What Is Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Automation and Where to Find Help

Being a business owner is a serious balancing act.

Not only are you your own marketing expert, but you are also the salesperson, accounts manager, CXO, and more, all at the same time.

And it can get overwhelming – making sure that every department is running smoothly and everyone gets things done is an enormous responsibility. You always have to make sure that the right information gets to the right people at the right time.

The good news is you don't have to do everything by yourself.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing empowers your business with marketing automation. These AI-enhanced and cloud-native tools help you to quickly create personalized "customer journeys" using emails, text messages and push notification communication channels to reach your customers.

This article will:

1. Guide you through Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation
2. Explain how this solution benefits your business
3. Show you the value of a Dynamics 365 marketing consultant

Let's get started.

What Is Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Automation?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is a 360-degree marketing solution that consolidates customer information and enables you to create personalized customer journeys. The Microsoft Dynamics platform has exceptional tools for building and customizing interactive workflows. Therefore, we can say that Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation refers to how Dynamics 365 Marketing handles routine tasks without needing human action.

With Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, your sales and marketing teams share data seamlessly because they are working on the same platform, which boosts cross-departmental collaboration in your business.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation has several other useful features. Such as:

• Multichannel campaigns
• Event management
• Webinar management
• Lead tracking
• Lead scoring
• Lead nurturing
• Data visualization tools

Businesses can get Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation in two ways – either by working with a Microsoft Partner or going directly to Microsoft.

How Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Automation Works

Marketing automation for Microsoft Dynamics 365 lets you conduct multichannel campaigns. This means that you can use several media channels to communicate with your audience and spread your marketing message. And through multi-channel interactions, you collect customer data that helps you create a 360-degree view of each prospect.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation then streamlines audience segmentation to target the right audience with relevant messages quickly and at scale.

The messages are sent automatically in line with predefined instructions called "workflows."

With Microsoft Dynamics and marketing automation, you can define workflows through customizable templates or build them from scratch on a canvas.

This lets you attract quality leads through email, LinkedIn, landing pages, social media, and more.

Each time a lead performs a certain action, they get an automated message response. For instance, if a customer fills out a form on your website. They automatically receive a confirmation email immediately after.

You can even extend the solution to custom channels like SMS for direct marketing. The language option for SMS is available in over 87 languages and can be used in more than 200 countries.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation lets you schedule SMS messages to be sent out automatically whenever some predefined triggers occur.

For example, you can automate SMS communication for when:

• Customers sign up for your SMS loyalty program – schedule an auto-generated welcome message for this trigger.
• New products arrive in stock – inform customers to come to check them out.
• A customer sends an inquiry – schedule a message acknowledging the message receipt and a promise to get back to them soon.

Here's an example:

Source

With the event management feature, Microsoft Dynamics CRM marketing automation alerts you and lets you keep all your event information on one platform.

All event details like venues, logistics, speakers, sponsors, and ticketing are accessible to your whole team. Makes it easy to coordinate as the work on an event progresses.

Attendees can self-register on event pages created with Dynamics 365. Here's an example:

Source

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation boosts your marketing efforts with lead-scoring models. You can now identify the most promising leads based on their customer journey and their interactions.

The leads are automatically passed on to sales for timely follow-up once they reach a predetermined, sales-ready score.

Since Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is part of the Dynamics 365 portfolio of products, it integrates with Dynamics 365 CRM, Microsoft 365, Power BI, Microsoft Teams, and other Microsoft products.

With automation, you can use the power of data and AI to make informed decisions on how to engage your customers more effectively across all touchpoints.

For instance, you'll see how many people clicked on each link in an email. You can also gain insight into how many people registered for your event through social media vs. through your website.

You and your team can then decide which campaigns get a higher budget because of their effectiveness and which ones need some modifications.

The 6 Benefits of Dynamics 365 Marketing Automation

First, a breakdown of the key benefits of Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation:

Now let's dive a little deeper.

1. Increased Customer Engagement

Marketing automation for Microsoft Dynamics CRM has audience segmentation capabilities that allow your team to create personalized content for each segment.

With Dynamics 365 marketing automation, your company can reach your target persona on any channel, including social media, email campaigns, and search ads.

How does Dynamics 365 marketing automation achieve this? It first turns your website visitors into leads by collecting key information about them.

It then segments these leads by behavior and characteristics, enabling you to personalize your entire lead nurturing process.

Imagine, for example, that a site visitor has read your post on marketing conferences. A personalized lead nurturing email would be sent inviting them to the next marketing conference organized by your company.

Engaged customers convert pretty fast – and personalizing marketing campaigns through segmentation helps keep them involved.

In fact, 51% of marketers prioritize email segmentation while building campaigns to boost conversion rates.

Also, streamlining processes reduces customer effort throughout the sales journey. The customer gets a consistent experience from their first touch point all the way beyond the purchase.

2. Improves Staff Productivity

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation takes care of mundane tasks that take up too much time every day. Examples of repetitive marketing tasks are:

• Personalized advertising
• Customer behavior targeting
• Email campaigns
• Lead scoring and prioritization
• Social media posting

It's worth noting that marketing automation increases employee productivity by 14.5%. It also reduces marketing overhead by 12.2%.

It's safe to surmise that automation empowers marketers to focus on high-priority tasks like planning and brainstorming. The result? A three-fold increase in the number of leads passed over to sales within a month.

Productivity of your team increases significantly due to the reduction of repetitive tasks. As they can concentrate more on things that can improve the quality of work.

This means that you may not need to hire more people to get the job done, increasing your revenue.

3. Improves Team Collaboration

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is a collaborative platform that allows teams to communicate in real-time.

Your teammates can tag each other with @ mentions and get quick responses. You also get alerts on pending tasks and potential bottlenecks.

This helps the teammates be responsible and clears the way for the other dependent tasks to flow.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation enhances the collaboration between your sales and marketing teams. The prebuilt workflows streamline operations, leading to better cross-department coordination.

You can align your company goals with efforts, generate more leads, and boost sales.

The marketing team can concentrate on strategizing, finding, and nurturing more leads. On the other hand, the sales team can focus on converting high-value, qualified leads.

4. Better Reporting and Campaign Analytics

Dynamics 365 marketing automation compiles comprehensive reports from all social media channels.

You save the time you'd have spent sifting through each platform, taking screenshots, and bringing it all together into one document to present to your seniors.

You can also get deeper insights into how well your campaigns are doing on each channel and what areas require improvement.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation makes suggestions on areas of improvement as well as projections on how these changes will benefit your business.

You can automate the frequency of these reports as per your preference (daily, weekly, monthly, or annually).

Dynamics 365 marketing automation has all that you need to scale your marketing efforts and better your current and future marketing performance.

5. Improves Accuracy

Automation helps to reduce human error that comes with the repetition of tasks. Surprisingly, this helps secure your data and prevents your business from falling victim to cyber attacks.

Notifiable Data Breaches Report noted that 43% of data breaches resulted from human error. Automation minimizes the number of human touchpoints, therefore lowering the risk of data breaches.

Using Dynamics 365 for marketing implementation also ensures that the output is consistent throughout your sales and marketing processes and campaigns.

Creating templates for email and event campaigns further contributes to the consistency of customer outreach.

Therefore, you will be able to create a seamless, user-centric experience.

In other words, your brand becomes easily recognizable because it maintains consistency across channels. Increasing brand loyalty among customers and brand recognition among prospects.

6. Boosts ROI

Follow-ups and responses can be sent quicker through marketing automation, which translates to more sales and ROI.

According to Forbes, 71% of internet leads are wasted because of late responses. If a business fails to respond fast enough, that lead is likely to fall through the cracks.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM marketing automation sends immediate responses to customers based on their actions. The responses are personalized and relevant to each customer's queries.

This personalization is what contributes to higher ROI. "The Rise of Personalized Commerce" study found that 70% of companies that adopted advanced personalization earned over 200% increase in ROI.

In addition, the increased efficiency among your staff members and greater collaboration between departments will result in a higher return on investment for your company.

How to Get Help with Marketing Automation

How can a Dynamics 365 marketing consultant help you unlock these benefits?

A Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Partner becomes your expert guide and supports you in buying, implementing, and optimizing Dynamics 365 applications to accelerate your business.

They have vast experience in Dynamics 365 model-driven app development, data modeling principles, and Microsoft Power Platform configuration.

This means that they can take over app creation for your business and train your staff on how to effectively use the apps and keep them up and running.

A Dynamics 365 marketing consultant also implements marketing initiatives like creating sales funnels, inbound marketing, and drip campaigns.

They work closely with stakeholders to understand requirements and implement Dynamics 365 Marketing solutions.

Another key item that a Dynamics 365 marketing consultant takes up is developing Dynamics 365 organizational cybersecurity for your business – protecting your data and keeping your business secure from cyber attacks.

Consultants also usually extend Dynamics 365 solutions to include more features through Power Platforms components like Power Apps and Power Automate.

They can train your staff on key Dynamics 365 capabilities, such as:

• Managing segments and lists
• Configuration of marketing applications
• Creating and managing marketing pages and forms
• Managing customer journeys
• Creating and managing marketing emails using email templates and more
• Configuring Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to collect customer reviews and feedback
• Managing events and webinars
• Implementing Power Virtual Agent chatbots
• Configuring the Microsoft Dataverse
• Managing leads, contacts, and accounts
• Creating business apps using Power Apps
• Creating and managing Power Automate

Post training, set up, and launching of Dynamics 365 for your business, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Partner won't pack up and leave.

In fact, they will remain your go-to people for all Microsoft-related questions. Consultants also help you get support quicker than you would if you went directly through Microsoft.

In other words, Microsoft Gold Partners like Amaxra become a part of your team, offering support and resolution whenever required.

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Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Automation FAQs

"What Problems Does Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Automation Solve?"

The key challenges that Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation helps you solve are:

1. Lack of resources and time
2. Personalizing marketing campaigns
3. Gauging marketing ROI
4. Scaling sales efforts

With Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation, your team can take on higher-priority tasks and increase revenue by limiting hiring requirements. It also takes care of process bottlenecks, ensuring on-time project completion.

Microsoft Dynamics marketing campaign automation ensures targeted audience segments see relevant messages and ad campaigns. This leads to higher engagement, better lead nurturing, and higher conversions.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation provides a closed-loop system that tracks leads from initial engagement to conversion. The data can then be used to measure the success of each campaign.

And with lead scoring capabilities, the software helps you identify hot leads and focus on converting them.

Finally, automating marketing tasks like lead nurturing and email marketing allows your marketing team to be more productive. They have more time to focus on strategizing and planning for better marketing campaigns in the future.

"Which Capabilities Are Included in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Automation?"

With Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation, you can

1. Email marketing management
2. Customer journey management
3. Lead scoring
4. Multi-channel campaign management
5. Marketing page creation
6. Social posting
7. Webinar creation and management
8. Event management
9. Interactive form creation for survey
10. Analytics and reporting

"How Much Time Does Marketing Automation Save?"

A recent study has shown that you can save up to six hours a day by automating your social media schedules. Auto-scheduling client reservations and appointments can save up to 80% of your time.

BenchmarkONE also calculated and found that marketing automation can save you up to eight hours a day.

"What Is the Biggest Obstacle to Marketing Automation?"

There are three large obstacles to marketing automation:

1. Failure to set up automation effectively

If you fail to set up your marketing automation effectively, it could be disastrous. Customers will get the wrong messages for the wrong actions or triggers, and this could deny you the chance to nurture them.

Solution: To overcome this challenge, get comprehensive training on Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation and how to effectively set it up.

Having a Microsoft partner like Amaxra on your team provides all the support you need to get started and run Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing automation.

Some marketing tasks still have to be done manually. For instance, while you can automate social media scheduling, you shouldn't automate your response to comments.

Content creation needs a creative human touch. And your marketing automation software does not have that capability.

Also, the customizable templates offered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing can help you save time in creating effective email campaigns. But without a human perspective to creatively communicate your brand, the campaign will not reach your intended goal.

Solution: Be careful about what you automate and what you continue to do manually by using creativity and personal touch.

3. Impersonal content

Personalized content is engaging and captures the audience's attention because it speaks to their unique needs. Impersonal content, therefore, compromises customer engagement.

Solution: Conduct a content audit to see how your current content is engaging your audience. Once you find out what kind of content your audience likes from the audit, create a strategy to develop and deliver this content to them.

Remember to add audience segmentation to the strategy, so each segment sees what's most relevant to them.

So to summarize these obstacles:

Conclusion

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing automation refers to how Dynamics 365 Marketing handles routine tasks without needing human input.

It not only boosts staff productivity but also improves accuracy, team collaboration, customer engagement, and reporting.

You can get help from a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Partner like Amaxra to connect you with top-level Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing experts.

We will help you set up your marketing automation and train your staff on how to keep it up and running.

It's time to take action – add a Microsoft expert to your team and scale your marketing efforts.

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