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.

Since 2022 Release Wave 2 updates were announced around August of this year, new features have been appearing in Dynamics 365 CRM apps. Some of these are flying under the radar, while others are front and center and have not been missed. Whether the former or the latter, we wanted to raise up a few features that we find particularly exciting and useful to admin and end users!

Microsoft has released plans for this year’s Release Wave 2, with new features and improved usability across the Dynamics 365 suite of applications – Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales, Business Central, and more.

If you don’t want to read the entire Release Wave plan, here are the updates you should know about.

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.

Welcome to the second instillation of the series “Habits of highly effective marketers,” where we explore some of the fundamental actions that marketers take to do their job and do it stunningly. In our last blog, we went deep into why and how to document your marketing strategies and processes. Next up are two similar components of marketing strategy and content development: cross linking and cross posting. Fostered from a desire to use content to its fullest extent and the wish to provide viewers valuable content at their fingertips, these two strategies can improve social media reach and SEO (when used carefully and judiciously). Let’s dig in.

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.

Adding a CRM solution to your manufacturing business’ tech stack helps you better understand customer needs and gives you the tools and insight you need to reach them in the best way possible at every touchpoint, whether they’re at the very top of your sales funnel or about to place a repeat order. Dynamics 365 Marketing is a flexible CRM solution that helps businesses in any industry create, manage, and analyze the results of a wide variety of materials to help even marketing beginners create high-quality, engaging content that speaks to your prospects, leads, and longstanding clients. Here are some ways manufacturers can benefit from using Dynamics 365 Marketing to engage prospects and drive revenue.

In marketing, “effective” can mean different things based on the company, team, and even individual. But the core of marketing is intrigue—to get potential customers or clients interested in what you do. The products you sell, the services you provide, your unique brand. That’s a very general, high-level goal, but each company will also have their more specific desired marketing outcomes, as well as their own ways to achieve it.

A cohesive brand is one that is consistent no matter what or where it is. Visually, your brand can be differentiated by the colors, logo, fonts, and other defining characteristics unique to you. Keeping your brand identifiable across all touchpoints your customers encounter boosts brand recognition, which increases reach and effectiveness of your marketing content.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of cloud-based business applications of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. Data-driven and inter-connected, these apps sport modern and aligned interfaces, robust built-in capabilities, and highly customizable development. Whether you use one or many of these apps, there are many build-in features that allow you to create brand-specific content.

Design principles fill entire textbooks and four-year college degrees. Safe to say the subject is ripe with intrigue and value, yet it is fraught with trouble spots. Strong design for all content is a key requirement for marketing content, such as website pages, blog images, and social media posts.

Because blogs and social media are often created in-house, it’s necessary to nurture the skills needed to build professional visuals for your marketing content, whether it be an infographic, a blog image, a thumbnail image, a social media visual, a header for email campaigns, or anything. But if you or your team is not trained in graphic design, how do you achieve this? Sticking to design best practices is a good first step, and below we will share a handful to start you on the right path.

Social media is a hotbed for marketing these days: everyone is on it, every business needs to take advantage of it, and there are many strategies to engage your audience across various platforms. Marketers work hard to create strong content for their business’ social media accounts—from witty, thoughtful, or research-backed posts, to content from their own website (like blogs, infographics, and whitepapers), to engaging advertisements.

So, when most of the hard work is done, how do you ensure that those efforts are as effective as possible and return as much on your investment as it can? Believe it or not, it’s often simple steps that lead to immense shifts in social media likes, clicks, website visits, and leads.

Plans have been released for the 2022 Release Wave 1, the semi-annual feature upgrades for the Dynamics 365 suite of business applications. These feature releases keep you on the forefront of technology with improvements based off user feedback – so you can always count on quality updates that really make a difference in your workday.

Here’s everything you need to know about the new, standout features coming to Dynamics 365 Marketing with Release Wave 1:

Things like real-time customer journeys, recommended actions, SMS messaging, and using natural language to create targeted segments are exciting (and relatively new) features that can help you connect with customers in the ways that matter most. Now, AI has been harnessed in Dynamics 365 Marketing for a new, imaginative feature called Content ideas.

Here’s how to use Content ideas to quickly generate on-message content to create personalized customer experiences:

A cornerstone of achieving web conversions is strategically placing landing pages as the first point of contact with your website. Landing pages are a bit different from your normal web page—having a smaller scope and narrowed down objective—although still an extension of your overall web presence. When done right, both you and your visitor gain something from this initial point of contact, and it can generate even more web engagement and repeat visitors in the future.

As the new year rings in, many people make resolutions—new habits, self-improvements, changes for the better. Whether or not you ascribe to New Year Resolutions, here’s a change your business can make to kick off this year and build up your bottom line: invest in CRM. A Customer Relationship Management system is a tool that, when added to your tech stack, can return massive ROI by improving your sales and marketing performance and potential. In fact, in 2014, every dollar spent on CRM returned between $5.60 and $8.71 (Nucleus Research).