All businesses operate in a competitive environment and customer experience (CX) is top of mind as we rise to today’s challenges of finding ways to differentiate, delivering on business goals and meeting increasing customer demands. Customers expect great experiences from the companies they interact with and companies that deliver superior experiences build strong bonds with their customers and perform better.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is the secret weapon that will help you elevate your CX game across every department of your company, whether it’s marketing being tasked with driving growth, or the sales department optimizing in-store and online sales, or the customer service department driving retention, upsell and personalized care. With AI-assistance, business users can build event-based journeys that reach customers across multiple touchpoints, growing relationships from prospects, through sales and support.
Today marks a monumental event for Dynamics 365 Marketing: the much-anticipated real-time customer journey orchestration features are making their preview debut! Rich new features empower customer experience focused organizations to:
- Engage customers in real time.
- With features such as event-based customer journeys, custom event triggers, and SMS and push notifications, organizations can design, predict, and deliver content across the right channels in the moment of interaction, enabling hyper-personalized customer experiences.
- Win customers and earn loyalty faster.
- Integrations with Dynamics 365 apps make real-time customer journeys a truly end-to-end experience.
- Personalize customer experiences with AI.
- Turn insights into relevant action with AI-driven recommendations for content, channels, segmentation, and analytics.
- Customer Insights segment and profile integration allows organizations to build deep 1:1 personalization.
- Grow with a unified, adaptable platform.
- Easily customize and connect with tools you already use.
- Efficiently manage compliance requirements and accessibility guidelines.
Some of Dynamics 365 Marketing’s standout features are listed below. To read about all of the new features, check out the real-time customer journey orchestration user guide or see a demo of the real-time marketing features in action from Microsoft Ignite 2021.
1. Real-time, event-based customer journey orchestration
Looking for a better way to engage your audience over pre-defined segment-based marketing campaigns? Look to moments-based interactions that allow you to react to customers’ actions in real time with highly personalized content for each individual customer. These moments-based customer-led journeys are easy to create with our new intuitive customer journey designer which is infused with AI-powered capabilities throughout. You can orchestrate holistic end-to-end experiences for your customers that engage other connected departments in your company such as customer service, sales, commerce systems, and more. What’s even better? You don’t need a team of data scientists or developers to implement these journeys – let the app do the heavy lifting for you. Use point-and-click toolbox in the designer to create each step in the journey, and AI-guided features to create, test, and ensure your message is delivered in the right channel for each individual customer.
2. Event catalog with built-in and custom events for triggering customer journeys
Journeys created with Dynamics 365 Marketing are customer led, they can start (or stop) when an event is triggered and can be executed in real time. “Events” are activities that your customer performs, including digital activities like interacting on your website, or physical ones like walking into a store and logging onto the Wi-Fi. Event triggers are the powerhouses behind the scenes that make it all happen, and you can create them quickly and easily by using built-in events from the intuitive event trigger catalog or creating custom events that are specific to your business.
By strategically using event triggers you can break down silos between business functions. Gone are the days of tone-deaf, disconnected communications from different departments, now you can deliver a congruous end-to-end experience for each of your customers.
3. Hyper-personalize customer journeys using data and insights from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Dynamics 365 Marketing goes beyond a typical marketing automation tool by leveraging the power of data, turning that data into insights, and activating it. Microsoft’s customer data platform, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, makes it easy to unify customer data, augment profiles and identify high-value customer segments. You can use this profile and segment data in Dynamics 365 Marketing to fine tune your targeting and further refine your journeys so that you can drive meaningful interactions by engaging customers in a personalized way.
4. Author personalized emails quickly and easily using the new email editor
The completely new, intuitive, and reliable Dynamics 365 Marketing email editor helps you to produce relevant emails with efficiency and ease. The modern layout with the redesigned toolbox and property panes makes everything simpler to find. Personalization is also streamlined – just click the “Personalization” button to navigate through all available data so you can customize your messages with speed and ease.
You can also take advantage of new AI-powered capabilities within the editor like AI-driven recommendations to help you to find the best media to complement the content in your messages. We make it easy to create professional emails with advanced dynamic content resulting in messages that better resonate with your customers.
5. Create and send personalized push notifications and SMS messages
Because email is not the only channel to reach your customers, we have also streamlined personalization across SMS messages and push notifications and made both editors easy and intuitive to use so you can create beautiful, customized messages to keep your customers engaged throughout transactional communications, marketing campaigns, and customer service communications. Using these additional channels enables you to react to customer interactions across touchpoints.
6. Search, manage, and tag your digital assets with a new centralized asset library
The new centralized asset library is the cherry on top of all channel content creation within Dynamics 365 Marketing. The new centralized library lets you upload files then AI automatically tags them for you. You can then search, update and add or delete images. No matter where you’re accessing the centralized library from, you’ll have access to the latest assets for your company helping you to build successful multitouch experiences for your customers.
7. Improve journey effectiveness with a built-in cross-journey aggregate dashboard
At the end of the day, you want to know if your customer journey is meeting its objectives. Dynamics 365 Marketing not only helps you to easily set the business and user-behavior goals for your customer journeys, it tracks progress towards those goals and gives you a clear dashboard with the results so you can troubleshoot areas of friction or see what’s working so you can recreate that same approach in other journeys. The new built-in analytics dashboard also makes it easy to view results and act upon cross-journey insights to further optimize individual journeys.
These preview capabilities are now available to customers who have environments located in the U.S. datacenter, and will be available to customers with environments located in the Europe datacenter starting early next week. When you log into the product, a notification banner will let you know when the preview capabilities are available for you to install. You can install these from the settings area of your app. If you are not a Dynamics 365 Marketing customer yet, get started with a Dynamics 365 Marketing free trial to evaluate them.
We look forward to hearing from you about the release wave 1 updates for Dynamics 365 Marketing and stay tuned, we have a lot more coming!
