3 ways D365 Marketing can help
1. Capturing consent
GDPR is something that we all had to prepare for, understand and wrap our heads around after it was passed in European Parliament for all organisations to be compliant from May 25 2018. It changed how and when marketeers could communicate with contacts, and it is something that all marketing departments and businesses have since become accustomed to living and breathing every day. One topic that we are now very familiar with is Consent and it is something that marketing teams have to think about daily; ensuring commercial communications are sent to only those who have consented to receiving such information. Dynamics 365 Marketing allows its users to request, capture, and store consent for it’s contacts and offers out of the box 5 consent levels which are hierarchical (with higher levels including all lower levels). Moreover, D365 Marketing also offers the ability of a Subscription Centre and the creation of Subscription Lists to allow users to choose which commercial communications they wish to hear about. This means that every commercial email, before being sent, is required to link to the subscription centre, which enables a contact to update their preferences whenever they wish too. This is helpful for the marketing department as there is the potential to include and exclude contacts within a segment based on whether they have opted in to receiving Subscription List information or whether they have a certain consent level. This further helps with ensuring that they are complying with GDPR when sending communications.
2. Visibility of the Marketing Campaigns for the year ahead
The marketing team is always busy. It isn’t just about the product and promotions. It is remembering that you have a campaign for Cyber Monday that is different to your campaign for Black Friday. It is thinking about Blue Monday, Pancake Tuesday, Valentines Day, Summer Promotions, the build up to Christmas and sending customers a personalised discount when it is their birth month. It is about remeering to send event invitations for the next product or service launch, whilst creating momentum to increase engagment and attendance. The list for the marketing events in a year is endless and quite frankly so are the communications. So just how does D365 Marketing help here? One word. Eight letters : Calendar. It is something that is so simple, yet effective. I absolutely love that the marketing app allows for you to see on one page the marketing calendar for the month it makes it so much easier to spot unwanted overlaps whilst enabling marketers to view many elements of a campaign on the same calendar, allowing for faster decision making to be made. You can also change the view to see the calendar for the day, week and year too. This can be the Marketing Calendar for Customer journeys, or it can be the calendar for the events. The events calendar allows planners to view or create sessions straight from the calendar, while accounting for room and speaker availability, without leaving the page. This is so much more fun than having to hop between different pages of information. Now don’t get me wrong, i love a good spreadsheet for events, crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s for accountability and effective planning, but this calendar and the events area in general makes event orchestration so much easier…… in fact, lets make that my next blog post!
3. The struggle of too little or too much communication is real!
A person receives 120 marketing emails per day per day in their inbox! Let that statistic just sink in a minute! So just how does a business stand out amongst the noise? How does a marketeer find a balance between communicating enough with the contact to not be forgotten, but not over communicating so that every email sent remains unopened and perceived as spam ? As previously mentioned, the concept of a customer journey allows for Marketeers to plan their campaigns, ahead for they year; with consumers opting in or out of specific commerical communications via a subscription list. But what happens if a contact opts in to receiving all of the promotional communications and suddenly finds themselves being overloaded with SMS, Emails, Push notifications. Chances are, they will hit that dreaded unsubscribe button.
Thankfully Microsoft have a solution ; The Frequency Cap Feature! Frequency capping will allow marketers to define the maximum number of commercial messages that their customers receive through a particular channel (email, SMS, push, and custom channels), per day, week, and even month. This will ensure that if they do fall into the segment criteria for every customer journey in the pipeline, then there can be a maximum of communications that they will receive in one day. After all, no marketeer wants to hear the Customer Service Team are receiving many complaint calls regarding too many emails!
