CRM migration
Field-level mapping, validation, and rollback between Marketing Star and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales . We move data and schema; workflows are rebuilt natively in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales .
Marketing Star
Source
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Destination
Compatibility
6 of 8
objects map 1:1 between Marketing Star and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales .
Complexity
BStandard
Timeline
3-5 weeks
Overview
Moving from Marketing Star to Microsoft Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is a shift from a marketing-automation-first platform to a sales-relationship platform with ERP-adjacent depth. Marketing Star organizes data around Contacts, Lists, and Campaigns with per-tier send limits and list caps; Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales uses Accounts, Contacts, Leads, and Opportunities with a relational data model that enforces parent-record lookups. We resolve the email-or-mobile requirement from Marketing Star against Dynamics Contact field requirements, chunk oversized audience lists into sub-collections, and map Marketing Star campaign send history to Dynamics campaign responses with activity associations. Marketing Star Forms and Landing Pages export as static assets with field structure documentation rather than functional recreations. Automation workflows in Marketing Star do not migrate as code; we deliver a written inventory for the customer's admin to rebuild in Dynamics.
Every standard and custom field arrives verified.
AI proposes the map; you confirm before any record moves.
Parent–child, lookups, and ownership stay linked.
Calls, emails, meetings — with original timestamps.
Documents, uploads, and inline notes move with the record.
Source platform
Marketing Star platform overview
Scorecard, SWOT, gotchas, and pricing for Marketing Star.
Destination platform
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales platform overview
Scorecard, SWOT, gotchas, and pricing for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales .
Data migration guide
The complete Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales migration guide
Data model, import mechanisms, field mapping strategy, pitfalls, and cutover — by the engineers running it.
Destination checklist
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales migration checklist
Pre- and post-cutover tasks for moving onto Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales .
Why teams make this switch
Leaving
What's pushing teams away
Choosing
What's pulling them in
Object mapping
Each row shows how a Marketing Star object lands in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales , including any object-level transformations, lookup resolution, or schema-design dependencies.
Typical mapping — final map is confirmed during the sample migration step.
Marketing Star
Contact
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Contact
1:1Marketing Star Contacts with an email address map directly to Dynamics 365 Contact. Contacts with only a mobile phone number and no email require resolution: Dynamics requires at least one email or phone value, so we flag phone-only contacts during profiling and apply a customer-directed strategy (exclude, add a placeholder email domain, or suppress). We preserve the original Marketing Star contact ID in a custom field ms_original_contact_id__c for reconciliation.
Marketing Star
Contact
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Lead
1:manyMarketing Star Contacts without a purchase history or sales-touch record map to Dynamics 365 Lead rather than Contact. We apply a split rule based on the customer's list of marketing-only versus sales-touched contacts. Any original Marketing Star lead scoring or tag data migrates as custom fields on the Dynamics Lead record.
Marketing Star
Company
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Account
1:1Marketing Star Company records map to Dynamics 365 Account. The company domain becomes the Account Website field and is used as a dedupe key during import. Account must be created before Contact import so that the parent AccountId lookup is satisfied at the moment of Contact insert.
Marketing Star
List
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Marketing List
1:1Marketing Star Lists export as static Marketing List memberships in Dynamics 365. For lists exceeding 50,000 records, we chunk into sub-lists that respect any intermediate staging limits and recreate the combined audience view in Dynamics using a query-based dynamic Marketing List with equivalent filter criteria. List names and descriptions map to the Marketing List name and owner.
Marketing Star
Campaign
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Campaign
1:1Marketing Star Campaigns (email, SMS, and QR code sends) map to Dynamics 365 Campaign. Campaign name, objective, start date, and end date migrate directly. Send metrics (delivery rate, open rate, click rate) migrate as custom Campaign fields since Dynamics Campaign Response tracks member responses rather than aggregate campaign metrics.
Marketing Star
Campaign
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Campaign Response
1:manyIndividual send responses within a Marketing Star Campaign (opened, clicked, bounced, unsubscribed) map to Dynamics 365 Campaign Response records, one per contact response. This captures per-recipient engagement history against the parent Campaign rather than losing granular send data at the campaign level.
Marketing Star
Form
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Dynamics 365 Form (Power Apps)
1:1Marketing Star Forms export as field-structure documentation and HTML form content. Form field names and types map to Dynamics 365 model-driven app form fields. Form submissions migrate as Contact or Lead records with the submitted field values populated. We do not recreate the form as a functional web form in Dynamics; the customer deploys the form to a hosting platform or Power Pages and connects it via Dynamics SDK or Power Automate.
Marketing Star
Landing Page
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Power Pages or static HTML
1:1Marketing Star Landing Pages (Ultimate tier only) export as HTML content and URL redirect configurations. We deliver the page content as static assets and document the URL redirect rules for the customer to re-implement on their hosting platform. Dynamics 365 does not include a native landing page builder in the Sales app; Power Pages is a separate license scope.
| Marketing Star | Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales | Compatibility | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contact | Contact1:1 | Fully supported | |
| Contact | Lead1:many | Fully supported | |
| Company | Account1:1 | Fully supported | |
| List | Marketing List1:1 | Fully supported | |
| Campaign | Campaign1:1 | Fully supported | |
| Campaign | Campaign Response1:many | Fully supported | |
| Form | Dynamics 365 Form (Power Apps)1:1 | Fully supported | |
| Landing Page | Power Pages or static HTML1:1 | Fully supported |
Gotchas + challenges
Platform-specific issues from each side, plus the pair-specific challenges that don't show up on either platform's page on its own.
Marketing Star gotchas
Import requires email or mobile phone on every record
List size caps hard-stop uploads
Landing pages not available below Ultimate tier
Annual billing discount not applied during migrations
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales gotchas
Professional tier 15-table custom table limit blocks migrations
October 2024 pricing increase applies at renewal for all customers
Custom fields must be created in the UI before API writes
Power Platform request limits apply to bulk migrations
Activity records orphaned to inactive owners fail silently
Pair-specific challenges
Migration approach
Discovery and scope audit
We audit the source Marketing Star portal for contact volume, list count, campaign history, form count, landing page count, workflow inventory, and SMS opt-in status. We pair this with a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales environment audit: existing schema, custom fields, security roles, validation rules, and whether the destination tenant is a fresh provisioning or an occupied org. The discovery output is a written migration scope with record counts per object and a list of validation rules to suspend during migration.
Schema design and Account pre-creation
We design the Dynamics 365 destination schema including custom fields on Account and Contact (mapped from Marketing Star Company and Contact properties), Lead fields for marketing-only contacts, and any custom entities needed. We pre-create Accounts from Marketing Star Companies before any Contact load so that parent-lookup references are satisfied. This step includes configuring Record Types and Sales Processes if the customer's deal workflow requires them.
Data profiling and quality remediation
We run a profiling pass across all Marketing Star contacts to identify records missing both email and mobile phone, duplicate Company names that would create duplicate Accounts, and records with invalid date formats or special characters. We present the quality report to the customer and apply their chosen remediation strategy (exclude, correct, or suppress) before any data is staged for migration.
Sandbox migration and reconciliation
We run a full migration into a Dynamics 365 Sandbox (Full Copy or Partial Copy) using production-like data volume. The customer's RevOps lead reconciles record counts (Accounts in, Contacts in, Leads in, Campaign responses in), spot-checks 25-50 records against the Marketing Star source, and validates that Dynamics validation rules did not silently reject records. Any mapping corrections happen in the sandbox before production migration begins.
Production migration in dependency order
We run production migration in record-dependency order: Accounts (from Marketing Star Companies), Contacts (with AccountId resolved), Leads (for marketing-only contacts), Campaigns (with campaign metadata), Campaign Responses (per-contact send history), and Form submission records. Each phase emits a row-count reconciliation report before the next phase begins. SMS opt-in status migrates to the Dynamics Contact msdyn_gdproptype field.
Cutover, validation, and workflow handoff
We freeze Marketing Star writes during cutover, run a final delta migration of records modified during the migration window, then enable Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales as the system of record. We deliver the Automation Workflow inventory document to the customer's admin team. We support a one-week post-cutover window where we resolve reconciliation issues. We do not rebuild Marketing Star workflows as Dynamics 365 workflows inside the migration scope.
Platform deep dives
Marketing Star
Source
Strengths
Weaknesses
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Destination
Strengths
Weaknesses
Complexity grading
Standard CRM migration. 1 of 8 objects need a mapping; the rest are 1:1.
Overall complexity
Standard migration
Derived from compatibility, mapping clarity, API constraints, and data volume across Marketing Star and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales .
Object compatibility
1 of 8 objects need a mapping; the rest are 1:1.
Field mapping clarity
Field mapping is derived from defaults — final spec confirmed during the sample migration.
Timeline complexity
8-object category — typical timelines run 2–7 days end-to-end.
API constraints
Marketing Star: Not publicly documented.
Data volume sensitivity
Marketing Star doesn't expose a bulk API — REST + parallelization used for high-volume runs.
Estimator
Rule-based pricing — no per-record fees, no manual quotes. Migrations over 2M records are scoped individually.
Step 1
Pick a category, then your source and destination platforms.
Category
FAQ
Answers to the questions buyers ask most during Marketing Star to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales migration scoping. Not seeing yours? Book a call.
Walk through your Marketing Star to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales migration with a real engineer — 30 minutes, free, written quote within 24 hours.
Book a free 30 minute consultationAdjacent paths
Other ways to leave Marketing Star
Other ways to arrive at Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Ready when you are
Tell us record counts and timeline. We'll come back with a written quote inside 1 business day — no commitment, no sales pitch.
