Successful marketing is now very focused on adding that personal touch to everything you do with regards to your customers. Generic messaging will not cut it anymore when it comes to your customers.

Regardless of what sector you specialise in, the common denominator is that you want your customers to feel special and appreciated. Microsoft’s marketing solution is Dynamics 365 for Marketing. The solution is built on the same platform and database as Sales and Customer Service, Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.

Email

As a user of Dynamics, it is almost like Marketing knows what you want to say to your customers and says it for you. With just a few lines of script, it can look up the dynamic placeholders you add to your marketing email, resolve them for you just before it sends the email and voila – you have given your customer that warm and special feeling by calling them by their preferred title or added a few bits of information that will convince them you care about and remember them.

Another example is scheduling workflows in the system to automatically offer your most valuable customers discounts around the time of their birthday.

The system is intelligent, so not only it could resolve a placeholder with the any data associated with any entity you have in your database but it can also look up whether you have said Good morning, or Good afternoon and depending on the preconfigured trigger word (morning or afternoon), it will amend the email to suit.

Forms Pro integration

Microsoft Forms has been around for a while, so you are likely already familiar with its easy and straightforward way to design surveys.

Dynamics 365 for Marketing now integrates with Forms Pro meaning you can get all your survey data back into your CRM system in real time with zero manual effort. Unless you opt to make your survey entries anonymous, survey data can be linked back to a contact’s record in CRM, allowing it to show against their customer activities.

Social Media 

If social media is key to your marketing strategy, Dynamics 365 for Marketing will not let you down. With smooth integration with channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, you can post and schedule all your social media posts directly from Dynamics 365.

Insights 

Marketing will help you learn when is the best time to contact each of your customer audiences. The solution provides you with heaps of insights for every campaign that you run.

Consider running an email campaign, for every email sent Marketing will provide you with a heat map of the most clicked links, a location map of where it has been opened and a time interval when most of your emails were opened. This is in addition to your standard delivery vs bounced back ratio that allows you to keep an eye on your sender reputation. All of these insights help you adapt and improve to enable you to optimise your next campaign.

Customer journey 

Consider a key event you are organising, with the solution’s excellent out-of-the-box event management, you can manage the full event from start to finish – from creating a landing page for registrations to managing multiple conference rooms on the day of the event.

In terms of driving attendance to your event, the solution enables you to create a customer journey that targets the people who might be interested in the event, based on perhaps their location or job title.

To further drill down, you can use a dynamic segment and target the people who attended your last event and send them a personal email promoting your event or schedule a call to be made in CRM by their Account Manager. You can then tailor their journey depending on whether they open your email, accept your call, register for the event or forward it to a colleague. The options are endless!