Are you investigating how to implement an efficient marketing & sales automation strategy within Dynamics 365?
Are you investigating how to implement an efficient marketing & sales automation strategy within Dynamics 365?
To do it successfully, an organisation must implement best practices, prepare their Dynamics environment, observe outcomes, and continue to improve. Sounds simple? Let’s have a look at the eight best practices teams use to get the most out of marketing campaign efforts and the implementation of their strategy within Dynamics environment.
- Objectives development
You can’t automate a process that does not exist yet. Firstly, you need to gather your research, ideally beyond internal data to learn about your audience. Identification of inbound leads, responses and website visits are just the beginning. Don’t stop at the internal resources, rather use information management services to get more details about your audience.
- Personas development
Analysing your audience’s interests, demographics, location, preferences, etc. allows you to create customer personas, better understand their everyday life, needs and challenges and get a perspective to offer solutions addressing their problems. Personas can develop overtime so be prepared to learn and improve your strategy accordingly.
- Buyers journey & workflow development
Once the customer personas are created, map the workflows addressing concerns at each step of the customer journey where the customer goes through stages of awareness – pain identification; search & research – options identification; decision – purchasing one of the options; experience – post-purchase opinion (social network posts, blogs, questions), other products and service interest in the future.
- Targeted content
Keep in mind the importance of personalising the content for the audience adapting it to each persona and their stage. Focus on action-triggered dynamic content to evoke interaction with your brand. This includes lead nurturing as well as customer retention. Create email templates, re-use what works, give your leads an option to engage fast and efficiently, by keeping the forms short and always share, adapt and recycle campaigns working the best for your business.
- Deliverability circle
Optimal deliverability positively affects your reputation. Make sure to adapt content to the correct audience, engage them regularly, and follow the correct practices to avoid the spam folder. This applies for both leads and customers.
- Multichannel approach
Do not forget about other channels of communication. Customers expect a seamless experience through every channel they interact with. If you need a higher open rate, select SMS communication with an approximate open rate of 98%. In other cases, a message is best delivered through diffuse campaigns on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
- Lead scoring & qualification
Learn how to qualify your leads, analyse the digital behaviour and develop your model accordingly. Learn which leads are more lucrative on the long run, which require more time, etc.
Correct qualification model, engagement and retention will allow you to prepare high-quality leads for your sales team.
- Measure performance & reputation
Put in place a feedback system allowing you to continuously observe and measure the performance and the reputation and adapt your strategy based on the results and feedback.
Strategy within Dynamics 365
Once your workflows and customer personas are defined you can create complex sales and marketing workflows addressing the identified pains. Nurture your customers, prospects and leads with seamless real-time data personalization and dynamic content increasing your brand visibility and retention. At the same time keep in mind to follow the GDPR compliance (when addressing European market) and stop missing answers to your emails but rather keep them in one place. Communication via SMS guarantees higher open rate and is also possible with Dynamics 365. Either way, don’t forget to keep an eye on real-time statistics, measure your performance and adapt your strategy when necessary.
