How to choose email marketing software that integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365
Besides needing to integrate with Microsoft Dynamics 365, what should you be looking for when evaluating email marketing software?
With only two vendors integrating with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and meeting your needs, this interactive guide is broken down into five steps to help you compare ActiveCampaign and HubSpot head-to-head to work out which one is a best-fit for your business.
šŖ This guide is personalised to you based on your contacts, budget and business type. If you havenāt already entered these, we recommend doing so to improve this guide.
1. Whatās your budget?
How much you spend on email marketing software is going to depend on the size of your contact list, the features you need and what your organisation can afford to invest in an email marketing platform.
Based on 100000 contacts, the average monthly cost of an email marketing tool that integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365 is $2093/month. While useful as a guide, comparing platforms on price alone is a false economy.
While itās true that you get what you pay for with email marketing software, this doesnāt necessarily mean that the cheaper platforms are worse.
Firstly, effective email marketing is about communicating the right message to the right person at the right time ā at scale. The more leads you have (and the higher value they are) the higher the potential ROI of your email marketing activity.
As a Enterprise business with 100000 contacts, you'll most likely get a better ROI with a mid-level/premium platform that offers functionality beyond basic newsletters.
Secondly, the price you pay today is unlikely to be the price you pay one year from now. As such, itās prudent to consider how much you might pay if your mailing list doubled or tripled. Donāt worry, weāve done the maths for you for both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot!
ActiveCampaign is the most affordable platform today, and will also provide you with affordable list growth longer term.
Lastly, while itās helpful to have a clear budget in mind itās also worth noting that the features (and therefore the results you can produce) with different tools are different. At 100000 contacts, you'll have plenty of scope to improve your results with certain features like A/B testing and automation sequences, so it makes sense to consider these in your evaluation process.
Which brings us neatly onto our next question.
2. What features do you need?
Nowadays, most basic features like templates, an easy-to-use visual editor, and segmentation are table stakes and found in virtually all tools. You may, however, want to consider some of the more unique email marketing requirements that your team needs.
As an
you may wish to consider excluding any tools that donāt offer enterprise-grade security features such as SSO & SAML, reputation monitoring and manager approval functionality.
Other enterprise features you might want to consider filtering by include:
- CRM - Do you need an email marketing platform with a built-in CRM, or will it integrate with your existing CRM?
- Other systems - Are there any other systems or data warehouses that you need to be able to send data to? If in doubt, choosing an email marketing tool with a REST API will ensure that you can connect it to most systems.
- Compliance requirements - do you need to be compliant with any regional or industry-specific rules (such as GDPR, CCPA, or HIPAA)?
- Reporting requirements - Do you need a platform with attribution features that will enable you to report on revenue and ROI?
With 100000 contacts, maintaining list hygiene and optimising email engagement rates will also likely be on your mind. Batch Sending, send time optimisation, dedicated IP and reputation monitoring are all worth checking to help you maximise email deliverability.
If there are any specific features that you need, you can enter them here to automatically filter out any tools that donāt have them.
3. Does it integrate with your tech stack?
Itās likely that your business runs on more than just Microsoft Dynamics 365. While itās not necessary for your email marketing platform to integrate with every tool you use, itās generally a good idea to ensure it connects with all of the tools critical to your sales, marketing and performance reporting.
If you havenāt already, you may want to consider adding your CRM, content management system, and any marketing tools you use day-to-day to the list of integration filters here, to help you further whittle the 2 email marketing tools down.
Feel free to enter any integrations you need in the box below to see whether this helps narrow down the choice between ActiveCampaign and HubSpot.
4. What do other companies like you think?
The email marketing software recommendations on StackUp are made algorithmically ā and most influenced by Satisfaction Score.
This score is based on 100,000ās of ratings weāve collected from real users of these tools. The reason we use this metric is that it highlights the platforms that deliver a good overall experience.
This matters because, letās face it, every email marketing tool says the same thing ā easy to use, a wide range of templates and lots of features.
Yet, much of what separates the wheat from the chaff is revealed through actual usage. From email deliverability rates, to support quality, security and platform stability, these are all things that can make or break an email marketing tool.
Satisfaction Score is a good proxy for this, as the tools with low scores are typically plagued by these issues, whereas those with high scores tend to get these things right.
Based on this, our algorithm has recommended
ActiveCampaign as the best-fit for your business with the highest user satisfaction score.
5. Can you try it for free?
All email marketing providers worth considering will offer a free trial. If not, that should probably trigger some alarm bells.
Both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot offer free trials, and weād recommend signing up for a trial with each of them so you can make a good comparison.
We hope this data-led approach has helped narrow your search and find the right email marketing service for you.
- ActiveCampaign
(here's the link to start a 14 day free trial- no credit card required)
- HubSpot (hereās the link to start a 14 day free trial - no credit card required)