What marketing features are built into Dynamics 365 Sales?
In the competitive business landscape of 2025, effective marketing is critical for building quality relationships with your customers and, therefore, driving sales. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales offers a package of in-app marketing features to assist with customer engagement, lead generation, and increasing sales. These features enable sales teams to create outreach campaigns, track interactions with customers, and turn your leads into loyal customers.
While the in-app marketing features in Dynamics 365 Sales aren’t as comprehensive as a standalone marketing app, they bridge the gap between sales and marketing to effectively ensure a more data-driven approach to customer retention and acquisition. Below are the primary marketing capabilities included in the sales app.
Static & Dynamic marketing lists
Once your customer records are in Dynamics 365 Sales, you can add them to your marketing lists to be used in targeted campaigns and quick campaigns. There are two types of marketing lists – static and dynamic.
Select Static or Dynamic when setting up a new marketing list
A static list requires you to manually add leads, accounts, and contacts and doesn’t change unless you add or remove contacts from the list. You might use a static list when sending communications out to a smaller group of contacts that does not change much over time. Perhaps you’d like to send out information to just the founders of your organization or follow up with a group of attendees from an event that you recently hosted. These lists of individuals will remain largely the same over time and are good examples of uses for static marketing lists.
Dynamic marketing lists, on the other hand, are created using a set of customer attributes, meaning they can change automatically as customers with relevant attributes are added or removed from your records. This is especially useful when sending out communications that are relevant to customers of a certain geographic region, for example. If you send out a monthly newsletter to everyone associated with a particular region, that dynamic marketing list will automatically update with each use depending on whether you’ve had
Quick campaign
Quick campaigns are one-time campaign activities and are created for targeted audiences. When a quick campaign is created, an activity will be created for each individual in the marketing list being used for the campaign. The quick campaign feature provides an efficient and easy way to distribute single marketing activities to targeted audiences, such as sending out an email alert regarding an upcoming promotion in a particular region, for example. If you need to add more than one activity to the campaign, you’ll want to create a standard campaign instead.
Create a quick campaign window
Campaigns
A campaign includes multiple activities as well as some tracking features. Contained within campaigns are planning tasks and campaign activities to be managed for marketing campaigns. You can add strategic campaign information to your campaign, such as budgets and expenses, target products, promo codes, marketing collateral, and target marketing lists. You may also include any planning activities that you need to perform before the campaign is launched. To build on the example of a regional promotion from the Quick campaign section, you will want to use a standard campaign if you need to add additional activities to the email alert, such as a mailing or a phone call.
You can add campaign activities using this drop down menu
When to use in-app marketing
The in-app marketing features in the Dynamics 365 Sales app are perfect for certain uses, such as specific initiatives like a sale or promotional period, lead outreach during the sales process, client outreach for common occurrences such as upgrade opportunities or subscription renewal notices, and other client notifications, like a notice that their salesperson is leaving the company. And, it’s an excellent resource for your sales team so you don’t have to spend money on licensing and provisions for a separate marketing app, or provide access and training for a marketing app your company is already using.
Each of these cases provide perfect opportunities to utilize the in-app marketing features in Dynamics 365 Sales. If you’d like a more in-depth demonstration of the features discussed in this blog, check out this Fast Class.
When to upgrade to a marketing app
As we mentioned earlier, the in-app marketing features in Dynamics 365 Sales, while useful, don’t include the wealth of features that you’d find in a standalone marketing application. For example, though you can create campaigns in the Sales app, there are some restrictions to the level of visual design that you can incorporate into your emails. In a comprehensive marketing app, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, you have the ability to create visually appealing, highly designed emails, and you can do so with or without HTML/CSS skills.
You may also want to consider upgrading to a full-service marketing application if you:
Regularly run campaigns for large volumes of contacts (over 5,000)
Need segments and campaigns that include more touchpoints and elements
Want to track advanced analytics such as emails received, opened, bounced, link clicks, etc.
Would like to include things beyond emails in your marketing efforts, such as text messages, push notifications, forms, marketing pages, lead scoring, and event management
If you find that your marketing needs surpass what is available within the in-app marketing features or you require any of the items listed above, your organization may benefit from upgrading to a full, standalone marketing application. While there are many options available, we strongly recommend Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys. Keeping your business applications all within the Microsoft ecosystem has several benefits, including easy-to-learn interfaces and solutions that can be customized to your processes and scaled with your organization’s needs. For more information about the benefits of the Microsoft ecosystem, check out our recent blog.
The in-app marketing features in Dynamics 365 Sales offer sales teams a seamless way to nurture leads, engage prospects, and create personalized interactions with customers – all without leaving the Sales app. This built-in functionality enables easy, streamlined communication and can accelerate the sales process.
That said, organizations experiencing growth often find that their marketing needs are also growing and can gain significant value from a dedicated marketing app like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys. Not only does this standalone marketing solution offer advanced automation and deeper customer analytics, but it also provides AI-driven insights and multi-channel campaign management, allowing your company to effectively scale its marketing efforts as it grows.
Whether you’re looking to leverage convenient in-app marketing features or expand to a full-featured marketing platform with enhanced capabilities, Dynamics 365 provides two great options that empower your team to drive long-term success by creating meaningful customer experiences. If you’re ready to upgrade to a full-service marketing solution or have questions about in-app marketing features in the Sales app, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!