3 new ways to build customer relationships using Dynamics 365 Marketing
What a world we are living in today. There is a lot that is different—how we live, how we work, and how we interact. It has never been more important in business to be able to reach out to customers in a personal and relevant way. We are doing everything in our power to help you build relationships and interact with your customers at scale in this new world. This is the goal of the current Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing release.
The Dynamics 365 Marketing 2020 release wave 2 plan—where you can build customer journeys faster using reimagined editing, in-place previews, and improved journey insights—is now rolling out and we expect it to be available to all regions by the last week of October. We would like to highlight the top three features of this release. We are looking forward to it, and hope that you will be, too.
1. Build amazing customer journeys faster
To interact with customers at scale, we design customer journeys. We took the opportunity in this release to redesign the customer journey canvas making it easier, faster, and more productive for you to automate your customer experience.
A key design point was to reduce the amount of context switching, clicking, and scrolling to reduce the level of effort to complete tasks and make things more intuitive. We also focused on improving performance and rendering, as they are fundamental to the experience as you use the product. Here are the top enhancements:
- Fast and fluid experience. Load time, zoom, and panning are faster and more fluid than ever.
- In-place journey menu. You no longer need to repetitively switch between the toolbox and the properties pane. You can now click to add the next step in the journey directly on the canvas, saving you time and effort.
- Simplified tiles to help you avoid mistakes. Tiles that enable specific actions make it clear and easy for you to build the journey the right way from the start, with options to wait for, wait until, or enable if/then.
- Enhanced journey insights. Analyze journey performance using our new, easier-to-read charts and overlays.
- Customized canvas view. One-click to fit the entire journey into the canvas, fluid zoom, drag to pan, and choose between horizontal and vertical canvas layouts.
2. Webinars and meetings directly integrated with Microsoft Teams
In-person events feel like a distant memory now. We have all pivoted to online and digital channels. In order to help you better run virtual events, we worked with the Microsoft Teams organization to integrate Dynamics 365 Marketing Event Management features with Teams Live Events (webinars) and Meetings (online group meetings with audio and visual), so you can run your team’s webinars and meetings using direct integration with Teams.
The event registration functionality in Dynamics 365 Marketing has been updated so you can continue to use your existing event registration process and, with the press of a button, switch the event or session to online streaming. For your customers, accessing the virtual event could not be easier. Your registrants can use the one-click check in from the event registration confirmation email that is designed and sent through Dynamics 365 Marketing.
We’ve made it seamless to track who attended the event. You can trigger customer journeys based on their registration, sign in, and you can nurture customers through their event experience, for example, sending post-event surveys through Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice and then branching to deliver different experiences based on the results of that survey.
3. Create and manage social media posts and easily monitor performance
We have also made it easier for you to connect with your customers over social media. With this release, we have made some big improvements to our social features across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
We completely reworked the user interface to improve the usability of post authoring, images, and links, and added support for emojis and the option to delete posts. The planning calendar is refreshed with improved visuals, colors, and icons, and you can now post directly from the calendar.
For LinkedIn, we addressed the top request we heard from you—supporting both personal and company pages. That functionality pairs well with the integration we already had with LinkedIn Lead Gen and LinkedIn Matched Audiences. From your feedback, we also heard that customers wanted post performance and social network-specific KPIs. So, we are announcing that KPIs will be provided, such as reactions, comments, impressions, and more.
We look forward to hearing from you about this release and we have a lot more coming—stay tuned!
Let us know what you think and additional features or capabilities you would like to see in future releases for Dynamics 365 Marketing through our Dynamics 365 Marketing Community site.
– Lori
Learn more about the 2020 release wave 2 plan
For ongoing information about recently released and planned new features, keep an eye on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2020 release wave 2 plan. Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Marketing.
