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.

A happy customer is one who is listened to, their needs met. A resilient and successful business is one who fosters happy, loyal customers. Where these Venn Diagrams meet is an efficient and easy way to ask for and give feedback. Standard, generic feedback won’t give the nuanced insights to help a company serve its clients and grow; yet asking for specific, detailed feedback usually calls for time-consuming manual labor, developing a myriad of surveys for common situations and experiences.

The goal behind digital transformation is to help organizations adapt and remain resilient against competitive pressure, changing customer needs, and even global crises. Companies who are flexible, with growth-mindsets and the urge to stay relevant with ever-new technologies, are the companies who successfully shift via digital transformation.

Digital is the future, and it is also the present, so there is no better time to consider how your business can move toward full digital transformation. This blog discusses seven key ways businesses can leverage the power of Dynamics 365 business applications to drive their digital transformation.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps organizations offer end-to-end customer support services across multiple channels to meet customer needs, wherever they may be. The app tracks customer issues through cases, manages performance and productivity in the workspace dashboard, tracks customer requests across channels, and provides customers with assisted and self-service through a variety of scenarios.

With the upcoming 2021 Release Wave 2 updates, the app will see overall enhancements to AI insights, embedded analytics, collaboration tools, and bolstered case management abilities.

When onboarding a new employee, the ability to quickly and efficiently provide permissions is paramount to that new employee settling in and jumping into the flow of work. Just as, if not more, important is taking access or abilities away if a position has shifted or an individual no longer works for the company to prevent over access and abuse of it.

Dynamics 365 applications have a variety of pre-built and editable security roles admin can assign to groups of employees, streamlining and enhancing security across the organization.

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.

Event management is a complex feat from start to finish, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. Event planning and management tools within Dynamics 365 Marketing help guide users through every step of the process from preliminary budgeting, registration, session planning, webinar broadcasting, post-event analytics, and beyond. Users can utilize two helpful features within the event work area to manage event sponsors and vendors.

Dynamics 365 Sales makes sales-focused CRM easy, and organizations can expect even better features with updates that refresh the user experience and maximize efficiency. More AI capabilities will allow sellers to work smarter and prioritize the most gainful activities while keeping track of critical information for each lead.

Microsoft will begin rolling out a robust update to the Dynamics 365 suite later this year, and Dynamics 365 Sales in particular will see quite a few improvements. The improvements were created based on customer feedback, so users can look forward to a highly optimized app experience.

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.

It’s time. Time to come together again, in-person, and bask in the connections and momentum that comes from being together and learning together. Community Summit North America 2021 will be held in Houston, Texas from October 12-15, and you’re invited. Summit organizers encourage you to come with questions, and you will leave with answers.

If Summit is new to you, or if it’s been a while since your organization has attended, here are the reasons why you should consider attending and how to make the most of Summit NA when you’re there.

Plans were recently published for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 2021 Release Wave 2, slated for release this fall. This update will feature hundreds of enhancements and improved functionalities, including robust integrations with Microsoft 365 products. These significant new capabilities will strengthen the features made available by Release Wave 1, which was rolled out earlier this year.

Each small to midsize business faces unique challenges, but perhaps most widespread is a SMB’s struggle to find software that works well for their needs. Often technology SMBs use are made for enterprise-sized businesses, and are therefore inefficient, too expensive, or missing important functionalities the SMB needs. Businesses shift as time passes, and its technology needs to be able to do the same. Let’s take a look at six ways Microsoft Dynamics 365 benefits SMBs.

Gathering customer feedback is one of the most effective means to improving your company’s products and services. Successful companies—those who wish to build resilience, foster a growth-mindset, and earn and maintain customer loyalty—listen to and deliver on what their customers desire.

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is an online survey platform that can be used with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing that can help any business create and manage simple, effective surveys as part of their journey toward resilience, growth, and customer loyalty.

Digital marketing platforms typically focus on email marketing or social media marketing, while avoiding other important digital marketing aspects like landing pages, forms, and event management, Dynamics 365 Marketing differentiates itself by housing all of the features above in one place and integrating with the powerful contact and account management capabilities of Dynamics 365 Sales.

For marketing forms specifically, the true benefit lies in embedding marketing forms on external websites and collecting contact information that can be used in email campaigns or tracked as leads in Dynamics 365 Sales.

Dynamics 365 Marketing comes out-of-the-box with a wide range of functionality. Customer journeys provide everything from quick, single-email blasts to much larger, dynamic, multi-step marketing automation processes. Content tiles within Customer Journeys allow users to drag and drop different marketing activities like emails, phone calls, appointments, workflows, and much more within a campaign.

In addition to these tiles, Custom Channels can be created to expand upon the base tool set. Custom channels can be things like social media platforms or SMS marketing that can be used within a customer journey just like the default tiles.

Any company that offers a product or service, collects data related to residents, or otherwise operates within the European Union must be sure it complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It can be a bit confusing to navigate at first, particularly for organizations in the U.S. or otherwise outside of the EU. Dynamics 365 Marketing is fully equipped and ready to easy the process of ensuring data collection procedures meet the requirements of the EU.

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.

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is an enterprise feedback management application built into the ecosystem of Dynamics 365. Customer Voice enables organizations to take in feedback from their customer base and incorporate their voice into the decision making of business practices and processes.

Ensuring that every customer interaction adheres to brand standards should be the primary goal for all marketers and survey makers. New personalization features released in Dynamics 365 2021 release wave 1 give survey makers new ways to brand Customer Voice surveys and personalize the survey experience.

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.