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14 Oct Customer Experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing
We believe that every company should be able to know how to elevate their customer experience with ease. That is why we will be guiding you through the best customer experience tool in the industry — Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.
In this article, we will take you through the basics of Dynamics 365 Marketing. We will go through its key features and show you exactly why it is a cut above the rest.
What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is a marketing tool designed to help elevate customer experiences, with an emphasis on enriching the connection between businesses and customers.
Dynamics 365 Marketing is built upon two primary modules — real-time (inbound) marketing and outbound marketing:
- Inbound marketing is tailoring your ‘passive’ marketing strategies to your customers’ needs. Rather than sending out materials, inbound marketing is being able to allure customers to your product naturally by solving problems for them. D365 Marketing’s inbound tools allow you to plan your customers’ journeys and ensure your content is both engaging and relevant to your customers.
- Outbound marketing is the contrasting approach of sending marketing messages and materials to your customers, to try to get them interested in your product. This involves sending out emails, texts, social media posts, and communicating with your potential customers.
D365 Marketing integrates well with the rest of the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem – including Dynamics 365 Sales, Business Central, Finance and even other Microsoft tools such as Teams. Your customer journey data can easily be shared across the entire D365 framework!
With such a rich suite of features, it is no surprise that many people are making the move over. For example, computing hardware industry leader HP has credited Dynamics 365 Marketing as allowing them to improve their service quality, build long-term customer loyalty, and save the company money in the long run.
Humanitarian charity UNICEF Netherlands also says that Microsoft’s data-driven services such as Dynamics 365 Marketing have helped them to ‘build a better future for displaced children’ by allowing them to effectively engage donors.
While other services may specialise in specific areas of marketing, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing has a plethora of tools and features that will truly unlock your business’ marketing potential.
Key Capabilities and Features
Email Creation and Automation
As email is a core outbound marketing channel for most businesses, it’s important to utilise them to their maximum potential. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is great for email creation and automation, powered by Microsoft’s email expertise from Outlook.
Dynamics 365 Marketing allows you to construct an email to your exact specifications, with easy drag-and-drop functionality to make the process simple and intuitive. Also, the templates built into Dynamics 365 Marketing are great if you want to get started quickly.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is also a powerful tool for marketing automation. Automation allows you to shortcut the process of having to manually send emails by distributing them automatically — this also works for social media posts and text messages.
This is done by creating ‘workflows’ — a set of instructions that will be carried out on activation. By doing so, you can ensure the process is to your exact specifications each time without having to spend resources hiring people specifically to do so manually.
Landing Page Creation
A landing page is a webpage that acts as a gateway for a customer to your product. It will often be the first thing they see once clicking through an email, text, or social media post, so getting your landing page right is crucial.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing allows you to create a vibrant landing page with ease. You can use their landing page templates to get started instantly and customise every aspect of your landing page exactly to your needs, without any fuss.
Customer Journey Mapping
The ‘customer journey’ is the whole process of interacting with a customer, from discovery to purchase. Whilst every company has a customer journey, the best businesses tailor their customer journeys to achieve maximum success — often through effective advertising.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing allows you to plan out your customer journey, to help you plan how exactly to guide a potential customer into a successful purchase. And if you are stuck on where to get started, Dynamics 365 Marketing’s built-in customer journey templates are a great way to begin.
You can even automate your campaigns with customer journeys, to ensure that your marketing strategy is effectively laid out without having to worry about doing the whole process manually.
Event Organisation
Organisation is key to running a successful business, and Dynamics 365 Marketing is the best when it comes to unlocking your event organisation’s potential.
With the ability to plan events and track the fine details of your event — including RSVPs, attendance, and everything in between — Dynamics 365 Marketing is a great tool to make sure that every detail is planned.
You can also ensure that your internal events and meetings are flawless, with seamless integration with 365 and Microsoft Teams. And event organisation flows back into automation — with the ability to create workflows based around events.
Lead Nurturing
By being able to plan and create marketing strategies that capture leads, you put yourself in a great position to turn them into successful customers.
D365 helps you with this along the way — its rich toolbox has all the tools you need to market effectively to leads. By creating segments of leads to be able to target different customer journeys, you can easily ensure that your marketing strategies are being deployed to leads effectively.
Dynamics 365 Marketing vs. Competitors
Of course, Dynamics 365 Marketing is not the only marketing tool available. Other than the obvious Microsoft ecosystem advantages, what sets it apart from the rest?
Hubspot Marketing Hub
Founded in 2002, Hubspot is a marketing company that is synonymous with modern marketing. With the company being credited as being the pioneer of inbound marketing, it’s no wonder that they were once the behemoth of the commerce world.
However, what was once a titan of a marketing company has now fallen far behind Dynamics 365 Marketing —
- Versatility: Hubspot is completely cloud-based, whereas Dynamics 365 Marketing can be used both with a cloud-based solution and an on-prem solution.
- Pricing: Hubspot is far more costly than D365 Marketing. Where Hubspot costs $6,000 per month for 50 paid users, D365 Marketing only costs $1,500 per month — and can be used by as many users as required. Also, Hubspot has tons of additional charges for added features that you may desire, whereas D365 Marketing has everything you need!
- Modernisation: Developed in collaboration with Adobe, Dynamics 365 Marketing is geared towards modern marketing. Hubspot Marketing Hub is a relic of the past, and so many people are opting for a more modern solution.
- Scalability: Hubspot has very limited scalability, which means that there is not a lot of room for growth for your business. However, Microsoft offers scalable solutions for its Dynamics platform, meaning that any growth within your business is not a problem.
- Features: Hubspot has very limited features and customisation. Features can be added through third-party services, but often requires you to pay extra for API. Dynamics 365 is customisable, however! There are no hidden fees or API charges, and you can easily make sure that your installation meets your needs.
Salesforce
One of the largest names in marketing and customer service, Salesforce is a well-established sales and marketing business. However, it also falls short of D365 Marketing in multiple areas —
- Versatility: Salesforce is too completely cloud-based, and so Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is much more flexible due to its cloud and on-prem capabilities.
- Pricing: Salesforce is incredibly expensive, with plans starting at $12,500 a month and going up to $65,000 a month. Compared to D365 Marketing’s $1,500 a month, there is no competition here.
- Features: Salesforce’s Einstein AI is a paid add-on, whereas D365 Marketing’s AI features are included with the product. Integrating into D365 Marketing is also much easier than Salesforce, as Salesforce’s integrations are not native.
Mailchimp All-in-One Marketing
Another large name in marketing, Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing solution that has grown to be quite popular. But there are many areas in which D365 Marketing is much better —
- Versatility: Like the marketing companies, Mailchimp only provides cloud-based solutions. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing has the advantage of providing both cloud and on-prem solutions.
- Updates: With Microsoft releasing Dynamics 365 updates twice yearly, it is hard for other CRM companies to keep up. That is why D365 Marketing is far ahead of other competitors.
- Features: D365 Marketing is far ahead in its functionality and can seamlessly deploy and track multi-channel marketing campaigns with ease on a single system. Mailchimp has less functionality and is all-around less powerful than D365 Marketing.
Get Started with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing today!
Marketing is incredibly important for any company and failing to invest effectively in it may stunt your business’ overall growth and potential.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is a powerful tool that enables you to massively improve your customer experience! With that, you can much more effectively nurture your leads into success and truly elevate your marketing strategies to the next level.
So, are you looking to take the first step into the future of marketing? We are here to help you get started!
Contact us today and see how we can help!
