For many years, ClickDimensions was the only reputable marketing solution for Dynamics 365. It allowed organisations to manage all of their marketing needs within Dynamics 365, even when it was Microsoft CRM. However in 2018, Microsoft released Dynamics 365 Marketing as a 1st Party App that comes into competition with ClickDimensions. Dynamics 365 for Marketing (or D4M for short) has grown in popularity and appears to be the best option for most businesses, but let’s compare the two products on a few key points.
We can’t compare the two without addressing the elephant in the room. Microsoft created Dynamics 365 Marketing – because the product is fully integrated with the Microsoft suite, they have an immediate advantage over ClickDimensions. According to the roadmap for future releases, more and more resources are being poured into Dynamics 365 Marketing.
But will ClickDimensions be able to retain you?
1. Email Builders
2. Storage
3. Social Media Marketing
4. SMS
5. Pricing
1. Both products provide more than sufficient email builders and both have like for like features. The layout and use of the email builder will be a personal preference, but Dynamics 365 Marketing has designed it specifically for the unified interface, giving it a fresh look.Both products allow you to send test emails, but Dynamics 365 Marketing has recently introduced real-time previews by choosing a contact to test the content on without sending it to them – this can be an excellent method for testing field mappings.
2. Storage in Dynamics 365 can be difficult to manage, especially if your organisation is large or has a complex Database. When you use ClickDimensions, every piece of marketing you do is saved against your environment. If you send 20,000 emails, those 20,000 emails, along with all the analytics, will take up space. These records accumulate and take up more and more space over time. Dynamics 365 Marketing stores marketing data in a separate database in the cloud, requiring no additional environment space for analytics. You still have records for emails, journeys, and so on, but they don’t have the same impact as ClickDimensions. Albeit with the restriction that you cannot run Advanced Find queries on D4M Marketing Interaction Data whereas you can with ClickDimensions given its key Entities and as ready as any Custom Table added to the Dynamics / Dataverse Database.
3. Social media marketing is an essential component of any modern business, and both products have advantages. You can use both products to post to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Linked-In. ClickDimensions provides a more comprehensive analytics package for these channels, but falls short of whats possible with Linkedin using Dynamics 365 Marketing. Because Microsoft owns Linked-In, they provide a more comprehensive integration that allows you to manage profiles from within the product and integrate lead-gen forms for quick pre-populated leads from Linkedin to Dynamics.
4. Sending SMS messages as part of a marketing campaign is a very useful tool, and ClickDimensions currently outperforms Dynamics 365 Marketing in this area. This is due to the fact that you cannot currently send SMS messages from Dynamics 365 Marketing; however, this is a feature that Microsoft plans to add to Dynamics 365 Marketing in 2021 with Multi-Channel Marketing.
5. Pricing with Dynamics 365 can be perplexing, as is so often the way with Software Licensing. If you have a minimum of ten Enterprise or professional licenses, you can get Dynamics 365 Marketing for £565.60 per month. Otherwise the App can be purchased standalone for a monthly fee is £1131.20. Nothing is feature gated and so you get access to everything Dynamics 365 Marketing has to offer for both costs – but the pricing is based on the number of ‘Marketing Contacts’ (I.e. the number of people you actively market to in a given month.) The initial level provides for marketing to 10,000 Contacts – with additional volumes being purchased in packs to market to increasing numbers. In this context, Dynamics does not really restrict the number of Emails or other Communications you send to these Contacts – so you can send up to 10 Emails per Month to a Contact (so 100,000 emails to your 10,000 contacts each month)
Pricing with Click Dimensions on the other hand works on a tier basis, starting at Basic, then Business and then Premier. Each tier provides more features than the last and allows a higher volume of emails sent within a year:
Basic starts at roughly £360 to send 50,000 emails a year
Business at £508 to send 200,000 emails a year
Premier at £944 to send 400,000 emails a year
You can find more about pricing of both products below:
Dynamics 365: https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/#Marketing
ClickDimensions: https://clickdimensions.com/pricing/
The Conclusion
In conclusion, the products themselves are quite similar; they provide the same features at comparable prices, though storage costs may be an issue with ClickDimensions. Because Microsoft owns Dynamics 365 Marketing, they can do things that ClickDimensions will never be able to.
One thing to think about is which product will continue to improve. Dynamics 365 Marketing has become a complete marketing solution in a much shorter period of time than ClickDimensions took a decade to achieve.
One thing to watch with both products is the inclusion of AI and Machine Learning into how we track the effectiveness of our marketing – from the ability of AI to spot particularly engaging elements of our Email Templates and make recommendations, to the ability to automate traditional A/B Testing.
Further Reading
Transforming Dynamics 365 Marketing: Want to learn more about Dynamics 365 Marketing
Read our Day In The Life Article to get a first-hand look at how we assisted Puma Investments with D4M: Dynamics Day In The Life: Puma Investments
