In a highly digitized world, customers can now shop around with more companies that ever before, and the horizons of the customer consideration phase has widened farther than ever. To stand out in an expanded marketplace, your business needs to cut through the competition and create personalized, customer-forward experiences. To find prospective customers with the right message, at the right time, and through the right avenues.

But what exactly is a customer-forward experience? It’s something that pushes your sales and marketing teams to really try and understand what it is that each and every customer is looking for, and more importantly, the things they need to be reassured of before they can make a purchase, contact your team, sign up for your newsletter, or even continue to browse your website. A customer’s attention is fleeting yet incredibly high-value, and the way you digitally craft and present your brand to your target audience is key to capturing their interest. By focusing on what it is that customers care about, you can ensure that your time and effort is spent on crafting a strategy that drives results and revenue.

Using a CRM solution can equip you with the tools necessary to connect with prospects and returning customers alike and ensure that you’re always putting your best foot forward when it comes to servicing, interacting with, and curating content for customers at any point in the sales process.

Dynamics 365 CRM is a sales-based, cloud-hosted solution with the ability to add and customize functionality to meet a wide range of business needs. Here are ways that Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and other CRM services can keep your business agile in today’s increasingly competitive market.

Real-time marketing

Adding a marketing module on top of your existing Dynamics 365 CRM solution is the easiest way to take your system capabilities even further while exploring exciting new features – like real-time marketing and outreach tools. Real-time marketing is a new addition to Dynamics 365 Marketing that allows you to always stay on top of critical customer touchpoints across multiple channels. Customer journeys are the key draw of Dynamics 365 Marketing, and they allow you to set up elaborate models that capture and engage potential customers with custom-set actions and responses.

Narrow down your audience with segments, manage your digital engagement activities, and automate communications like emails, SMS messaging, and more. And when you set custom triggers in your customer journey, you have unparalleled control over the moments that matter – create engagement points based off of what kind of customer action is completed and what kind of information is sent to them (and on what communication channel) in return. Custom triggers in your customer journey can send things like abandoned cart emails, item-based promotions, auto-replies when an order is placed, and more.

Personalized content and outreach

Understanding the sales funnel helps break down the different purchase phases that customers find themselves in. From the moment they first become aware of your brand to the moment that a transaction is made, customers will have different needs based on how far along they are in the purchase process. To meet the needs of all these unique customers, you’ll need to strategically deploy content, likely across a multitude of platforms.

Dynamics 365 Marketing is equipped with tools that make it easy to create, manage, and broadcast your branded content, whether it’s through creating customized marketing emails, landing pages, custom-coded web forms connected to your website, or scheduling social media posts for a constant stream of content. Your content itself can be personalized to your audience as well. Triggers and branching paths in customer journeys and surveys can be tailored to job titles, past purchase records, geographic area, and even contact birthday information if you want to get that granular—a great feature for B2C marketing! Emails can be programmed with dynamic content, so even though your target segment contains 500 contacts, each email is sent addressing the contact by name.

Tools like the drag-and-drop email designer, social media scheduler, customer journey builder, and built-in reporting are designed with beginner users in mind, but savvy enough for experienced users to find exciting new ideas to implement into a digital strategy—and many of these tools are customizable for all your company-specific needs, goals, and ideas.

Cross-posted content

A great way to increase the effectiveness of your content is to start cross-posting on multiple platforms so you can reach the broadest audience possible. Mixing and matching content types ensures you have something to offer customers, no matter how they prefer to be engaged – take some time to create a variety of downloadable materials like Whitepapers and eBooks, easily consumable media like podcasts, webinars, and videos, and using this content when crafting social media posts. Note which social media platform you’re using, too, as you should be mixing longer content on Facebook and LinkedIn with bite-sized quips on Twitter. Using the social media scheduling tool in Dynamics 365 Marketing is the easiest way to keep track of your social media outbound marketing efforts, while using a built-in analytics tool to gauge impressions, interactions, and actions taken (shares, likes, etc.) with each of your posts.

Long-term relationship management

For prospects, predictive pipeline scoring and forecasts allow you to make metrics-backed decisions and engage with leads and opportunities strategically and follow the data toward results. But once leads have been engaged and a rapport has been established, the work doesn’t stop there. Continued success in any business relationship must be cultivated over time – and quite frankly, most salespeople just don’t have the memory or capacity to juggle it all without a few tools to help.

Using Dynamics 365 CRM gives you full visibility into interaction timelines, account insights, and analytics that take the guesswork out of common, everyday workflows and seller tasks as you continue to cultivate successful customer relationships. Your CRM solution can also be customized to pull in your real-time data through avenues you actually use – think customer surveys, social media engagement, email campaigns, and event registrations – to give you an overview of customer sentiment and the best ways to nurture a long-term partnership. For thriving, loyal customer relationships, focus on ensuring they are satisfied with your services and feel like they have something to gain by continuing to return to you time and time again – it’s a beneficial exchange for both you and your customer base.

See the difference a good CRM can make

Equip your team with a solution that drives results with easy-to-use and high-quality sales, marketing, and customer engagement tools. Dynamics 365 CRM sets the bar high not only in terms of its feature stack, but with competitive pricing and all-in-one interface. If your team could benefit from a revamped CRM application, fill out the form below. Our CRM team will be in touch to provide you with a free system demo.