New Marketing Automation Provider ClickDimensions Boasts Tight ExtactTarget Support, Azure-based Platform

(Ed: Since this article was originally published, the partnership between these firms has ended)

John Gravely has a long history of building software businesses around Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  The co-founder of Dynamics CRM development firm c360 and former marketing chief at Scribe Software, Gravely's latest venture, ClickDimensions, is an Azure-based marketing automation offering for Dynamics CRM that launches today at ExactTarget's Connections 2010 conference.

"I've been working to incubate ClickDimensions with the focus of making marketing automation integrated into Dynamics CRM, built on the Azure platform," Gravely said.

Gravely believes that there is still a lot of room for growth in marketing automation for Dynamics CRM customers.  "Marketing automation is still a new category," he said. "It's something [Dynamics CRM customers] are just starting to look at and discover it's something they need."

ClickDimensions describes its offering along five dimensions: web tracking, lead scoring, social discovery, form capture, and email marketing.  ExactTarget handles email marketing "because they have a great email engine," according to Gravely.

Social discovery, or the building of a detailed lead profile by scraping data from various social networking sites, is a differentiating feature, ClickDimensions believes.  Other features like web tracking, lead scoring and form capture, while still new to many online marketers, are becoming typical for this product space.  The solution tracks and identifies web site visitors, links known visitors to their CRM profile, connects form submissions to Dynamics CRM fields, and scores visitors as leads based on their activity on various pages of the marketer's site. 

Marketing automation has emerged as a competitive hotspot ...