By integrating a marketing automation tool with your CRM software, you can boost your business’s potential for increasing revenue and profit. An integrated sales and marketing solution can help you save time, manage a higher volume of leads, maintain more prospect and customer relationships with less effort, nurture leads and stay top of mind, deliver relevant messages at the most opportune times, and analyze your results and ROI. 

From our experience in helping companies with their sales and marketing needs, here are six marketing automation tools we believe will help you achieve optimal results when integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. 

1. HubSpot 
2. ClickDimensions 
3. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing 
4. Sugar Market 
5. Act-On 
6. Marketo 

HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is our top marketing automation recommendation for businesses, and it is a popular choice for best-in-class businesses and Microsoft shops alike.  

HubSpot’s solution seamlessly scales up or down, so it can work well for companies of all sizes and with a wide range of marketing requirements. It enables you to start small with basic features and then expand your capabilities as your needs become more sophisticated. 

Multiple vendors (including HubSpot) have written integrations between HubSpot and Dynamics 365 CRM, so you can choose your preferred provider, or work with a software partner to build an integration customized to your needs. Several HubSpot integrations enable a two-way sync, making data easier than ever to access. 

ClickDimensions

ClickDimensions is the only marketing automation solution embedded in Dynamics 365 CRM. It makes a wonderful mid-market tool and does an exceptional job at handling automated email campaigns. It also has some enterprise features such as forms, lead scoring, and duplicate detection. ClickDimensions additionally lets users access site analytics, manage events, and craft a customized marketing calendar. 

Because ClickDimensions exists and works directly within the Dynamics 365 CRM platform, updates happen in real time. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing

Launched by Microsoft in spring 2018, Dynamics 365 Marketing is a full marketing automation solution with features like multi-channel campaigns, event and webinar management, lead tracking, scoring, and nurturing, and data visualization tools. It has tools for building and customizing interactive workflows that adapt to a prospective customer’s actions, creating a personalized experience. 

As part of the Dynamics 365 portfolio, Dynamics 365 Marketing works seamlessly with Dynamics 365 CRM, as well as Microsoft’s other products like Microsoft 365 and Power BI. It can also integrate with Microsoft Teams to manage digital event planning and execution. 

Sugar Market

Sugar Market, formerly known as Salesfusion, is perfectly suited for mid-market organizations, offering functionality for campaign creation, lead nurturing, landing pages and forms, social media tools, contact management, and analytics, all without the price tag of an enterprise solution. Sugar Market also offers a unique concierge service where the company handles tactical campaign execution and reporting, leaving you free to focus on your messaging and strategy. 

Sugar Market’s integration is available for both Dynamics 365 CRM on-premise and hosted environments. It offers a 20-minute sync and access to Sugar Market’s robust web and email report dashboards directly in Dynamics 365 CRM.  

Act-On

Act-On is a flexible solution, offering multiple pricing tiers and support plans so you can select the package that best suits your needs and your budget. Their core offering includes extensive marketing automation capabilities with the option to add on more advanced features like reporting, business insights, and account-based marketing functionality. Users can also nurture leads, segment contacts, and run automated campaigns through Act-On. 

Act-On’s integration with Dynamics 365 CRM is equally flexible, allowing you to determine the CRM data you would like to see in Act-On and how often you would like the two systems to sync. Thanks to Act-On’s open API, integration is easy and data syncs in both directions. 

Marketo

Marketo is an enterprise-level option that offers robust features including forms, lead scoring, duplicate detection of contacts and companies, lead generation from social media, and more.  

Marketo wrote and manages its integration to Dynamics 365 CRM. That native integration enables it to synchronize quickly—every five minutes or so. However, after the longer initial syncs, users typically see Marketo’s sync period shorten. Data is synced one way, from Dynamics to Marketo, and this sync includes leads, contacts, accounts, users, teams, and more. 

MailChimp and Constant Contact

Although MailChimp and Constant Contact are known mostly as email programs, they serve as useful starter tools for small businesses and other companies that don’t have extensive marketing needs.  

MailChimp’s and Constant Contact’s cloud-based integrations for Dynamics 365 were written by third-party vendors, so to purchase, implement, and support them, you’ll need to add another provider into the mix. This also means updates may take several hours to sync between the systems. 

Honorable Mention: Adobe

Adobe and Microsoft have a long-standing relationship, one that allows for integration and collaboration across their various software offerings. Adobe acquired Marketo in 2016 and offers multiple marketing, experience management, content management, and data analytics products that sync with Microsoft’s tools, so there are plenty of ways to integrate Dynamics 365 CRM with Adobe-owned programs.