Introduction:
You may have heard of something called the ‘Metaverse,’ which is an effort by technologists to bring social media, online gaming, and other digital properties under a unified AR/VR world.
Now, efforts are underway to do the same thing with your corporate data– the creation of a ‘Dataverse,’ where you’ll be able to collect, manage, and aggregate data into a shared set of info about your customers, constituents, and organizations with which you interact. The goal is to make it actionable for smarter lead generation, opportunity nurturing, and higher closing rates.
Welcome to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, a modern Marketing platform that leverages the Dataverse to help companies more effectively take their customers on a Marketing journey. It’s the brain behind rich sets of communications and interactions that provide incentives to work with your organization.
Though it shares some similarities with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales and Customer Service, the Marketing variety has become a necessity to help companies compete in today’s marketplace. That’s because it can help automate communications along the customer journey to enhance customer service, nurture the customer and constituent base, and ultimately turn clients into repeat clients.
Your Marketing and sales teams will appreciate the way it handles data collected along this journey – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing tracks and pushes activity data back into your customer relationship management system, so you can monitor the effectiveness of your digital campaigns and other events.
Here are the specific features bundled into the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing platform:
- Segments and customer journey – Create dynamic lists of prospects and customers, using criteria that you set, to automatically manage the communications that are delivered, based on their level of engagement. Commonly referred to as ‘drip campaigns,’ these communications do the heavy lifting of incubating leads and driving traffic where you want it to go.
- Event Management – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing allows for the building of registration portals, so you can drive people to your events. On the back end, the system provides a rich set of features to manage the event itself- with scheduling, multiple sessions and agenda planning, speakers, and venue-logistics management. Analytics are provided in real-time as registrations arrive from the portal signup pages for the event.
- Internet Marketing Assets – Track as many Marketing websites, landing pages, and forms as needed to guide, capture and track visitors to these assets. When a form is populated and submitted, a lead is automatically generated in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. Forms can also be used to create custom entity records for just about any use case scenario imaginable. Dynamics Marketing features dozens of rich, responsive-designed email templates that allow non-technical users to quickly design and launch email campaigns. There are templates for every aspect of the customer journey, so you can launch your campaign quickly and with minimal technical knowledge. You can even personalize landing pages so that they appear to be generated for an individual contact.
- Algorithms and Analytics – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing allows you to quantify and score leads by demographics, firmographics, and behaviors. You can even define custom conditions, and then assign actions to those conditions. The scoring data can then be used by business decision-makers to make important Marketing decisions.
A typical customer journey consists of the following steps:
- Triggers– in the example (refer to image above), we have chosen to include a specific segment. This segment, which is dynamic, will be automatically populated whenever someone is added to the database that meets the criteria, which in this case is any contact with a household income over $125,000 in the state of Georgia.
- Outbound email – The system sends an invitation to a fundraising event that is coming up in about a month. Any interaction at this point determines the appropriate path in the customer journey.
- Follow-up – Here, the system is set to follow up in one day – sending a thank you for registration if one is made, or an incentive if no action has been taken.
- Analytics – With one of the more powerful aspects of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can set up dashboards to visualize the progress of your campaign.
- Microsoft Power BI integration – Because Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is part of the Dataverse, the very popular Power BI reporting platform can not only use the data as a reportable data source but Power BI Dashboards and Tiles can be embedded directly in the Marketing App. In the example, we see a map displaying our Atlanta Marketing list in the context of household income, which is the basis for our customer journey for the fundraising event shown earlier.
- Individual custom data – Click into each contact to view a timeline of the interactions taken by the prospective customer since the email was sent.
In short, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing can help you punch your ticket to the Dataverse, providing a world-class solution for modern Marketing teams that are looking for tight integration with other Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement applications.
Can we put our years of Microsoft 365 experience to work for your organization? Please reach out.
