Modern Marketing with Dynamics 365

One of the great things I love working about at Microsoft is that the company embraces the CEOs vision around growth mindset. This year, I got the opportunity to learning about Modern Marketing from a course by Prof. Sawhney from Kellogg School of Management. I love learning, and I am almost a little sad my course has ended, even though it meant my saturdays were blocked out for this.

As I was attending the course, I was amazed at the digital transformation that is happening around the world. From an insurance company that is able to reduce the premium if you use their app and drive safely, to retail businesses that are turning their stores into effectively showcasing areas (showrooming), and spending all their money on online.

I started noticing the key ways in which marketing is transforming, and how Dynamics 365 could help enable this. The first couple were - 

Moving from Waterfall and Exposure Marketing to Agile Engagement Marketing using Customer Journeys in Dynamics 365

Traditionally, most companies have lead with product based marketing. Campaigns are created about a product, which run for a few months, and then data is collected around the campaign. The shift is happening that modern digital organizations are leading with content, and constantly changing their approach based on customer engagement. 

In Dynamics 365 you can define customer journey. Each journey establishes a target market segment and can then deliver automated communications, make automated decisions, generate internal tasks, deliver follow-up communications, respond to customer interactions, and more. You can run high-volume email campaigns to deliver personalized messages that look great on all platforms and screen sizes. You can judge the effectiveness of mailings with detailed counts of opens, clicks, forwards, and constantly iterate your marketing content. 

Moving from Transactional Customer Information to Customer 360 using Dynamics 365

CRM and ERP systems have traditionally had transactional data across different data points - prospects, leads, sales, revenue. In the last decade we have had huge amounts of data come in from different data sources - social, video, blogs, chats, calls. We have a much richer picture of the customer based on their behaviour. We know what interest a customer has on social media, and we can understand their sentiment.

Dynamics 360 allows us a Customer 360 - you can bring together data from multiple sources. You can then use knowledge and insights to build a holistic 360 degree view of the customer. Microsoft Social engagement insights offer interactive analytics for social media conversations, such as native-language-based sentiment analysis across a broad set of sources

You can target the right prospects by specifying dynamics segmentation rules based on common attributes associated with your best customers.

You can set up multiple lead scoring models and sales readiness grades to prioritize leads who are ready to buy.