Creating marketing emails is a core part of any digital strategy, and a marketing platform like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys (formerly known as “Marketing”) makes real-time email campaign creation and management a breeze. If you’re a current Outbound Marketing customer, you may be wondering what the transition to Real-Time means for you and the things that you currently do in the Outbound area of the application. Namely, all the time and energy you’ve spent building and sending marketing emails in your Customer Journeys. But good news: you can very quickly and easily import your existing emails to use in Real-Time Marketing!

Within Dynamics 365, it’s easier than you may think to create a dashboard yourself, and it’s a process that can be repeated multiple times over to ensure that you have the right data visualization for specific needs or user roles—for instance you can create a salesperson dashboard to show salespeople their open leads and opportunities and where they are in the pipeline, and you can create a sales manager dashboard to help managers see what their team has on their plates).

As a marketer, your analytics count. When it comes to sending emails, did you know that you might not be getting all your campaign insights, particularly when your email is sent along to other people outside your initial audience? But not to worry. It's easy to set up and use a "Forward to a friend" link to make sure you're capturing those analytics. Plus, you can make sure your new recipients have the same excellent inbox experience with your marketing efforts as your original audience.

Both Gmail and Yahoo have recently implemented measures to ensure that bulk email senders provide an easy, visible one-click option to unsubscribe within all promotional emails. For businesses using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys (formerly Dynamics 365 Marketing), ensuring compliance is super simple. In addition to the normal subscription center links with which you are probably familiar, Microsoft has added a new one-click unsubscribe feature.

If you’ve done any A/B testing in the Outbound Marketing module, you’ll know that the system is primarily based around setting the tests up at the email-level since that is the primary focus of Outbound Marketing. Real-Time Marketing has a couple additional channel options, such as texting, outside of just sending emails. As such, it pulls the A/B testing back to the Journey-level. Rather than setting up an A/B test on an email and then adding the element to the customer journey, we instead will simply add an action to our journey and select “Test which variation performs better.”

Depending on where you’re located and where your clients or contacts are located, there are data protection laws you must adhere to. You may have heard of GDPR (or General Data Protection Regulation) that went into effect in 2018 within the EU. Other data protection laws include CAN-SPAM for email marketing in the US, and CASL in Canada. The details of these regulations are readily available online, so if you haven’t already, be sure to familiarize yourself and your marketing team with the laws you must follow depending on your and your clients’ locations. Consent management in D365 will help you adhere to whichever laws you must follow.

The general best practice is that all contacts must opt-in to receive marketing communications from you, but that they also have the ability to easily opt-out and revoke this consent at any time. So, how is marketing consent established, and how does Dynamics store it?

Microsoft has announced that on September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will be combined into a single product offering called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. The new unified application will help users continue to deliver excellent customer experiences and harness customer data in ways that further brand loyalty and growth.

Although this sounds like a major change, there’s no need to panic. We’ve broken down everything you need to know about the unified app and how you can benefit from it.

To put it broadly, bounced emails are ones that were unable to be properly delivered to a recipient’s mailbox. There are a variety of reasons that an email may have bounced and they fall into two main types: hard and soft.

Receiving a canned or boilerplate email message is not nearly as impactful as opening your inbox and seeing an email that seems to be written just for you. Personalization drives engagement, heightened engagement improves the impact of your sales and marketing pursuits. That’s the whole theory behind Dynamic content as a method of making your sales and marketing messages more impactful without spending an abundance of time personalizing emails for each user. And you don’t even need to know how to code to create Dynamic content in your emails.

One of Microsoft’s primary goals when updating old features or developing new ones for its fleet of business productivity apps is right there in the name: Productivity. One thing that can lead to slowdowns and hang-ups is navigating between a bunch of different pages. Even aside from the slowdowns, it just doesn’t feel as good for the user. A relatively new feature to Dynamics 365 CRM is Focused View. This feature is aimed at reducing the number of screens users have to jump between when working with different record types.

Access and security in Dynamics 365 CRM is a pretty big topic and can be a complex undertaking when you get into the granular details. It is the system administrator’s responsibility to configure and assign access and security, but proper setup impacts every single user, and it’s not a bad idea to have a general idea of how you and your coworkers are given access.

When we zoom out and look at it in broad strokes, your admin gives you access to CRM in three main ways: security roles, business units, and field-level security.

Responsive design is the design and development approach where creators consider and adjust their web-based content (like emails and websites) to consider the size and layout of the device it will be viewed on and adapt accordingly. The goal is for your web content to render to provide an optimal experience—usability, navigation, visual appeal—no matter the size of a user’s screen size.

In today’s outbound marketing, we must consider mobile-friendly design when planning our email campaigns, but we also cannot forget the desktop experience. Dynamics 365 Marketing has recently added further responsive design options to help your emails flux based on the device it’s being viewed on.

In CRM, the command bar is the strip at the top of page that contains a bunch of different functions for the page. Recently, Microsoft has implemented an improved functionality for customizing the command bar to the Power Apps designer for CRM apps.

The first batch of new features will soon be available for Power Platform and the entire Dynamics 365 suite. 2023 Release Wave 1 will continue to enhance the way you work with your business data, create personalized lead engagement efforts, optimize your sales cycle, and support industry-specialized functions. Preview access is now available, allowing you to test and validate features in a sandbox environment, and will become generally available in April.

To stand out in an expanded marketplace, your business needs to cut through the competition and create personalized, customer-forward experiences. To find prospective customers with the right message, at the right time, and through the right avenues. Dynamics 365 CRM can elevate your sales and marketing efforts by equipping your team with the tools needed to capture each prospect’s attention at the moment that matters most. Here are ways that Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and other CRM services can keep your business agile in today’s increasingly competitive market.

Often, there are too many disconnected apps at play in the workplace, so the challenge is to ensure that any additional app you add to your tech stack is multifaceted and adds tangible value to your work process. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems provide useful tools to teams who attract leads, build rapport with opportunities, and support current clients. Here are a few of the ways that CRM apps within the Dynamics 365 suite can be more than just a CRM.

Understanding the sales funnel and knowing how to navigate each phase is key for businesses to attract, win, and keep high-quality leads and build long-term customer relationships. Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing are the cloud-based solutions that can help you meet every type of customer right where they are, with exactly what they’re looking for at any point in the sales funnel.

Whether it be a new product rollout, lead re-engagement, subscription upgrades, or any other sales and marketing endeavor, every business needs a strategy to get their message to their target audience in a structured, automated way. That’s just what customer journeys do, by providing highly customizable and personalizable options to build your own outbound and real-time marketing campaigns. Building a customer journey is a straightforward and intuitive process that uses tiles to establish elements of the journey – from who is sent along the journey to every step that occurs along the pipeline. There are quite a few tile options that allow for a huge variety of journey objectives to serve the needs of any business.

Ever heard the proverb “out of sight, out of mind”? Well, the things we measure are in our sight, on our minds, and therefore more likely to be the target of change. We live in an increasingly data-driven world, where gathering data, making sense of it, and garnering actionable insight from it is as easy as it has ever been. The data begs to be used.

Manufacturers value efficiency, automation, and the ability to forecast orders, sales, inventory, and other important elements of their business. Considering these values, it’s perhaps a curious thing, or maybe not so curious, that many manufacturers use their enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for customer relationships management (CRM) activities, or else they don’t use any solution for CRM at all. Considering the myriad benefits of CRM functionality—from lead and opportunity management, contact and account management, data analysis, automated marketing campaigns, event management, branded landing pages and forms, email creation, and so much more—it’s a wonder how a business could get by on the limited customer relationship functions a typical ERP provides.