Analyze lead and contact behavior with Dynamics 365 Marketing analytics

Get the most out of your team’s various marketing endeavors by using smart insights and analytics from Dynamics 365 Marketing. Using analytics is a simple, yet effective way to measure the successes and pain points of marketing efforts to clearly see what’s working well and determine how to fill in the gaps. Using this kind of information is crucial to making informed decisions about future campaigns, marketing content, strategies, customer journeys, social media—well, you get the point.

Dynamics 365 Marketing provides analytics for nearly all entity types, which can easily be accessed by opening a record’s Insights tab. Toggle through what you need and filter results by date range or usage (i.e., where and how content was used) to get the most empirical bang for your data-driven buck.

Know that you want to measure marketing analytics, but aren’t sure where to start? Here’s a brief look at a few of the things you can track using Dynamics 365 Marketing insights and how to use the data to make better, more informed decisions.

Contact behavior

Analyzing the way contacts, customers, and prospects interact with your content is standard marketing analytics practice, but Dynamics 365 Marketing allows you to dig deeper and tailor content to best cultivate a personal relationship with each contact. Information on the ways contacts interact with email content, website forms, event registrations, subscription lists, and much more can be used to work smarter and more efficiently when planning and managing future campaigns – who doesn’t love a faster ROI on marketing efforts?

Statistics, analytics, and KPIs get down to the granular details of which links a contact clicked through on your website, which pages they opened, and even how long an email sat unopened in their inbox—and smart insights feed into features like automated email scheduling, which generates a predicted best send time for each email for each contact.

Keeping track of the ways contacts interact with marketing materials helps better understand the impact of your efforts, learn what works best, what can be improved, and how to constantly drive results forward.

Leads

Cultivating a relationship with a potential customer is the backbone of sales and marketing activities, but knowing the right content to craft to keep leads interested can become overwhelming. Using analytics to gather insights on leads pulls in more data to improve lead forecasting models by capturing individual lead ages (how long the record has been active) and how their interest has progressed over time, combined with account leads interactions as well—interactions with all associated contacts tied to the account.

Lead analytics can and should be used to inform the ways relationships are cultivated with leads with clear tactics for acquisition and retention. Plus, you can compare acquisition costs vs. the ROI on each lead after the fact to refine strategies and work more efficiently.

Website analytics

Everyone wants to track their website traffic, but you should be looking at more than just aggregate numbers like page views. On top of website visits and page views, Dynamics 365 Marketing gathers insights on where visitors were when they accessed your website, creates and tracks script when website pages are loaded, forms completed and submitted by contacts, and even if website pages that host forms are viewed anonymously or by existing contacts.

Sure, website analytics provide information on the successes of your site—it’s important to know what on your site works well to generate interest and garner web traffic. But perhaps it’s more important to thoroughly consider the failures and pain points as well. Is there a specific page with important information, but with low traction? Do visitors get frustrated with the user interface and leave before they can complete a call to action? Connecting individual metrics to the bigger picture can find answers to a core question of website functionality: what are people looking for on your website, and are they successful in finding what they need?

Building on gathered information about successes, pain points, and growth opportunities can and should be used to inform effective content management to meet the objectives of your website presence, the purpose of your content, and your ability to optimize your website for a better user experience to drive success.

Customer journeys

Building customer journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing helps take the guesswork out of lead nurturing and marketing efforts. Automated journeys help direct marketing efforts to prospects throughout the sales pipeline, so doubt that the insights gathered will be valuable. There are three different ways users can view customer journey analytics: the Insights overview, viewing insights in the Journey Designer tab, and insights specifically regarding Incomplete Journeys.

The Insights overview provides basic journey results, like how many contacts interacted with emails, marketing pages, and how they progressed through the steps of the journey to provide relevant information at a glance.

For those well versed in creating customer journeys, viewing Insights within the Journey Designer tab may be the most intuitive and rewarding way to view journey analytics. The Designer tab Insights have the same view as the journey designer but has a read-only version of the pipeline and journey KPIs. Each tile displays the ways that contacts interacted and flowed through them, and you can display data to view breakdowns for each possible interaction activity (called “dependencies”) and how many contacts performed which type of interaction at each step of the journey.

If a journey is not completed for any reason, or if messages were not delivered as expected, you can view each reason why a contact was unable to complete the journey. Stopped contact incompletions are those that chose to stop the journey, and no more messages or journey actions will be applied going forward—this could be due to contact consent (due to data protections the contact enacts themselves or through an external data protection system) or email soft bounces—like if emails have bounced several times in a row, perhaps due to mailbox or server issues. Blocked email incompletions mean the system did not attempt to send specific messages, most likely due to a contact’s preferences, or even a technical problem with the email itself. Customers can still carry on with the rest of the journey, even if a specific email in the journey has a blocked email error.

Journey analytics can help you uncover where customers are struggling in the customer journey process and adjust steps as needed—they can be simplified, improved, or completely changed for better resource allocation. Getting a new look at the ways customers interact with your contact gives opportunity to personalize the journey experience to better reach every customer, lead, and prospect while adjusting strategies as necessary.

Real-time customer journeys

A new feature that sets Dynamics 365 Marketing apart from the rest is the ability to conduct real-time customer journeys, which allow users to build event-based journeys, engage with customers with customized event triggers, utilize AI insights and suggested actions, and more. Measuring analytics for real-time journeys can indicate pain points, successes, and how close the journey results compare with goals and objectives. Utilizing these analytics provides rare opportunity to take quick action in direct response to the real-time results.

Journey operational analytics can help you understand the performance of the different branches in a real-time journey, and highlights which branches are performing well in terms of goal analytics, channel analytics, and AI optimization. Aggregate cross-journey analytics generate into a dashboard of Power BI visuals with relevant metrics and insights for all journey orchestrations—view overall journey effectiveness, audience participation, channel engagement, performance, and more.

Reviewing data from a malleable environment like real-time journeys can help equip you with the tools needed to find a balance between each avenue of content and materials being managed for your audience. Taking data into account can give a well-rounded view of what works and what doesn’t—ultimately helping you figure out how you can shift and adapt strategies over time to make the most out of marketing efforts geared toward every type of customer.

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