D365 Customer Insights - Journeys: real-world benefits - EMAIL TESTING
A MINI SERIES - The real word beneftis
Marketing is vast in it’s definition. It is the individual or team(s) that are responsible for Brand, Promotion, Competitor Strategy, Consumer Messaging, Advertising and more. They are the team that is essentially responsible for determining WHO to target, WHEN to communicate, HOW to get the message across, WHERE the message should be placed, and WHAT that content needs to be. The role, whilst very rewarding and with it’s many perks, comes with its challenges
This mini series of blogs will focus on the real working world benefits that D365 can have on the marketing department and wider business as a whole.
HARSH REALITY FIVE : TIME
My last blog post, which I admit was a while ago, talked about modern consumer expectations when it comes to personalisation of an email.
This week I want to bring up the challenge of time
Now I appreciate marketeers have a well planned marketing campaign. Every detail of a campaign is orchestrated and timed to perfection. Whether it’s the social media messages, the launch packs, whitepapers, blog posts or emails. But one thing that we can often forget to take into consideration is the time to do simple tasks. We can estimate how long an event is going to plan; do we estimate the time it takes to proof read all of those emails that we intend to send? Or the time it takes to get sign off from a manager on the content?
D365 MARKETING D365 CUSTOMER INSIGHTS JOURNEYS EMPOWERS MARKETEERS TO PREVIEW EMAIL CONTENT AND ALLOWS FOR QUICKER SIGN OFF ON CONTENT
HOW DOES D365 ALLOW MARKETEERS TO PREVIEW THEIR EMAIL CONTENT?
TEST SEND / PREVIEW IS ABOUT TO BECOME YOUR BEST FRIEND
Standard preview
Allows Marketeers to select the Preview and test tab , within the email designer, to see the standard designer preview and choose between various form factors, contacts, and content settings. If this email contains personalisation, I.e dynamic content, there is opportunity to enter sample data. Marketeers then have the ability to preview them email as the recipient would based on data held in the system.
Inbox preview
Allows Marketeers to access real-world inbox previews that show the full design exactly as it will appear in a wide variety of target email clients and platforms. For example how would this email look if it was sent to an Outlook account on an iPhone 15?
Not only does this allow Marketeers to ensure their email looks professional but it also allows them to check that dynamic personalisation is pulling through as they would expect it too.
HOW DOES D365 CUSTOMER INSIGHT - JOURNEYS IMPROVE SIGN OFF OF CONTENT?
IT IMPROVES COLLABORATION
D365 allows for multiple users to have access to the same records; providing permissions of roles and business units allow.
The beauty of this is straight away Marketeers and Managers can work collectively on the content for records such as an Email. Similar to the way we have come accustom to working in the same word or excel documents with our colleagues.
The benefit of this is that Marketing Managers can directly open and email record and view it’s content there and then. They don’t have to wait for a TEST to be delivered to their inbox, printing it out, annotating it all, and handing it back. They can open the record, and change it where required (far less time consuming).
Now another challenge with regards to time, can be getting all of the key stakeholders together to showcase and receive feedback on the latest campaign.
It can be pretty hard to show a full suite of emails in physical printout/presentation format;particularly with emails involving many content variation blocks.
To help Marketeers paint a true representation of a campaign to their key stakeholders; they can add the Key Individuals as a contact in the system, as add them to a static segment. Because a database may contain many contacts, the segment designer now includes an Add by Queryoption. Adding contacts by query differs from dynamic segments in that it is executed only once. Marketeers can use the Add by Query option to find the right group of contacts to add to a static segment without choosing them individually. For example thy could query all contacts who have a Column Contact type of KeyStakeHolder
Marketeers can use this static segment as the start of a test customer journey and put all of the campaign emails (and any text messages/push notifications) into a customer journey and can send them out directly to the inbox of their key stakeholders for their approval. (Just over short space of time such as 5 minute intervals between emails)
By working collaboratively in D365 , and allowing for Key stakeholders to have an accurate representation of a full campaign end to end ; marketeers can be more confident in their content. Having many opportunities to sense check emails, and gain approval for email content more quickly, marketeers are less likely to fall error to a typ0 (see what I did there😂)
