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.

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.

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.

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:

The search is always on for how businesses can achieve more with the effort they put in. To achieve the goal of more results with less effort, the Dynamics 365 Marketing 2021 Release Wave 2 focuses on engaging customers across all touchpoints when that contact will have the most impact, personalizing customer interactions using their own data for a heightened sense of connectivity, and making the strong and speedy business decisions that are afforded to Microsoft customers through AI-driven analytics.

Time is a valuable resource—make the most of it by utilizing smart automation functions for day-to-day tasks. With Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can easily automate email communications to customers, but did you know that you can also delegate send as permissions so others can send emails on your behalf—automatically? Sending quick reminders to check in and follow up have never been easier.

Get the most out of your team’s various marketing endeavors by using smart insights and analytics from Dynamics 365 Marketing. Using analytics is a simple, yet effective way to measure the successes and pain points of marketing efforts to clearly see what’s working well and determine how to fill in the gaps.

Know that you want to measure marketing analytics, but aren’t sure where to start? Here’s a brief look at a few of the things you can track using Dynamics 365 Marketing insights and how to use the data to make better, more informed decisions.

Each business is its own ecosystem, with specialized needs for the customers they serve, the distinct services they provide, and their individualized business processes. You wouldn’t buy a suit without tailoring it to fit you perfectly; the same expectation should apply to CRMs. Companies are not cookie cutter and generic, and neither are the customizable abilities possible with solutions such as Dynamics 365 Marketing or Sales.

CRMs are powerful tools for automation and record keeping, but did you know that they can also take on a bulk of digital marketing activities too? Finding an all-in-one CRM solution can drive success and help teams exceed expectations, all within a single workspace.

How many workdays have been filled completing manual, repetitive, time-consuming business processes, like sending reminders, scheduling meetings, or completing the steps of an approval? These tasks are necessary, but they often require time and energy that employees could otherwise spend on driving the business forward. With advancements in technology and the power of automation, these processes can be done—often from start to finish—automatically, freeing up time in your day for all the other important things you do for your company.

Effective marketing strategies and tactics are designed to cultivate enough interest to make sure each sales-focused interaction has a stable foundation. Creating lead scoring models in Dynamics 365 Marketing autogenerates a score to indicate each contact or account’s likelihood of closing a deal based on interactions with websites, emails, events, and more. Scoring leads allows users to focus on the most quality prospects by cutting through cluttered sales pipelines and highlighting each lead’s progress towards becoming sales ready.

New real-time marketing features in Dynamics 365 Marketing provide users with tools to engage customers in the moments that matter using a variety of customizable dimensions like branching paths and triggers. Insights can be harnessed by AI capabilities to automatically generate recommendations for actions when it comes to content, channels, and analytics.

Segments (marketing lists) and integrations also allow organizations to seamlessly leverage customer profile information to ensure each customer engagement utilizes the full range of tools available for an overall personalized experience.

Engaging a customer at the opportune times is a tricky, time-consuming business; yet, this is a necessary act for many businesses to build and retain a loyal and satisfied customer base. Gathering touchpoint data, analyzing customer actions, anticipating customer desires, and sending proper emails or other communication at the right moment—what if all this effort and toil could happen automatically based on the customer’s actions? Fortunately, automation for a broad range of purposes, even across several Microsoft applications, can be easily established.

This blog will demonstrate just one example of Microsoft applications—such as Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft Bookings, and Power Automate—interacting seamlessly to provide optimal, efficient business solutions for you, and a cohesive, satisfying end-to-end experience for your customers.

Digital marketing strategies became more crucial than ever this past year, especially when many businesses realized an effective digital presence was a key factor in maintaining successful operations. Dynamics 365 Marketing takes the guesswork out of campaigns and makes it easy to put together polished digital marketing content while managing it all in one cohesive interface. Check out some of the key functionalities of Dynamics 365 Marketing that allow for a high degree of customization to branded marketing content.

When it comes to creating consistent, high-quality digital marketing content, templates are key. Content templates ensure that brand standards are met by including default colors and logos that are consistent with the brand. Templates also provide management with a way to approve design elements without needed to approve each piece of content.

Dynamics 365 Marketing provides out-of-the-box templates for landing pages, forms, marketing emails, and more while giving managers the tools to create customized templates for digital marketers to use in day-to-day work.

As part of Dynamics 365 2021 Release Wave 1, Dynamics 365 Marketing received an overhaul of its email designer last month. The new designer gives a more modern look and feel in addition to new features. With the changes, users may find it a bit jarring when opening an email record for the first time. However the new layout should feel overall more streamlined after getting better acquainted.

Managing live events can be incredibly stressful and difficult for staff. From planning to taking money and managing registrations, it is imperative to have a set system and process for conducting live events. Systems like Dynamics 365 Marketing make it easier by managing registrations, logistics, and payment in one place.

But what about the check-in process? If the check-in process is mismanaged, the check-in desk can get backed up or post event reporting can be negatively affected. In this blog we’ll cover how organizations can utilize the Dynamics 365 mobile app and event registration QR codes to ensure the check-in process runs smoothly.

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is Microsoft’s powerful solution for customer feedback management. With it, business can easily create, send, and analyze surveys.

As part of the Dynamics 365 ecosystem, Customer Voice is easily integrated with other applications like Dynamics 365 Marketing. This integration allows businesses to automatically send out surveys to targeted segments created in Marketing.