Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing offers automation and other tools for digital marketing, complementing the Dynamics 365 software’s integrated CRM, ERP, and business intelligence services. Compatible with a broad variety of devices, its features allow for the data-driven handling of varied marketing strategies across multiple channels.
What is Dynamics 365 marketing?
Dynamics 365 Marketing was the first purpose-built marketing software to fall under the Dynamics 365 umbrella, and it provides assistance with both the creative and data-driven aspects of marketing. Its range of tools allow users to monitor potential leads, set up and maintain automated campaigns across different channels, organize events, and track the performance of various strategies.
Microsoft designed Dynamics 365 Marketing to be fully integrated with Dynamics 365 for Sales, as well as the customer service and business intelligence solutions. This means that all aspects of your business automation services will share data, allowing for better feedback and more efficiency, with digital marketing strategies targeted more directly at potential leads, both old and new.
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For whom is Dynamics 365 Marketing?
Though the Dynamics 365 Marketing software has features that will be useful for all kinds of businesses, there are some to which it is more suited than others. Because of the complexity and depth of some of its tools, smaller businesses may be better off with a more entry-level cloud marketing platform. As for the largest business operations, Microsoft recommends making use of Adobe Marketing Cloud, which runs on the company’s Azure platform.
In general, Dynamics 365 for Marketing is better equipped for B2B marketing, as opposed to B2C marketing. Nevertheless, its tools can be used effectively for both types.
What are Dynamics 365 Marketing features?
The core features of Dynamics 365 for Marketing allow you to have full control over your digital marketing strategy, and to integrate it effectively with every other aspect of your business.
Email & website creation
The email communications that you send out to your leads and potential customers can be created and customized from within Dynamics 365 Marketing. A drag-and-drop interface allows easy building of professional emails, based on a range of different templates. Each template is designed to look good across all devices, platforms, and email clients. There’s also an integrated HTML editor, so anyone with the coding expertise can make important tweaks to the layout and appearance of the emails. After the messages have been sent out, extensive data is centralized about when and if they’ve been opened, interacted with, forwarded, etc. These results can be effectively displayed with heatmaps and other advanced visualizations.
Similar to the email editor is a web editor, which allows you to create customized landing pages and other marketing content for your website. Mailing list subscriptions and other types of information obtained from forms in these pages can be captured directly into your Dynamics 365 database.
Customer journeys
The core marketing features of the software allow for the creation and implementation of strategies aimed at particular customers or groups of customers. Here, the concept of a “customer journey” is visualized, to give a clearer idea of how this process will happen. Users of Dynamics 365 Marketing can use a simple drag-and-drop interface to build a step-by-step journey for their potential customers, or just use one of the templates provided.
For example, you might want to aim a specific marketing strategy at anyone who has visited a particular page on your website. You can use your Dynamics 365 database to find this group of contacts, and add them to the campaign. Next, you could choose to send out an email to all these contacts, and create specific trigger rules that determine when and how this will be sent out. Further steps could be set up to send out follow-up messages at specific times, or after specific interactions. The paths will branch out according to what you know about the customer, and what actions they have taken. In this way, the software allows you to easily build personalized customer journeys, nurturing these leads and encouraging them towards a sale. By aligning your marketing with your sales, you will be able to increase productivity and simplify collaboration towards your organization.
Customer journey allows you to collect a lot of data from your clients. You will be able to have a better visualization of your data on the Dynamics 365 Marketing dashboards. With these analyses, you will be able to improve your marketing effectiveness and to make more data-driven decisions.
Events
Organizing in-person events or online meetings like webinars can be a key part of marketing and sales, allowing you to have more direct contact with your leads. Dynamics 365’s events management features allow these to be integrated more directly into your overall strategy, and managed more efficiently. Every aspect of events can be handled by Dynamics 365 Marketing, such as:
–Initial planning and budgeting. There’s a step-by-step guide for those who haven’t planned events before, as well as important tools that help with registration, contacts, and attendance management. Venues and accommodation reservations can be handled from within the platform, as can bookings for speakers, and scheduling.
–Promotion and publication. A fully functional website can be set up for the event, with important information taken directly from your schedules. Guests can also register themselves, and this information will be relayed back to you.
–Webinar/simulcast creation. In partnership with ON24, the software also includes features that allow you to set up and run webinars and other online events, while also obtaining important metrics.
–Evaluation. After the event is over, you can track the activities of attendees, and use various metrics to analyze the effectiveness and ROI of your events, as well as tracking the generation of any new leads.
What are the benefits of using Dynamics 365 Marketing?
Though there are a range of digital marketing cloud software solutions available, Dynamics 365 for Marketing has the unique ability to integrate directly with other Dynamics 365 solutions. This compatibility helps your business in a number of ways, and the software also offers an array of other useful benefits.
- Knowing your leads better. As Dynamics 365 for Marketing is integrated with other solutions, information about your leads from every part of your business will be shared. This full 360-degree view of your potential customers gives you a deeper understanding of the market, and allows different teams to collaborate more effectively.
- Personalization and Branding. Marketing is likely to work better if it’s aimed at specific individuals or groups, and is geared towards a particular purpose. With an easy-to-use email editor, personalized customer journeys, and extensive information on leads shared between different teams, you can create marketing campaigns that are designed to suit the exact values and needs of your business and your customers. This allows you to build a strong, coherent brand, and to target your marketing more effectively, to increase engagement.
- Insights and actionable feedback. When integrated with sales, data analytics in Dynamics 365 for Marketing give you extensive insights into how well your marketing strategies are performing. You can identify which activities are working and which aren’t, and there are options to automate the prioritization of leads, based on their interactions, in order to get better sales results. Customer surveys can also provide crucial feedback that you can quickly action.
- Configuration and expansion. Basic functionalities of Dynamics 365 can be customized in all kinds of ways, and there are a whole range of third-party tools available to expand its capabilities. One particularly useful option is to connect the software to your LinkedIn pages, in order to follow up directly on any leads that are generated there.
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Dynamics 365 Marketing is a useful tool that perfectly complements the other Dynamics 365 solutions, particularly for B2B marketing and for medium-sized companies. It’s just one of the ways that Microsoft Dynamics 365 can improve how your business operates. If you want more information and guidance on Dynamics 365 for Marketing, or any of the other benefits of Dynamics 365, reach out to Gestisoft today.
For over 20 years, Gestisoft has been providing crucial assistance to businesses of all sizes, offering them the benefits of its CRM expertise. Alongside consultations as to which CRM solution is the best for you, and technical demonstrations of the software, Gestisoft also creates custom implementations of Dynamics 365 and other CRM packages, tailored to the specific needs of a business.
