The start of a new year is always a great time to home in on your goals and to-do list. If your New Year’s Resolution is to make data-informed decisions that steer your marketing strategy, then decluttering your marketing application to achieve clean data and clearer KPIs is a good place to start. If you’re using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, we’ve put together this new year’s guide to help you dive in with best practices and to revisit features and tools to help you make the mo...

Email has proven to be one of the most effective ways to reach and engage with current and potential customers—as long as they receive it, of course. So, how do you avoid sending your marketing emails to spam? First, you need to understand what spam is. Once that is clear, you can consider key factors when trying to avoid sending spam emails.

Both Gmail and Yahoo have recently implemented measures to ensure that bulk email senders provide an easy, visible one-click option to unsubscribe within all promotional emails. For businesses using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys (formerly Dynamics 365 Marketing), ensuring compliance is super simple. In addition to the normal subscription center links with which you are probably familiar, Microsoft has added a new one-click unsubscribe feature.

Depending on where you’re located and where your clients or contacts are located, there are data protection laws you must adhere to. You may have heard of GDPR (or General Data Protection Regulation) that went into effect in 2018 within the EU. Other data protection laws include CAN-SPAM for email marketing in the US, and CASL in Canada. The details of these regulations are readily available online, so if you haven’t already, be sure to familiarize yourself and your marketing team with the la...

To put it broadly, bounced emails are ones that were unable to be properly delivered to a recipient’s mailbox. There are a variety of reasons that an email may have bounced and they fall into two main types: hard and soft.

Receiving a canned or boilerplate email message is not nearly as impactful as opening your inbox and seeing an email that seems to be written just for you. Personalization drives engagement, heightened engagement improves the impact of your sales and marketing pursuits. That’s the whole theory behind Dynamic content as a method of making your sales and marketing messages more impactful without spending an abundance of time personalizing emails for each user. And you don’t even need to know ho...

Responsive design is the design and development approach where creators consider and adjust their web-based content (like emails and websites) to consider the size and layout of the device it will be viewed on and adapt accordingly. The goal is for your web content to render to provide an optimal experience—usability, navigation, visual appeal—no matter the size of a user’s screen size. In today’s outbound marketing, we must consider mobile-friendly design when planning our email campaigns, ...

Ever heard the proverb “out of sight, out of mind”? Well, the things we measure are in our sight, on our minds, and therefore more likely to be the target of change. We live in an increasingly data-driven world, where gathering data, making sense of it, and garnering actionable insight from it is as easy as it has ever been. The data begs to be used.

Welcome to the second instillation of the series “Habits of highly effective marketers,” where we explore some of the fundamental actions that marketers take to do their job and do it stunningly. In our last blog, we went deep into why and how to document your marketing strategies and processes. Next up are two similar components of marketing strategy and content development: cross linking and cross posting. Fostered from a desire to use content to its fullest extent and the wish to provide v...

In marketing, “effective” can mean different things based on the company, team, and even individual. But the core of marketing is intrigue—to get potential customers or clients interested in what you do. The products you sell, the services you provide, your unique brand. That’s a very general, high-level goal, but each company will also have their more specific desired marketing outcomes, as well as their own ways to achieve it.

Design principles fill entire textbooks and four-year college degrees. Safe to say the subject is ripe with intrigue and value, yet it is fraught with trouble spots. Strong design for all content is a key requirement for marketing content, such as website pages, blog images, and social media posts.Because blogs and social media are often created in-house, it’s necessary to nurture the skills needed to build professional visuals for your marketing content, whether it be an infographic, a blog ...

Social media is a hotbed for marketing these days: everyone is on it, every business needs to take advantage of it, and there are many strategies to engage your audience across various platforms. Marketers work hard to create strong content for their business’ social media accounts—from witty, thoughtful, or research-backed posts, to content from their own website (like blogs, infographics, and whitepapers), to engaging advertisements.So, when most of the hard work is done, how do you ensure ...

A cornerstone of achieving web conversions is strategically placing landing pages as the first point of contact with your website. Landing pages are a bit different from your normal web page—having a smaller scope and narrowed down objective—although still an extension of your overall web presence. When done right, both you and your visitor gain something from this initial point of contact, and it can generate even more web engagement and repeat visitors in the future.

In Dynamics 365 Marketing, customer journeys are orchestrated to guide a prospect through a predetermined, flexible path toward a preset end goal. Whether this goal is buying a product, scheduling a discover call, or closing a loan, a customer journey is easy to create and personalize to the needs of a segment, which may be thought of as a demographic, or group, of people who share similar characteristic. When creating a customer journey, you want the most value for your efforts. Here are six...

Business to business (or B2B) marketing is tricky and made even more so if you are a B2B marketer in an industry that might be considered, for lack of better words, “boring” in the social media space. But B2B companies can no longer afford to coast with weak or absent social media. A whopping 60-84% of people consider mobile devices essential to their work, and mobile devices are the main vehicle by which social media is consumed. With their devices out, it’s more likely they will check in on...

Good digital strategy has the potential to transform business operations by driving revenue, building broad brand awareness, uncovering new and untapped audiences, boosting online engagement, and increasing customer retention and loyalty.Email marketing is a powerful tool that shouldn't be tossed to the side. Emails grant the ability to tailor the exact information going out to recipients, customize visual elements, track analytics, and require minimal effort for a sound return on investment....

Gathering customer feedback is one of the most effective means to improving your company’s products and services. Successful companies—those who wish to build resilience, foster a growth-mindset, and earn and maintain customer loyalty—listen to and deliver on what their customers desire. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is an online survey platform that can be used with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing that can help any business create and manage simple, effective surveys as part of their journey ...

Account Based Marketing has shown it can be a high-value element of any team’s marketing initiatives. See what you can do, and how to do it, with Account Based Marketing in Dynamics 365 for Marketing.