Microsoft made some big announcements during the Inspire conference, particularly around Dynamics 365 Marketing and its new AI capabilities. In this blog, we’ll be unpacking these new capabilities and what it means for companies and organisations.
Announcement: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Marketing will be combined
Microsoft announced that later this year, both Customer Insights and Dynamics Marketing will be coming together as a single offering. That means if you’re a new customer, you’ll be getting Customer Insights, which brings together all your customer data and gives you a single 360-degree view of them. This is in addition to enabling you to track customer behaviour, drill into customers’ details — demographics, affinity to other brands, lifetime value as a customer, predictions, churn risk and more.
But if you’re already using Dynamics 365 and want to explore Customer Insights, you may want to check out our services here.
Features: Shift from outbound to real-time marketing
Outbound marketing offers classic marketing automation tools (email marketing, customer journeys, and social posting) and focuses on reaching out to prospects with pre-planned messages and campaigns.
With Microsoft’s recent announcement, outbound Marketing is out, and the real-time module is the future. Real-time marketing, with its focus on real-time interactions, provides a more effective and responsive way to engage customers compared to the traditional outbound marketing approach.
The real-time marketing module in Dynamics 365 lets you engage with customers in the moments that matter, providing trigger-based customer journeys, SMS, and push notifications. It allows for the hyper-personalisation of content and journeys based on real-time customer actions and profile data, ensuring you’ll be able to connect with customers on the channels they use the most and enhance their overall experience.
Features: What to try out in Dynamics 365 Marketing
If you want to start testing out some new real-time marketing features, you may want to start with:
- Personalisation and conditional content – With conditional content in Dynamics 365 (shown in this image), you can easily personalise emails, depending on who the recipient is.
- SMS and push notifications – Real-time marketing allows you to directly send text messages and push notifications to customers.
- Channel optimisation – Channel optimisation in real-time marketing uses an AI model to pick the optimal channel and message for each customer based on their historical data and preferences, helping improvement engagement and responsiveness in the process.
- A/B Testing – This feature enables you to run A/B tests across different channels.
Features: What to keep an eye on
Several new features are set to enhance Dynamics 365 Marketing even further:
- New Lead Scoring Model – With the new lead scoring model (shown in this image) businesses can efficiently define and identify the leads to prioritise, ensuring that every single qualified lead gets the right attention from their sales teams.
- AI Copilot Features – An AI assistant, Copilot is being rolled out to several Microsoft products, including Dynamics 365 Marketing, and can help marketers with tasks ranging from generating content for emails to styling them.
- Marketing Effectiveness Dashboard – This dashboard enables businesses to create and track important customer milestones and evaluate their marketing efforts.
Microsoft has more in store for its Dynamics 365 business applications, with a bevy of new features in the pipeline and a transition towards real-time interactions. If you want to learn more about the features to watch out for, you can watch a recording of this video here.
Next up, we’ll be discussing the latest Power Platform features released in Wave 2 of this year. If you’re interested, you can register here.
About the Author: Rishona Elijah
Rishona Elijah is a Microsoft MVP and is one of our Power Platform experts at Barhead Solutions. She is also a Microsoft Certified Trainer who runs regular training and events and is passionate about empowering business users to realise the potential offered by Microsoft Solutions. Her focus is on showcasing how you can leverage the Power Platform to transform your business.
