, for our form, we’re using the Raleway and Sacramento fonts; those are the same fonts used in our header image. Google has both of them available, so once we select them, we can copy the @import include option to paste into our form’s Code Editor.

When you copy the @import code, you won’t copy the <style> and </style> tags; just copy/paste the @import line of code. You can see how that looks in the code editor snapshot below. The code editor does include default CSS in it which can be customized, so we will just place the @import code above all the CSS currently in there so it’s easy to find.

Now, we can go through the existing CSS and look for any mention of the font-family attribute. Remove the current font specified (it’s probably Verdana) and replace it with the font you want used for that type of content. Our form will use Raleway for the field labels, field text and submit button text.

When changing the CSS in the code editor, you can use the Refresh button at any time to see how your styles are being incorporated. Just keep in mind that this is a preview tool, so some of your styles may not look correct in that smaller preview window. And you still need to save the code editor in order for your CSS to be saved. Otherwise, if you close the code editor without saving, your changes will be lost.

Part B: Using External Fonts in the CSS

In the above screenshot, you saw an example of how to add an external font to the code editor. We will take this a step further so you can also target the field labels and HTML component text to use the fonts.

Back in Step 1, we added the class html-component to our HTML component text. We’re now going to add that class in to the code editor and set Sacramento
as the font-family.

Then below the html-component styles, we will target the field labels so they can use the Raleway font.

You will notice that instead of referencing a class, such as html-component, we’re actually referencing a few different classes/tags here. This is because of how the field label is included in the form’s HTML. There’s not a class assigned to it, but we can use a CSS selector which essentially draws a map to the portion of the code that we’re trying to target. (I’ll include a link to my entire CSS file at the end of this post so you can copy/paste that selector if you want.)

With just these font changes, you can see that our form is starting to look quite different.

Step 3: Font Size and Colors

Now that we have the framework for our form and have incorporated the fonts we want to use, we can style the content and other elements of the form to complement our header image.

Part A: Font Size

First up is font size. When designing digital content, I like to ensure that my text is legible on a desktop as well as mobile device. So, I recommend never letting your font-size attribute slip below 13px. Personally, I like to use 14px as my baseline, but 13px is fine to start with as well. As you can see below, our field inputs are using a 13px size so any text, text area, or select fields will display the text in them at 13px. Our fields are all text/email fields so we won’t see this style in use until we type a value into one of the fields.

Our submit button should be rather prominent, so it’s clear that customers should click on it. We can set its size at 14px.

The other portions of text on our form are the html-component items as well as the field labels. We will add their sizes as shown below. Our Sacramento font is a cursive font so we will need to set the size for it quite a bit larger than the rest of our content. Otherwise, the text using that font will appear to be about the same as our 13px and 14px content.

A quick check shows our form continuing to improve:

Part B: Colors

Next, we will want to add some color to our form. I’ve chosen two colors based on the header image—a dark purple and a light purple/pink—which we can use to style the HTML component text, the required asterisks and the submit button.

First, we will add the dark purple color to our html-component class and also make it bold. Our html-component text, shown in the preview below, has adopted those two added styles.

Next, we can edit the asterisks that appear for required fields so they use the light purple/pink instead of the default red. The class that styles the asterisk is called requiredStar, and as you can see below, adding our color changes it from the default. Adding !important to the color here is necessary since we’re targeting an existing ClickDimensions style and we want our color selection to take precedence.

Step 4: Fields and Submit Button

Part A: Field Styling

We can also give our fields a different look than the standard box format. How you design your form will depend on your end goal(s) as well as your branding. In this case, our form could certainly benefit from removing the standard box look for our fields and instead give it a softer look that fits with the rest of our form.

The first part of styling the fields is to remove the current border styling so we can then add our own. You can see the default border styling set on text, text area and select fields below.

We will remove the border-top, border-left and border-right styles, and change the border-bottom style to look like this:

And from the preview above, you can see how removing the top, right and left borders made quite a difference for our text fields. One optional change I included was setting the border-bottom style to use the color #ccc which is just a slightly darker shade of grey than the original #ddd that was used. You can leave it as is or use a different color if you like.

We can also change the text alignment for values entered into the fields to be center aligned, again adding that extra difference to set it off.

Then to make the fields a little more interactive, we can also use the :focus selector. This allows us to assign styles to the field when they are either clicked on or if a customer uses the tab button to access the field. You can see the :focus style reflected in the screenshot above and below as the grey background for the field that has been clicked in.

Part B: Submit Button

Now, we’re going to add some special styling to the submit button. The code editor by default will include styling for it, so as we did earlier, we can just go in and modify it.

The styles we used are described more in detail below.

• letter-spacing: 1px; Used to add some additional spacing (horizontally) between the letters in the word “Submit.”
• background: #6F4C88; Adds the purple background color to the button.
• border: #6F4C88; Adds a border with that same purple color to the button. The border has a size of 2px and is solid (so not dashed, dotted or otherwise displayed).
• color: #fff !important; Makes the text color for the button white. Because white’s hex code is #ffffff, we are able to abbreviate it to just #fff.
• font-weight: bold; Makes the text bolded.
• padding: 10px 20px; Adds 10px of padding to the top and bottom of the button, while 20px is added to the right and left sides. Padding happens within the element, so this keeps Submit from being flush against any of the button’s sides.

Next for the button is an optional element, a hover style. Personally, I like adding hover styles to links/buttons when possible because it changes the button’s appearance when a customer’s cursor is hovering over it, reminding them that this is a link they can click.

The hover styles are described in more detail below.

• #btnSubmit:hover This hover selector is used by identifying the link/button and following it with :hover. In this case, the submit button has an ID of #btnSubmit so it precedes the hover selector.
• background: #fff; Makes the button’s background white when hovered over.
• color: #6F4C88 !important; Changes the font color to white.
• font-size: 16px; Makes the button text change to a 16px size.

With all the changes we’ve made our form is looking very sharp. There are some more styles that could be added to align the form and its fields better. Stay tuned to the ClickDimensions blog for part 2 of this post where we talk about implementing those additional styles.

P.S. You can copy any of the code we looked at today here.

Happy Marketing!

The post Customizing a ClickDimensions Form as a Standalone Page: Part 1 appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

Campaign automations are an effective way to streamline a variety of marketing actions, and are especially powerful and useful when combined with native CRM functionality. By using workflows, you can monitor changes to contact and lead records and automatically add someone to a marketing list. This is a great way to automatically add people to a campaign automation. By combining these processes, you will save a lot of legwork and you don’t have to monitor your contacts as closely.

To begin, let’s use an example where a business has different service packages or levels. The options for these service levels are silver, gold and platinum. The business has a field that denotes which service level the contact or lead has, and it is updated by accounting when a payment is processed.

Under these conditions, the first step you will want to take is to create static marketing lists for each one of your service levels.

Next, set up your workflow to run on the lead or contact entity whenever the record fields change. Then click on Select and choose the field for service level. Whenever this field changes, the workflow will run.

Your first step of the workflow will be a check condition that checks if the Service Level field equals Gold.

If this is true, then you will want to add a step and select Update Marketing List Members to use the ClickDimensions workflow assembly. You can find more information on that workflow assembly found here.

Repeat those same steps for the other options of the field, Silver and Platinum. Then, activate your workflow.

Once you have your workflow created, create a campaign automation and use the Added to List trigger as the entry point so that everyone added to the campaign automation will go down a different path. You can accomplish this by using multiple Add to List triggers for all the different marketing lists that you created earlier. In this example, I have created three paths so that the marketing list the contact is added to will dictate what welcome email the contact will receive.

Now that you have this process set up, anytime you update the Service Level field on your contact or lead record, they will then be added to a marketing list and will be put into a campaign automation. You can also use the custom fields to remove people from the campaign automation which is explained into further detail here.

Happy Marketing!

The post Using a Workflow to Add Contacts to a Campaign Automation appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

In our 5 Questions blog series, we profile our customers, partners and team members to help the ClickDimensions community become better acquainted. We hope you enjoy getting to know these individuals, and if you’re interested in being featured, send us an email at marketing@clickdimensions.com.

Lucy Bourne
Account Manager, Cloud 2020

1. What do you like best about your job?

Seeing the spark of excitement in people’s eyes when you show them a feature of Dynamics 365 or ClickDimensions (or both!) and they realize how it’s going to help them do their jobs that little bit easier. Also, a few months down the line into delivering a project and a customer tells you how much time your solution has saved them or what your solution has been able to help them achieve that they couldn’t have done otherwise. That’s what really excites me.

2. What are the biggest challenges you face in your work, and how does ClickDimensions help you address those challenges?

The biggest challenge I face is getting people to realize that putting some effort into planning their CRM delivery upfront is worth the legwork. Demonstrating ClickDimensions often gets people so excited that they are keen to go off and put in that legwork, and it also gets them thinking about the art of the possible with their business.

3. What was your background before landing in your current role?

My background is teaching business English to speakers of other languages. I loved it! I got to travel the world, meet many people, and help them achieve their business and personal goals through having better understanding of our wonderful language. Since then, one of my students even emigrated from Germany to Australia!

4. If you could live anywhere on this planet and take everything that you love with you, where would you choose to live and why?

Gozo, the sister island of Malta. It’s just off the coast of Italy, and my finance’s native land. It’s a tiny island, and I mean tiny. There’s 30,000 people (on a good day) spread across 26 square miles and it’s set between the gorgeous coastlines of the Mediterranean and northeast Africa. It’s rich in history and culture, and the cuisine is wonderful. I’m currently attempting to learn the language, which is proving to be a real challenge! The main reason I’d chose there to live is the feeling of community, the climate and the pasta!

5. If someone was making a movie of your life, what actor or actress would you want to portray you?

Jessica Hynes…we look scarily alike and she’s hilarious – much funnier than I could ever hope to be!

The post 5 Questions: Lucy Bourne appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

In the next ClickDimensions new release, there will be an option to switch your system to opt-in based subscription management. In general, what this means is that when sending an email, ClickDimensions will check to make sure there is an opt-in from each email address. Currently, ClickDimensions will just exclude everyone on your list who has unsubscribed.

Note: This will be available for CRM 2011+ customers.

Once you update to our version 9.2 (coming later this month), you will have an option in the ClickDimensions Settings area for Subscription Management Settings.

Here, you will be able to switch to the opt-in method.

Once you choose to switch, we will run a process that will make the necessary changes.

1. All members of your subscription lists will be considered opted-in, unless they have previously unsubscribed from the list or from all emails.

• ClickDimensions will query all members of marketing lists associated with a subscription list. All members will initially be stored as opted-in within ClickDimensions’ Azure.
• The data stored: email address, subscription list (the CRM record GUID) and the preference (In or Out).
• ClickDimensions will then query all unsubscribe records. If a member has previously unsubscribed from a subscription list, their preference will be updated to Out for that list. If a member has a global unsubscribe, all their preferences will be updated to Out. All subscription preferences are based on the email address.

2. Everywhere you can send an email (email send record, campaign automation send email action, workflow email, quick send email, auto responder email action on web content) will now contain an option to set the email as Transactional. If it is not transactional, you will be required to specify a subscription list.

• Transactional means that it is a non-marketing email. Examples of this would be a billing email, privacy policy update email to your users/customers, etc. These emails will not check any subscription information, but will still make sure the recipient is not on the blocked list (too many bounces or spam complaints).
• If it is not transactional, you will be required to choose a subscription list. When the email goes out, ClickDimensions will make sure that the recipient(s) have an opt-in for that subscription list. If they do not, they will be excluded with the reason Unsubscribed/No Opt-In.

Once we are finished switching your account to opt-in subscription management, you will receive an email that it has completed and emails going forward will be sent with this process.

Sending Emails Going Forward

A link to the global unsubscribe or a subscription management page will always be required if it is a subscription list type email, no matter how many recipients. However, if it is a transactional email, the links are not required.

SMS Subscription Management

Once you switch to the opt-in method, SMS will also require a subscription list to be associated to any send. The difference between text messages and emails is that SMS does not have a transactional option, so you must have an opt-in for that phone number.

You will need to create new subscription lists for your text message marketing. There will be a new field on the subscription list entity called Subscription Channel with email and SMS options. Create an SMS channel list, then use the ClickDimensions import tool to create opt-ins for anyone you already have opt-ins for from another method used prior to the update.

Gathering Subscription Preferences Going Forward

There are a few improvements we have made to different features to help gather preferences from your customers and potential customers.

Forms

Web content forms will now have an option for radio and checkbox form fields to be mapped to a subscription list (in addition to or instead of a field on the lead/contact record). If you have a field on your form enabling people to opt into your newsletter, for example, you can create a subscription preference for that list automatically by mapping it.

Import Tool Update

The existing import tool will now allow you to add subscription preferences. This will allow you to easily add preferences from previous marketing apps, or preferences you obtained in any way other than a ClickDimensions form or subscription page. Download the import template and add the information for subscription list, preference and a new field called Method of Submission.

Creating Preferences Yourself

The preferences will need to be created through one of three ways. Two are described above (form and import tool), and the other is through a subscription page. Creating a subscription preference record manually, via a workflow, plugin or any other method will not update the preferences correctly. The three approved ways will update the preferences in ClickDimensions’ Azure. They are held in Azure for performance reasons so that when sending the emails or text messages, ClickDimensions does not perform queries that would burden your CRM environment and slow down the sending process.

Documentation

The GDPR requires several pieces of documentation of opt-ins and opt-outs. We have added several items to help you more easily comply with these parts of the law.

Posted Subscription Updates

Within the posted subscription, there will be a new field called Method of Submission. This field will be automatically filled if the preference was created via a ClickDimensions subscription page or form. If you use the import tool, you will have the ability to enter how you received their opt-in.

A section called Auditing will be added to the posted subscription entity which will hold the view of exactly what the subscription page looked like at the time that the end user filled it out. This enables you to show exactly what the person agreed to at the time.

Subscription Builder Updates

There is an option to add a checkbox to the subscription builder where you can have the end user agree to any terms and conditions or privacy policies. If you add this to the subscription designer, this field will be required and they will have to check the box to submit the subscription.

You will now have an option to add a Phone Number field for gathering subscription preferences for mobile. As well as an option for unsubscribing from all SMS.

FAQs

What will happen with my existing campaign automation emails, auto responder emails and workflow emails that go out immediately? Will they stop working?

No, before you update each of these to be either transactional or subscription list based, ClickDimensions will continue to send them the old way. This ensures that none of your marketing efforts will stop working when you make the switch.

What do I need to do before switching?

Just make sure that all contacts on a marketing list connected to a subscription list should be considered opted-in to that subscription list (unless they have an unsubscribe for it).

What do I need to do after switching?

Update campaign automation send email steps, auto responder emails, workflow emails and quick send email templates to be transactional or associated to a subscription list. Update your web forms that have any fields for the end user to opt-in/out of a subscription list.

The post New in ClickDimensions: Opt-In Subscription Management appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.

Looking for information for a specific ClickDimensions entity? Good news! It can be easily accessed through the Related Records menu. Using the Related Records menu can save you time when locating information for a specific contact, email send or ClickDimensions web content record. The examples below demonstrate some of the most valuable relationships and data available in related menu options.

Contacts

To get to the Related Records menu for a specific contact, you will need to go to Marketing > Contacts and select a contact record. Once you are viewing the contact, you can click the arrow beside the name to show all options for the contact’s related information.

For instance, you can view all the forms a contact has submitted or the email events they have generated. The latter is especially useful for determining why someone may have bounced or been blocked.

Tip: If you don’t see ClickDimensions entities in a contact’s Related Records menu, make sure you’re on the ClickDimensions entity form.

Email Sends

If you are viewing an email send’s Related Records menu, you will notice that it will differ slightly from that of a contact. To access this, go to Marketing > Email Sends and select a specific record. Once you have chosen the email send you would like to review, click the dropdown arrow again.

From there, you can drill down into the minute details of your email. Sent emails represent every individual message that was sent, while email events represent every action that was taken in regards to your email (deliveries, opens, clicks, etc.) Excluded emails and suppressed marketing lists represent people that ClickDimensions did not attempt to deliver the message to.

Web Content

You also can leverage the Related Records menu to gather information for web content records. You can review the data collected from the web content, like form submissions, or associated with the record, like page views, to monitor engagement and traffic.

Happy Marketing!

The post Drilling into the Details with the Related Records Menu appeared first on ClickDimensions Blog.