Ever since Microsoft announced the release of Dynamics 365 in 2016, one ‘module’ was obviously missing. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM (which is what ‘Customer Engagement’ was pre-Dynamics 365), there was a module exclusively for Marketing that contained marketing lists, campaigns, etc. These entities were merged into the Sales app, and it made perfect sense. But companies were still missing a dedicated Marketing app mature enough to handle the heavy marketing workload.
Click here to download our free ebook on Dynamics 365 and get answers to your questions!
Of course, there is the Microsoft-Adobe partnership that allows you to use Adobe Cloud Marketing capabilities directly from Dynamics 365, and don’t get me wrong, it has excellent marketing features (unified customer views, sales data conversion to campaigns, and more), but it was still a partnership. It wasn’t a Microsoft Dynamics App so you couldn’t purchase it as a stand-alone product.
At last, Microsoft is set to release Dynamics 365 for Marketing in Spring 2018. Even though it came a “bit” later than the original release date (ahem…a year late), it is great news for any company looking to automate part (or all) of their marketing procedures.
What does it bring to the table?
Just like other Dynamics 365 apps, the Marketing app is built with these three things in mind:
- Ease of use
- Flexibility
- Rich Features
Learn more on how to manage your business with Dynamics 365
Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns
Multi-channel marketing became very popular in the last couple of years, especially with the increasing power of social media platforms and the rise in the many ways you can reach and interact with your potential customers.
With Dynamics 365 for Marketing, you get:
Email Marketing
Easily one of the most common and useful ways to market products. Dynamics 365 takes marketing to a whole new level with its super user-friendly drag and drop interface allowing you to pull data from all your entities (yes…including custom). You can include them in eye-catching templates to guarantee you’re grabbing the attention of potential leads. It doesn’t end here; you get to visualize your results using heatmaps, geographical location maps and more!
Landing Pages
Create amazing looking landing pages that link directly to Dynamics 365. This allows you to effortlessly capture your website visitors into leads or contacts in the system. Once the data is in, it can integrate with email marketing, lead scoring and other marketing techniques.
LinkedIn Integration
Set up multiple LinkedIn profiles and capture leads from different campaigns. When leads are in, compare the lead generation performance from different sources to further adjust your marketing plans.
Webinars and events
Events are critical to get your product out there and interacting with a live audience. Dynamics 365 for Marketing allows you to work directly with ON24, data-driven webinar software to get your events ready on the fly. Since all the data is centralized, all event histories are organized in one place enabling you to compare and contrast different events’ performances.
Lead Management
The primary goal of marketing is to bring in new leads, and you want to make sure you can manage these leads the right way. To achieve that, D365 for Marketing includes:
Lead Nurturing
Developing relationships with buyers is necessary if you plan to have customer loyalty. Record every customer engagement including recent activities to identify possible future purchases.
Lead scoring
Create multiple scoring models to help prioritize leads and determine sales readiness. Also, use RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value) rules to personalize your customers’ experience.
Segmentation
Segmentation helps you create targeted campaigns to increase interest in your product or service so you can increase lead conversions.
Notifications
Never miss an interaction by receiving real-time updates whenever a lead responds to any of your campaigns (Event registration, Email opened, Landing page visit, etc.).
Event Management
Webinar providers
Your audience is not in your geographical area? No worries. Easily create online webinars using Microsoft’s Skype for Business.
Event Portal
Streamline the event registration process by using Dynamics 365 for Marketing event portal. This allows you to have all the event information in one place and it can serve as a placeholder to post updates and event-related changes.
Generic Marketing Tools
Email Templates
Email templates let you define a pre-formatted email message with dynamic fields that you can use across your organization. Dynamics 365 for Marketing comes equipped with a list of professional email-ready templates right at your fingertips.
Dashboards
Dynamics 365 contains easy-to-configure dashboards to help you visualize all the data you need as soon as you open the app.
Reports
Make use of all the data stored to generate multiple reports to help you assess your campaigns’ performance and your leads’ response levels. These reports can export to PDF, Word, Excel or any common document type giving you the option to save local copies or share them with external users.
Landing Page Templates
No need for technical knowledge. Dynamics 365 for Marketing lets you create code-free landing pages to attract more leads.
Surveys
Gather all the feedback you want from customers using easy-to-create surveys. Automate the process by using rules to auto-respond to a lead or create a follow-up action upon survey completion.
Workflows
Create Dynamics 365 workflows to automate actions based on record creation, updates, status changes, and more. The best part? No code is needed! All can be done directly inside the app through configuration in a very user-friendly interface.
Resell Dynamics 365 Like an Expert with Sherweb
Pricing
For the Dynamics 365 Marketing App, the pricing model is a bit different than other apps. The Marketing app is licensed by organization and is based on contacts. There are two options:
| Dynamics 365 For Marketing (Standalone app) | Within Customer Engagement Plan | Within a Customer Engagement Application |
| $1500/month for 10,000 contacts $250 for 5000 additional contacts | 2,000 contacts included with the purchase of 10 plan seats.
$750/month for 10,000 contacts (8,000 + 2,000 above) $250 for 5000 additional contacts |
$750/month for 10,000 contacts $250 for 5000 additional contacts |
| Emails per month: Up to 10 times the number of contacts purchased | ||
Want more information on what a partnership with Sherweb looks like? Check out our InfoKit.
Conclusion
Marketing is a key area in any business. After all, it provides the first (arguably the most important) point of interaction between a business and a potential customer. As technology advances, marketing tools and techniques are changing and evolving to the point where it’s not easy—in fact—it’s near impossible to maintain control over multiple channels without using automated processes, especially if you’re targeting a wide audience. The more automated the process is, the less personalized it becomes, which is problematic.
Dynamics 365 for Marketing is here to tackle this dilemma by helping you automate a big part of the procedure in a smart way. It uses many metrics for lead nurturing and segmentation to guarantee great results and happy customers. Mix that with the already existing Dynamics 365 for Sales, and you have a full solution ready to transform your business.
