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5 Ways Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Interacts with Office 365

Post Author: Joe D365 |

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing has evolved exponentially in its short product lifespan since its introduction a few years ago. The Wave 2 release in October 2019 added features like A/B Testing, Customer Insights integration, and enhanced Email editing that really completed the stack as an end-to-end marketing solution and gave it feature parity with other marketing technology solutions available today.

Since the October 2019 release, each subsequent release has added new and exciting functionality and features, culminating in the introduction of Real-Time Marketing going live in the Summer of 2021! Microsoft has done a great job of listening to the needs and functionality requested by the marketing community and building in these tools with each release to stay even with, and in many ways ahead of, their competitors. Now that Microsoft has established a marketing technology product viable of running complex campaigns and supporting an enterprise-wide marketing department, the advantages of using Dynamics Marketing come in the form its ability to connect and interact with the rest of your Dynamics 365 and Office products.

As described in an earlier blog post, the ability for cross-functional teams and other departments to interact with marketing provides huge advantages from increased efficiency to team collaboration. In this blog post, we will direct you to 5 areas within your Office 365 product suite to leverage marketing.

Dynamics 365 Insights (Accounts/Contacts/Leads)

Marketing Insights: Lead

The first and most ubiquitous place to take advantage of Dynamics Marketing is to use Marketing Insights within the Sales Hub on your Accounts, Contacts, and Leads. Any salesperson or account manager can quickly open and view all marketing interactions of these record types. A couple of notes:

  • Many people overlook the Lead Insights which includes an additional metric of ‘Lead Age.’
  • Account and Contact Insights contain a metric for ‘Email Open Times’ which allow users to send messages at optimal open times using the AI tool ‘Smart Scheduler’.
  • Account-based or B2B Marketing Analytics are seen on the Account record ‘Insights.’ Because Microsoft foundationally is based on a hierarchy (contacts roll up to accounts) the ability to do account-based marketing is built into Dynamics Marketing, making it unique as marketing technology goes.

Microsoft Teams

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Everyone loves Microsoft Teams! The ability to collaborate Dynamics Marketing with Microsoft Teams has now been expanded to include Teams Webinars, Teams Live Events, and Teams Meetings. Set up your events in Dynamics Marketing and send an invite to each participant with a personalized URL to register through the Dynamics portal and attend the event using Teams. Now, the tracking, attendance, and metrics of people viewing the event in Teams will appear in Dynamics Marketing.

Power BI

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Upon installation of your Dynamics Marketing instance, you can connect your data to Azure blob storage and use as a source for analytic reporting using Power BI. Few people know, however, that Microsoft has already created a wealth of sample reports called ‘Sales and Marketing sample’ that are available for any customer using Dynamics Marketing. This set of sample reports contains about 10 comprehensive Marketing reports with numerous sub-reports and professionally created charts and graphs ranging from ROI reporting to click and open analysis. Once connected, the user can manipulate these reports to fit their individual company marketing reporting needs.

Customer Voice

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Profile-based segment Dynamics 365 Customer Voice.

We rarely get through a Dynamics Marketing demo anymore without someone asking about the ability to connect to a Survey tool. Using Customer Voice, you can add surveys to marketing campaigns and interact with them in many areas of Dynamics Marketing. Surveys can be sent directly through marketing emails, or as a follow-up to an event or campaign. As survey results are collected, the user can then add them to customer segments and use survey responses to prompt action and directives from the marketing team.

Customer Insights

Insights and data are received by an organization in multiple ways. Companies must maintain website data, point of sale and purchase history, ERP transactions, and more, in addition to their Dynamics CRM data. Microsoft Customer Insights platform provides a way to unify all this customer data and generate AI-powered insights in real time. By understanding the whole customer profile, and not just CRM data, we have unlocked the ability to send every customer the right message at the right time using Customer Insights with Dynamics Marketing. Now, every Customer Insights profile segment can be used as a Dynamics Marketing segment to reach the correct audience. Additionally, with the introduction of Real-Time Marketing, we can use Customer Insight profiles in real-time journeys which allows for behavioral and transactional marketing like ‘Abandoned Cart’ visitors and targeting ‘Loyalty’ customers.

These are just a few of the areas within Office 365 that we can harness the power of Dynamics Marketing. With the introduction of Real-Time Marketing, we have only scratched the surface of how Dynamics Marketing can play a role in driving an organization forward. As the product evolves, we expect to see greater emphasis on the importance of the Marketing team and its ability to be the building block of any company.

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

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