The powerful marketing features of Dynamics 365 – Turning leads into customers

Dynamics 365 offers unique marketing-automation tools to help organisations generate more sales-ready leads across multiple channels and nurture them with personalised experiences – turning prospects into business relationships.

“Dynamics 365 enables better marketing for organisations because it is easily customisable and configurable so that you can build a complete 360-degree view of your client based on their particular needs,” says Nicholas van den Heuvel, MS Dynamics CRM consultant at Mint Management Technologies.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM (Customer Relationship Management) enables organisations to manage relationships with customers, and its flexible, cloud-based architecture allows businesses to scale as their needs change.

“It offers powerful marketing features that creates a single view of the customer, identifies leads, and provides the tools you need to nurture those leads and make smarter decisions,” says Paul Dias, Mint Management Technologies Microsoft Dynamics 365 Consultant.

Multichannel marketing campaigns

Dynamics 365 allows businesses to attract the right prospects through multichannel marketing campaigns, including email marketing, web landing pages, phone calls, and surveys.

“Within Dynamics 365, you get campaigns, marketing lists, and an email builder straight out of the box,” says van den Heuvel. “And the system seamlessly integrates with more advanced applications, such as Click Dimensions, Marketo, and Hubspot, if you want to be more creative or need customer-specific tools.”

Microsoft will be upgrading the marketing module to include more advanced configurable templates and design tools that will allow users to set up clients’ journeys and personalise their experiences based upon customer engagement.

Marketers can also engage customers across social channels, build a social presence, and source new leads through social media using Dynamics 365.

“There are multiple of tools that you can use, like social engagement tracking, which allows you to look at the sentiments of posts, judge whether they are positive or negative, and decide whether or not the person is a potential,” says Dias. “Dynamics 365 is also able to analyse the sentiment automatically and will create a lead if it feels the sentiment is positive, using customer defined keywords.”

Users are then able to review sentiments and can change them if necessary and can see which social media channels offer more engagement and better leads so that marketers can tailor their campaigns accordingly. Social insights can also be used to gain competitive intelligence and to measure and manage brand reputation.

Align sales and marketing

Using Dynamics 365, marketers can prioritise leads and automate hand-off to sales, with multiple lead-scoring models and sales-readiness grades. It also offers marketers a 360-degree view of each customer, and both marketing and sales can share one source of information about contacts, leads, and customers.

“Dynamics 365 allows you to build marketing lists that target your industry – which can be anything from a hairdresser to someone in the steel industry,” says Dias. “You’re able to build a complete client base, which can include very specific details, such as shirt size or marital status. This is all captured and available at the click of a button and allows you to market far more specifically.”

For this to be effective, Dynamics 365 needs to be configured and optimised to ensure uniformity across the available data. “You want to make sure that everything you want is captured, and the best way to do that is to make specific fields required before you’re able to move on, which Dynamics 365 allows you to do,” says van den Heuvel.

When capturing leads, the sales team can move through different stages that ensure all relevant details are included, such as personal details, contact details, location, and anything else that is relevant. “This ensures that your team has all the information they need to follow up effectively with leads,” adds Dias. “They won’t open a lead and find that the name is missing or that the number is incorrect, because number and email validation are included as well. You can streamline the system to work perfectly to meet your requirements.”

Innovate with an adaptable platform

Dynamics 365 is easy to tailor or extend, and it connects to other apps and services seamlessly. As a result, it allows businesses to adapt quickly with no-code visual editors and tools that make it easy to build and deploy web and mobile apps.

“Click Dimensions, for example, seamlessly integrates with Dynamics 365 and allows you to utilise them within the application. This means that you don’t need to click in and out of Dynamics 365 to view different windows,” says Dias. “With Click Dimensions, you can build templates, create emails, and set up the web forms all within Dynamics 365. Being able to work from one platform without switching between multiple applications can save you a lot of time.”

Users can also automate processes across Dynamics 365 applications and third-party systems for better service engagement experiences, while transforming customer interactions with deep insights provided by artificial intelligence that guide teams to the right business outcomes.

“Campaign automation is a big feature,” says van den Heuvel. “Once you’ve set up your automated campaign, the marketing person can walk away and let the system take care of it. This includes automating follow-up emails that encourage clients to respond.”

Make smarter decisions

Using Dynamics 365, marketers can measure results in real time, and improve their marketing ROI with embedded intelligence and analytics that track marketing performance. Teams can track campaign performance and marketing activities with configurable dashboards within PoweBI.

“Dynamics 365 is the ultimate reporting tool for marketers,” says van den Heuvel. “It gives you a variety of charts and dashboards, allows you to pull up leads or view a pipeline that shows you where you stand, where you are going, and where your issues are. You can see if sales are tracking according to their goals, and who you need to talk to if they’re not.”

Combined with marketing automation tools, such as Click Dimensions, users are also able track the origins of leads to determine which channels require the most investment and deliver the best return.

“In Dynamics 365, you can create campaigns, such as LinkedIn content, Facebook posts, or exhibition sponsorships, and link those campaigns to contact forms that visitors fill in when they’re on the landing page,” says Dias. “If a visitor clicks on a Facebook post, that lead source will be correctly attributed, and this will allow you to determine where your best leads are coming from.”

Choosing the right partner

One of the key aspects for businesses looking to get the most from Dynamics 365 is choosing the right partner, says Dias. “It’s great that the system is fully customisable and can cater specifically for you, but you need to make the right partner choice to see its full benefit. The right partner will understand your needs as a customer and will ensure that your unique business requirements are catered for.”

The right partner will also ensure adequate training. “Insufficient training is a serious problem,” says Dias. “If your marketing team doesn’t know how to make use of the tools available to them, how effective can they actually be? It doesn’t help that you spend a fortune getting Dynamics 365 set up with all your data, but it’s not being used effectively.”

Partners also need to consider the growth of your business and the direction it is headed, says van den Heuvel. “Businesses change every day, so whoever you choose as a partner should understand that your requirements will change as your business grows, and you need to future-proof that. Mint has more than 15 years of experience, and we have a proven record in assisting clients across the globe and industries alike.”

For more information, visit the Mint Management Technologies website.

About Nicholas van den Heuvel

With a background in hospitality and customer service, Nicholas moved into the world of technology in 2008, and fused his customer-service experience with technology-driven customer engagement practices that help organisations to digitally transform. Having worked on various versions and functionalities of CRM, he serves as a Microsoft certified CRM Consultant for top 1% global systems integrator Mint Group.

About Paul Dias

With 21 years of experience in the steel industry Paul combined his trade and analytical skills to become a Microsoft Certified CRM Consultant for top 1% global systems integrator Mint Group. Driving transformation and innovation, Paul helps Mint Group’s clients to enforce customer-centric marketing practices by combining the powerful capabilities of Dynamics 365 with marketing automation tools.