Twice a year Microsoft releases core improvements to its product stack that include key enhancements or new feature availability. Recently, Microsoft published the release plan for coming spring, introducing some really breakthrough enhancements to its marketing product in terms of AI, personalisation, omnichannel and analytics.
Target of the product evolvements planned for April is to unleash the power of all an organisations’ data assets, enriched with AI, analytical and predictive capabilities. These enhancements aim to empower organisations to thrive more meaningful conversations with their audiences, whit high attention for ease of use and self-service for end users in marketing teams.
Overall, the coming release of Dynamics 365 Marketing relies on four drivers:
- Deeper personalisation: Both more ease and more advanced capabilities to realise personalised and dynamic content for audiences.
- More channels: Enhanced capabilities giving more power and ease to reach customers with the right messages through various channels introducing text messaging and Android and iOS app push notifications.
- Analytics: Intelligence to introduce look-a-like profiles and audiences or to experiment with next best actions along customer journeys.
Studying the release into more details, I listed the five most exciting new features to be expected in April this year:
1. Extended datasets to power processes and personalisation
Personalisation and process capabilities with respect to customer experience become more powerful. Users will be enabled to utilize every single piece of data over Microsoft Dataverse as input for personalisation, dynamics content or to trigger personalised processes and journey’s. This makes personalised content and contextual messages much more advanced, more tailored and more actionable.
2. Mobile Apps
Multi – channel capabilities are extended with new out of the box functionalities that before required 3’rd party involvement and subscriptions. From April, marketers are equipped with functionality to seamlessly integrate with iOS and Android apps of their businesses engaging with their audiences. Every single event in Dynamics 365 can be utilized as a trigger for push notifications targeting customers and prospects with relevant and personalised content via a channel that they have at hand every single moment of the day.
3. SMS Messages via mobile phone
What first had to be reached making use of third party integrations, has now become default functionality. The mobile channel is now further integrated with the ability to connect with mobile users using SMS messaging.
Today’s digital landscape has paved the way for text messaging to be a marketing platform that’s not only viable but actually worthwhile. Text is simple, powerful, and brands are utilizing it more now than ever before. Text messaging offers extremely high read rates within the first 15 minutes of delivery, making it one of the best methods in marketing with minimal costs. Being able to expand your channels via Dynamics 365 Marketing, using any event and characteristic about your audience to orchestrate actions so can become a very competitive asset.
Both SMS and MMS messages can be sent and users have the option to purchase or use existing phone numbers across selected regions over North America and Europe.
4. Experiment with the best next actions
The new release will also support marketers to discover which of their methods are most effective and adapt to it. Variances of any form, channel, message or next action can easily be tested concluding into tactics that prove to be most effective.
The metric for the wining action can be message specific (for example, email clicked), or a journey goal (for example, cart checkout); the latter allows you to choose a winning variant that truly increases the journey goal attainment. Any variance can be tested: different channels with the same message, different message with the same channel, different messages with the same channel, or any next actions over the customer journey. The winning strategy can determined automatically once a threshold metric is reached or when a specified date has been met.
5. Dynamic content with based on point and click interface
Not only personalisation has been made more powerful harnessing insights from whichever dataset in your Dynamics 365 environment, it also becomes easier as advanced dynamic content can be applied by a point and click interface. Personalisation is key to customer relevance in today’s digital era and with the coming release advanced users can realise dynamic content such as showing content blocks based on conditions and iterating through dynamic datasets. It’s no longer requested to be an expert and to write custom code with HTML.
Dynamics 365 Marketing has taken huge steps in becoming a competitive and mature marketing solution for marketing teams. The power of data, AI, and personalisation becomes ground-breaking whilst still being a self-service solution for marketers making it a unique product.
Want to know how Dynamics 365 Marketing can help your organisation ahead? Reach out via a DM on LinkedIn or by writing to marijnvanhaperen@intouch365.nl.
Want to remain updated about the latest evolvements in Martech and data driven customer centricity solutions? Follow the Intouch365 LinkedIn page here.
