D365 Customer Insights - Journeys: real-world benefits - Personal Communications

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 FOUR : MODERN DAY CONSUMER

Last week i asked you to take a moment to reflect and consider the following question:

Before you make a purchase from a company…. what are the steps that you take?

Let’s do a quick recap on the stats that I presented

1. 89% of UK Consumers read reviews regularly online when shopping before making a purchase
   

2. 3/4 Consumers use a comparison website
   

3. 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends
   

4. 75% of consumers say word of mouth plays a key role in purchasing decisions
   

The modern day consumer is informed. This knowledge leads to an expectation on the service or product that a business will provide.

This week I want you to ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why does someone choose to go with EE over O2 as their phone provider?

2. Why does someone choose to shop at Tesco over Asda?

3. Why does someone choose an IPhone over Android?

All the above examples provide similar services, sometimes the same products.

The common answer between all three examples is TRUST.

They trust the brand, the product, the service, the team and the quality. As such TRUST has become the new currency of commerce.

D365 MARKETING D365 CUSTOMER INSIGHTS JOURNEYS EMPOWERS MARKETEERS TO BUILD ON THAT TRUST AND MEET MODERN DAY CONSUMER EXPECTATIONS

HOW DOES D365 CUSTOMER INSIGHT - JOURNEYS MEET THE MODERN DAY CONSUMER EXPECTATIONS?

PERSONALISED COMMUNICATIONS!!!!!

Did you know that emails have a 50% higher open rate when the subject line is personalised?
By definition, i mean surfacing personal data belonging to the contact record, or a related entity, within the subject of an email or a text message.

But, we can also extend this further , and add personalisation the the body of our emails also.

Now you may be thinking, well most Email CRMs has this feature? The beauty of Dynamics, is that we can save the personalisation values if we use them often, and add them to our Personalised tokens for later

Personalised tokens make it easier for the marketing team

Not all marketeers know how tables and fields are connected in the back end. Personalised tokens allow for system admins or managers who know the system to create tokens that other team members can use; allowing them to spend more time focusing on the content rather than business database concepts

The top 10 items on the list are sorted by org-wide usage. If there are more than 10 items in the list, you'll see the remaining items sorted by alphabetical order after the top 10 items.

Sticking with my previous blog post example of Candidate Experience HR theme.

Let’s say a candidate applys for two job roles at the company that you are recruiting for. In the old world of Outbound Marketing , users could create a segment such as :
’’Get me all of the contacts in the system that have an active job application’’

The challenge that marketeers faced here, was that the segment could provide you with the contact, but would not be able to then allow you to traverse down to the specific job application and surface attributes from that Job Application record within the email. It struggled with the one to many relationship.

D365 Real-time Journeys allow marketeers to do this. By using a custom trigger , mentioned in my previous post, marketeers can also access the attributes on the custom table, and surface relevant data within the email, that is specific to the record.

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But wait. Theres more!

Personalisation goes beyond surfacing personal data within an email. It can be used to determin what content within an email an individual should receive.

Through the concept of content variations, conditional content is a great way to deliver different images, button links, and information to better match consumer interests and preferences. It has instant benefits:

1. No coding or scripting
   Marketeers don’t always know HTML. And if we do, we don’t always know how to add this content variation html into the email! So no coding is a winner!

2. Marketeers can create as many variations as needed
   Lets say previously marketeers have created a different email for each region of the country. 1 email for Scotland. 1 email for Wales. 1 email for England. 1 Email for Northern Ireland. Using content variation, we now have 1 email with 4 content variations based on the region where the contact lives.

3. Default content can be used
   If for whatever reason there was missing regional data against your contact record. Marketeers can then send a default email that is very generic, and use this as an opportunity to gain that information from the contact record.

Conditional Content sections can include: Text, Images, Buttons, links, images or any other element supported by the email editor.

How to add conditional content

1. Enable the section for conditional content

2. The property pane on the right margin shows a new sub-tab called Variation. Select the Variation sub-tab

3. Select + New Condition in the property pane. Define the condition.

4. Add more conditions if needed. At this point, you have the same content associated with each condition.

5. Select Default on any condition for which you want to change the content.

This week i have shown how we can make personalising emails for our contacts, more easier for the marketing department.

My next blog will focus on how Marketeers can sense check their emails, and approve email content more quickly. Let’s face it we have all fallen to the error of a typo in an email at some point in our lives!