As organisations are seeking ways to do more with less, Dynamics 365 Marketing’s 2023 release plan is designed to drive better marketing team collaboration, personalisation and efficiency to support organisational success.
Dynamics 365 Marketing is Microsoft’s enterprise-grade marketing solution. It is a flexible, cloud-based solution that provides lots of functionality out-of-the-box and can be easily tailored to suit your organisation’s needs. We’ve explored some of the exciting new features in Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Marketing release plan…
Level up your lead processes
Dynamics 365 Marketing’s upcoming releases drive increased lead conversions and better commercial team collaboration.
By combining Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales, marketing-qualified leads can easily be routed to the correct sales representative. As part of the release wave, a lead scoring criteria can be defined to update the relevant fields in the lead record, when a lead meets the score threshold. From here, assignment rules can be created based on the lead qualification status – for example, the sales representative’s capacity or matching attributes between the representative and the lead. This means the lead can be captured when it’s hot without the need for manual intervention or customised solutions.
Another of Microsoft’s new releases for Dynamics 365 Marketing is a lead score builder, allowing users to easily create lead scoring models with a combination of behavioural and demographic or firmographic conditions. This lead scoring builder allows marketers to evaluate scoring model outputs and performance with real-time, enhanced insights, and ensures that engaged leads are prioritised, driving increased deals and reducing time spent on lukewarm opportunities.
Even better, the Dynamics 365 Marketing release can now trigger a sales sequence to accelerate a deal within Dynamics 365 Sales by adding sales phone calls and tasks to nurture journeys. This feature offers sellers automated recommendations based on the campaign’s sales playbook.
Embrace the power of AI
April’s release wave explores exciting ways to create new content using the power of AI. The new Copilot capability provides inspiration for marketers when creating email content, making the email marketing process more efficient while using the correct tone of voice for the audience. Sample key points are provided for typical email types to kickstart the creation process – for example, an abandoned cart or an invite to an event. Within Copilot, the new query assist feature uses generative AI capabilities to use conversational language to effectively and efficiently build targeted segments.
Figure 1: Copilot content ideas
Enhanced journey reminders can create action-oriented journeys to remind customers if they have not completed a call to action – for example, if they have an abandoned online shopping cart or have not completed an event registration form before the deadline.
Data-driven decision-making
To optimise B2B marketing, out-of-the-box dashboards in Dynamics 365 Marketing can track pipeline development and analyse the impact of buyer journeys, marketing messages and content throughout different stages of your organisational process. When integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales, this visualises the journey from prospect, to lead, to won opportunities as accounts move through the pipeline. These analytics help marketers identify the most effective sources to produce high-quality leads.
Figure 2: Define milestones in your customer journey
Marketing teams are no longer restricted to a 30 million contact limit, with Microsoft increasing this to 100 million in this upcoming release. This means that up to 300 million monthly outbound interactions can now take place to deliver personalised experiences at scale. To minimise ad fatigue via these outbound interactions, marketers can also cap communications per channel to prevent contacts that qualify for multiple campaigns receiving lots of messages in a short time period.
Another key feature of this release wave is the automatic tagging of all marketing messages with Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes to track website and landing page traffic sources. This enables marketers to attribute conversions to the correct source and gives full visibility of the impact of marketing efforts on web traffic, empowering optimisation activities to drive better results.
Dynamics 365 Marketing has also released a feature to maintain organisation between multibrand business units without neglecting compliance. New out-of-the-box campaign and data segregation capabilities organise marketing journeys, digital assets, content and customer preferences allowing marketers to review marketing analytics at individual brand, region and organisation levels.
To effectively capture leads, marketers can now easily create smart forms to place on websites using a modern drag-and-drop editor to guide through the form building process. This new feature means there is no need to depend on developers to track conversions.
Figure 3: Smart forms to aid conversion tracking
Better personalisation, better customer experiences
Microsoft found that 63% of consumers expect personalisation as standard service, and feel they are recognised as an individual when they receive offers that are tailored to their stage in the customer lifecycle. This is why receiving the right messages at the right time is crucial to drive loyalty.
The segment builder functionality in this release plan allows users to easily create segments on demographic and behavioural attributes. Using everyday language, for example ‘I want the list of all my customers who have engaged with my email’, segments are built to accurately target the right customers to provide a personalised experience.
The release plan also features multi-brand consent and customisable preference centres to represent the brand and meet business needs. This means that consent can be captured independently for each business unit and channel-specific consent is linked to the contact’s email address or phone number, providing them with control over the messages they receive from each channel.
Figure 4: Customisable preference centres
To reduce email opt-out rates and gather consent more granularly, an unlimited number of marketing subscription topics can be created. For example, ‘Newsletters’, ‘Community events’ or ‘Product discounts’. Dynamics 365 Marketing can now automatically enforce topic checks for each contact without the user needing to create and manage subscription lists of contacts – tailoring communication topics to ones that will most engage the recipient.
Optimise your solution today
The new features for Dynamics 365 Marketing will be released from April 2023 through September 2023. If you would like to learn more about the features and functionality of release wave 1, get in touch and our team will be happy to help your organisation transition through and harness the power of these planned changes.