Dynamics 365 Marketing Real Time
I will start with a quick history lesson. In August 2017 Microsoft announced that they would be deprecating Microsoft Dynamics Marketing and it would be replaced with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing in the Spring of 2018. This happened with little fanfare which I think is due to the lack of takeup on the old MDM product.
We can now fast forward 3 years and talk about how far the Microsoft Dynamics Marketing product has come and how it has managed to shake of the negative connotations that came with the previous product. Slowly but surely Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing has month on month picked up market share on enterprise-level customers. At Proximo 3, 70% of the projects we have been working on in the past 6 months have been based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. It has been fantastic to see the uptake in the product for ourselves and has enabled us to work with the product team and give feedback on what is needed and where the product can go.
I feel that there is about to be an even bigger shift in the platform with the release of Dynamics 365 Real-Time Marketing (still in preview). There are features in this preview that when released will change the way that you market to prospects or existing customers.
The headline items for Real-Time Marketing are;
- Event Base Journey;
- Custom Event Triggers;
- Push Notification;
- Outbound SMS.
I will focus mainly on a concept idea that I have run through with our customers and how this could revolutionize their business. The customer that we have worked with in this instance is focused on two areas of marketing and that is new customers and customer loyalty. The customer has retail outlets that give free access to the Wi-Fi in-store when you log into your store account. They would like to give customers a loyalty discount when they log into the Wi-Fi.
With these requirements, we can trigger this process in Real-Time Marketing.
The WI-FI connection has a real-time API that we can use to push a CUSTOM EVENT TRIGGER. This custom event trigger is the entry point for our EVENT-BASED JOURNEY. When the journey kicks off there is a data-driven decision to set the path based on Contact Preference. If the value is Application (Custom Choice) or SMS (Custom Choice) then either PUSH NOTIFICATION to the app or SEND SMS based on the data point.
This is a simple example of how we can use real-time marketing and how it can change the way you think about marketing.
My last point would be one to think about. Does your marketing department think about marketing as a vehicle to only get new customers in? Times have changed and sometimes the marketing team is so focused on passing on marketing qualified leads that we forget that the people spending money with us still need to be retained.
If you would like more information on how Proximo 3 can galvanize your marketing team’s thought process and execution please book a free call with one of our experts here.