When it comes time to evaluate your organization’s email marketing efforts, it can often lead to this deceptively short-and-sweet question: “Is it working?”
Without the right tools at your disposal, it is probably not an easy question to answer. And the answer is important. You need to know how well email marketing is leveraged to contribute to the overall growth of your organization. With all the tasks involved in email marketing – researching your target audience(s), managing and tracking leads, creating engaging content, planning entire campaigns with intelligence, soliciting feedback – it’s a BIG job, and your hard work should pay off.
"It’s a BIG job, and your hard work should pay off."
Implementing comprehensive solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing with apps that support marketing operations is a great place to start. A recent JourneyTeam Learning Forum highlighted several Dynamics 365 Marketing email marketing features, including tips to help organizations realize the value of email marketing as a vital communication channel.
In this post we will look at five ways Dynamics 365 Marketing can be used to apply greater strategy to email marketing:
1. Manage and Personalize Campaigns from the Customer Journey
2. Automate Emails with Reusable and Dynamic Content
3. Perform A/B Testing
4. Score Your Leads
5. Solicit Feedback
Let’s dig in!
1. Manage Campaigns from the Customer Journey
"Customer Journeys allow you to model, execute, and evaluate dynamic campaign experiences for your prospective customers.”
According to Microsoft, Customer Journeys “…allow you to model, execute, and evaluate dynamic campaign experiences for your prospective customers.” Further, Customer Journeys allow you to:
Share information and processes across sales and marketing teams
Automate email marketing and run multichannel campaigns
Access key insights that promote smart decisions, right from where you work
With sales and marketing data in sync, all the information that is critical to personalizing the buyer experience can be found in one place. You can map out all marketing interactions, from one e-blast to complex campaigns, from a visual top-level view for full campaign oversight. Campaigns may include event marketing, including any email touchpoints.
You can also analyze detailed email interaction data from Customer Journeys that reveals trends on opens, reaction time, clicks, bounces, and more. Using these insights are critical to fine-tuning your email marketing strategy.
2. Automate Emails with Reusable and Dynamic Content
In Dynamics 365 Marketing Marketers can optimize marketing campaigns with email publishing tools that support:
Branded email templates, with options to customize or use a standard template
Reusable blocks of frequently used and/or pre-approved content
Dynamic content that personalizes messages
You can optimize the email design process with templates and blocks of standard content. This saves tremendous time long-term – no more searching multiple shared databases for a standard list of your organization’s services, or rewriting that “about us” boilerplate. Using drag-and-drop tools, it’s in your email in seconds.
With templates and reusable content ready to go, you can spend less time writing and focus instead on tailoring the buyer experience to something much more personal.
"Now it’s time for the fun stuff - dynamic content!"
Dynamic content can transform a generic email into a personalized one. Automating email personalization in Dynamics 365 with dynamic content opens a wide realm of possibilities. A typical use case we all know of is merging a first and last name to personalize an email salutation. But there are even more powerful uses for dynamic content. With some code work, custom logic can dictate the use of dynamic content anywhere in an email message. Dynamic content can be automated into the process before a message is sent to a recipient, merging information from a recipient’s contact record.
For example, if you are emailing an existing customer, you could use purchase history data to update a dynamic content field with a blurb promoting a product upsell. Or if you’re emailing a VP, the tone of your email could be formalized with a different variation or inclusion of a sentence or two.
3. Perform A/B Testing
A/B testing is a common best practice of effective email marketing. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing provides A/B testing capabilities so that you may trial two different variations of the same email and track the results. With this information, you gain insight into the messaging that is proven to resonate better with recipients.
4. Score Your Leads
By assigning lead scores based on behaviors and conditions, you can tailor campaigns and foster the growth of leads that are more likely to become engaged customers.
"Your leads are more likely to become engaged customers."
5. Solicit Feedback
Surveying is a great tool to solicit feedback that can be insightful when planning campaigns. Dynamics 365 Marketing supports the ability to create and publish online surveys that can be integrated into email and event marketing, and more.
Ready to Go Next-Level?
Want to see how the tools offered with Dynamics Marketing 365 can take your email marketing efforts to the next level? Contact JourneyTEAM to get your organization set up with Dynamics 365 Marketing at (833) 438-2312.
JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security, and more. www.journeyteam.com
For any additional questions, please contact Journeyteam at (801) 565-9199.