In the 2022 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft is excited to be delivering so much value that enables your team to improve customer experiences, be more responsive to market demands and become more efficient in creating content. These capabilities and features are designed to empower marketers to not only survive, but also thrive, by efficiently leveraging the full power of their data and out-of-the-box AI insights.
The features are scheduled to be released between April 2022 and September 2022. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the latest features available in the marketing application.
Utilize your team’s full potential with ease
For marketing teams to create impactful moments, they must respond quickly to market conditions. As hybrid workplace scenarios have become more common, more and more marketers are connecting with colleagues in other departments to find the most effective engagement strategy. To keep these cross-functional teams (and all of us) productive, we must avoid content switching and instead, keep everyone in the flow of their work.
With the April 2022 release, Microsoft has brought Microsoft Teams into Dynamics 365 Marketing. By linking the Teams chat functionality, everyone involved with the project will have the ability to collaborate without leaving your workflow.
The new unified customer activity timeline will also bring cohesiveness across the end-to-end customer journey. Since Dynamics 365 marketing interactions are now interwoven with customer engagement apps, your team will have access to Dynamics 365 Marketing’s real-time marketing interactions on the contact timeline. This will naturally give customer-facing teams the opportunity to better plan journeys, as they easily can search or filter to find the relevant interaction history.
Furthermore, to provide the ultimate flexibility with collaboration, you can now trigger journeys and measure goals based on changes in common customer data across any Dynamics 365 customer record. You can engage your customers more deeply through every interaction, like a completed application, a renewed contract, or a closed service ticket. These interactions will allow your team to kick off, drive, and measure customer journeys quickly, without requiring additional developers or customizations.
Easily hyper personalize experiences with ease
Personalization has become a necessity. Customers expect companies to understand their preferences and engage them as individuals to improve the likelihood of customers repurchasing and referring products or services.
Personalization begins with creating content that will resonate with customers. To make this process easier with Microsoft Marketing, the team at Microsoft has introduced reusable content fragments so your team can send beautiful emails with just a few clicks. Note: There are no limits on the type of content you can create and reuse. The fragments can include layout, advanced elements, and personalization.
Additionally, you can personalize your emails with pre-defined Dynamic text which is faster and easier than before. Dynamic Text automatically replaces the recipient’s personal details when the message is sent. Defining pre-defined requires some understanding of the Dataverse data model to correctly connect a token to the right data source.
Pre-defined tokes, give other members of the team the opportunity to create a set of commonly used tokens while leaving the rest to quickly build email messages.
Also, the ability to add conditional content, offers the ability to add personalization and customization to your emails. Your team can utilize any combination of personalized text, images, and layouts, and create rules to select the right content based on segment membership, attributes, or triggers. Until now, achieving this level of dynamics personalization was complex and required coding. However, with the new conditional content experience, you can easily create messages targeted to specific segments without writing any code.
Finally, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights users can leverage your own data in Azure Data Lake Storage to build segments, specify conditions, and personalize messages to build rich, real-time journeys while maintaining full control over the underlying data.
Create custom experiences with agility and flexibility
Today, businesses are becoming increasingly competitive in their efforts to win and retain customers. Companies need to provide the highest level of service to their customers and to support this obsession Microsoft has continued to build out the Dynamics 365 applications this time by adding additional features to the application’s real-time engagement capabilities.
In the last Dynamics 365 Marketing release, native support for SMS providers Twillio and Telesign were introduced to enable organizations to connect around the world via SMS. In this Wave 1 (2022) release, you can now act on SMS keyword replies to continue the conversation with your customers. Customers will be able to create custom keywords that will guide their journey based on their responses, ensuring flexibility and agility are built into the experience.
Furthermore, you can select journeys that are triggered based on certain qualifying conditions to better drive customers to action. It is no longer necessary to create cascading branches or offer multiple options for conditions. In the past, you could enable a journey using an out-of-the-box or custom event trigger, but now with the new release, the marketing team is able to apply logic to the event trigger without involving a developer.
Lastly, with seamless integration between real-time marketing journey orchestration and Power Automate, you can leverage a wealth of connectors and actions for limitless customization and fine-grained control of the customer experience. This allows semi-technical marketers to automate journey steps quickly and easily, allowing deep technical resources to focus on complex needs.
To learn more and for the most up-to-date details, see the release notes.
