Business growth doesn’t happen overnight and marketing is an essential part of it. In this digital age, customer experience is rapidly becoming the most important priority for organizations to focus on, and personalized communication is critical to gaining and retaining customers.
Real-time marketing is all about sending the right message to the right customer at the right time. It’s much more personalized than the generic messaging the system was only capable of sending prior to this update. It benefits your organization by allowing you to communicate with your customers in the way your customers want to be communicated to. If one organization can’t offer this to their customers, it’s very likely for the company to disrupt the relationship and reputation with their clients, and not only lose the competitive advantage but also leave room for them to move towards the competition that obviously knows how to approach them in the right way.
We explored some of the new features in the real-time marketing area like trigger journeys based on data changes in any Dynamics 365 app to engage customers at the right time without writing any code.
With this feature, we can automate the process of approaching each user individually, track the actions they make during the journey, and respond in accordance with the preferences they choose. All the data will be available for usage in Dataverse, and of course, we can manipulate them further by building a flow in Power Automate.
How is the solution built?
To explain the business needs for expanding Dynamics 365 Marketing with the new features, we built a complex customer journey where we can see how we can leverage and use them in future projects and scenarios. The main goal of the journey is to promote new technologies, share knowledge through seminars, and attract ambitious people to become part of our family. Since the employees are the most valuable assets in our company, the recruitment and selection process are essential. So, we tried to build a customer journey that should help us in the process of selecting suitable candidates, and create the right channels to find them, guide them, and approach them.
We can easily do this with the tools available in real-time marketing
- Make an event with the speakers
- Add additional fields in the registration form in the event – to collect customer preferences
- Create a custom event trigger that will start the customer journey each time someone registers
- Use the benefits we have with Power Automate, and manipulate through Dataverse tables to get the needed values for the attributes we defined in the trigger
- Personalize emails with tokens even from the event trigger attributes
- Create A/B testing emails
- If/then branch based on a previous action such as clicking on the email link for the event
- Activate custom trigger in the middle of a real-time journey, which will trigger Power Automate flow to do some process in the background (tasks for speakers, upgrade lead scores)
This way we are not only gathering valuable information for our candidates, but we are also creating a personalized journey with personalized emails for each of them.
Benefits of real-time marketing
Real-time marketing offers a lot of benefits for businesses and companies. The fact that customers receive the right message at the right time is one of the most important benefits. Our scenario can be leveraged by companies that want to attract the right candidates as events and HR interviews sometimes cannot be enough to evaluate a candidate. Thus, real-time marketing helps in not only selling marketing strategies that boost the success of the business.
Looking from a technical, cost, and time perspective, the implementation of updating D365 Marketing is relatively small compared to the benefits that it provides. The customer journeys are very scalable – they can be expanded accordingly to future requirements.
The influence of real-time marketing on a company’s reputation and client relationship is huge and direct since you get in front of your audience at the right time.
