d365 marketing: real-world benefits - DATA INSIGHTS
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. Last week i discussed the harsh reality of reliable data and how i believe the marketing department can benefit from DR365 with regards to segment creation, subscription centre and duplicate detection rules that the Customer Engagment Apps like Sales and Customer Service have to offer; allowing the marketeer to focus on strategy rather than data cleansing. This blog will take data a step further, and explore how the Marketing App offers the ability for the Marketing Team to turn that data into meaningful insights and understand the story behind their data to perfect their strategy
HARSH REALITY THREE : MEANINGFUL DATA
The marketeer is expected to know everything there is to know about their customer(s) and rely on data to provide meaningful insights. When data exists across multiple CRMs or communication platforms it can be difficult or time consuming to pull that data all together and create reports to feed back every quarter.
‘What does a typical Marketing Manager need to report on?’ I hear you ask?
Marketing Reports typically include the following:
Monthly or annual revenue
Monthly traffic sources to your website
Customer Satisfaction Score
The number of leads you bring in each month and the conversion rate from new lead to new customer
Website Analytics such as PPC, Unique Visitors, Paid v Organic Traffic
Email Analytics such as Sent, Deliverability, Open Rater Bounce Rate Clickthrough rates
And that is only scratching the surface….
HOW CAN D365 MARKETING HELP WITH THOSE ALL IMPORTANT INSIGHTS?
Be prepared as your mind is about to be blown!
Dynamics 365 Marketing keeps track of the way your contacts react to your marketing initiatives and provides detailed analytical views to help you understand your impact and learn what works best. Each of the following entities provides statistics, analytics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) based on your marketing results:
Contacts
Leads
Segments
Customer journeys
Email messages
Lead scoring models
Marketing pages
Marketing forms
Websites
Redirect URLs
Here are the three insights that i believe are the most valuable to the Marketeer:
Customer Journey Insights
Here Marketing Members can see an overview of the number of contacts who are successfuly moving through the different tiles within the journey. They are able to see how many contacts are being processed, or are yet to move through the tile. Marketing are also able to see contacts who have been stopped from continuing down the journey and the reasons such as they have Unsubscribed or have fallen into a Suppression Segment. This can help for future segmentation/customer journey planning.
Email Insights
Here you can find a complete history of how various contacts have reacted to the selected message, which links they selected, and where they were when interacting with the message. I particularly like the heat map which shows a red overlay to indicate the most clicked link, and follows the spectrum down to blue, which indicates the least clicked link. We can even hover the mouse pointer over a link to see the number of total clicks, unique clicks, and the click-through rate! And of course we can see those all important Open Rates and Bounce Rates. This helps the marketing team know what's working well and can allow them to adjust future campaigns accordingly.
Contact Insights
Saving the best for last…...
In my opinion the level of detail that the contacts insights provide is unbelievable. We are able to see from both Outbound and Real time marketing what channels of engagement a contact is interacting with. Are they more likely to interact with an email over a text message for example. We can see their individual open rates v delivery issues along with any forms they may have submitted. We can also see when a contact is imost likely to interact with our emails too. I like to open my personal emails on the walk home from the school run, on my phone. This can later be used as part of an Automated Scheduling Feature which sends the email at the right time for the contact.
These are just 3 examples. But the icing on the cake for me is the Power BI dashboards that are available ootb. More on that next week!
