Dynamics 365 Marketing has increased its power and usability to become a market-leading solution.

2021 was an exciting year for Dynamics 365 Marketing with the release of multiple features that take the product to a whole new level.  In last year’s release waves, 27 new features were announced, building on the previous developments to elevate the power and usability of the Marketing interface. In short – Dynamics 365 Marketing has grown to be an industry leading marketing suite solution for 2022 – and it keeps getting better.

Here is our round-up of key features released so far and what to watch out for next:

Real-time marketing

One of the biggest developments in Dynamics 365 Marketing was the addition of real-time, events-based marketing. This feature allows marketers to build customer journeys based on real world events (such as visiting a store or attending a concert), to customise communications and respond to customer actions immediately. Real-time marketing now has its own menu within the product, unifying real-time automation and outbound marketing. Watch this space as there will be more developments in this customer engagement feature soon.

Following on from the launch of real-time marketing, the solution has been updated to allow marketers to increase their customer reach with a 10x increase in the scale of interactions. Real-time outbound interactions are now set at a limit of 100 million per month to a maximum of 20 million contacts. This is more than enough for many businesses to communicate with their customers without restrictions – empowering marketing departments with powerful reach.

Improved usability

Personalisation

As well as new capabilities, Microsoft has also been focusing on product usability. One of the key improvements was a new “point and click interface” which includes a new panel for personalised content. This enables the marketer to build highly personalised content with ease and efficiency.

SMS/push notifications

Communication channels have been expanded to enable the use of two commonly used services for SMS messages; Twilio and TeleSign.  This improvement makes it easier for marketers to integrate their messaging systems.

Intelligent analytics

A number of improvements have been made which enhance Dynamics 365’s ability to manage and analyse marketing actions. Some key improvements have been:

• The addition of business goals to measure progress
• New A/B tests to experiment with emails and customer journeys
• A new cross-journey dashboard to help evaluate, trouble-shoot and understand the effectiveness of the marketing actions
• Reports for KPIs with the option to download templates for additional Power BI insight
• Integration with Dynamic 365 Customer Insights to enable hyper-personalisation and improved segmentation.

New features out in general release

Here is a round-up of exciting new features in general availability (GA):

• Simplified natural language queries to create targeted segments
• A new outbound marketing email editor with A/B testing
• Send SMS messages using Twilio and TeleSign integration
• Personalise emails to include lists of related data
• Monitor how your consumption is tracking against your quota
• 10X increase in the scale of interactions in real-time marketing journeys.

Coming soon

In 2022 we have already had some new and exciting announcements covering updates to customer journey creation, marketing email features and event management calendars:

• Define only the minimum entry criteria to create customer journeys quickly
• Include multiple suppression segments in a journey
• Stop and edit custom events even if they are used in live journeys
• Include a unique identifier to correlate event triggers between journeys
• Directly link to documents in the asset library through feature-rich links in emails
• Link buttons and images to existing events and marketing pages in the Marketing app database without looking up the specific URL
• The Teams online event calendar in event management now include a 15-minute reminder before the event for attendees and speakers.

We can’t wait to see what else 2022 will bring!

If you want more information on any of the features in Dynamics 365 Marketing, please get in touch.