Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys is a top-tier choice when it comes to marketing applications. In this app, each step of the customer journey is optimized, allowing you to enhance your customer interactions, utilize multi-channel capabilities, and lean on automated lead scoring models to weed out leads with minimal interest. But that’s just the beginning of what Customer Insights - Journeys has to offer.

While every business will approach the move from Outbound to Real-time in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys a little differently, we've compiled two example timelines to help you conceptualize what key tasks we recommend completing during each phase of either a gradual or rapid transition.

This checklist can help to organize and plans for the transition. It includes required initial configuration, migrating content, and considerations for the new functionality available in Real-time.

As you’re likely aware, Microsoft will be removing the Outbound Marketing Module from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys app on June 30th, 2025. To prevent the interruption of your marketing efforts, you’ll want to work on getting your organization transitioned over to the Real-Time Journeys module within the next few months. This checklist can help to organize your thoughts and plan for the transition. There’s a simplified version with just the checklist items at the bottom. 

Depending on your business, you may choose to create a content strategy, which can be a completely separate document or can be housed inside this bigger marketing strategy. But what should you include in an effective content strategy, and how should you approach building one?

Check out this infographic that talks about exactly those questions and includes a few additional resources to delve into further questions you may have. View this infographic online and download it to reference in future or share with colleagues!

Microsoft has announced that on September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will be combined into a single product offering called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. The new unified application will help users continue to deliver excellent customer experiences and harness customer data in ways that further brand loyalty and growth.

Although this sounds like a major change, there’s no need to panic. We’ve broken down everything you need to know about the unified app and how you can benefit from it.

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.

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 viewers valuable content at their fingertips, these two strategies can improve social media reach and SEO (when used carefully and judiciously). Let’s dig in.

Adding a CRM solution to your manufacturing business’ tech stack helps you better understand customer needs and gives you the tools and insight you need to reach them in the best way possible at every touchpoint, whether they’re at the very top of your sales funnel or about to place a repeat order. Dynamics 365 Marketing is a flexible CRM solution that helps businesses in any industry create, manage, and analyze the results of a wide variety of materials to help even marketing beginners create high-quality, engaging content that speaks to your prospects, leads, and longstanding clients. Here are some ways manufacturers can benefit from using Dynamics 365 Marketing to engage prospects and drive revenue.

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.

A cohesive brand is one that is consistent no matter what or where it is. Visually, your brand can be differentiated by the colors, logo, fonts, and other defining characteristics unique to you. Keeping your brand identifiable across all touchpoints your customers encounter boosts brand recognition, which increases reach and effectiveness of your marketing content.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of cloud-based business applications of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. Data-driven and inter-connected, these apps sport modern and aligned interfaces, robust built-in capabilities, and highly customizable development. Whether you use one or many of these apps, there are many build-in features that allow you to create brand-specific content.

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 image, a thumbnail image, a social media visual, a header for email campaigns, or anything. But if you or your team is not trained in graphic design, how do you achieve this? Sticking to design best practices is a good first step, and below we will share a handful to start you on the right path.

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 that those efforts are as effective as possible and return as much on your investment as it can? Believe it or not, it’s often simple steps that lead to immense shifts in social media likes, clicks, website visits, and leads.

Things like real-time customer journeys, recommended actions, SMS messaging, and using natural language to create targeted segments are exciting (and relatively new) features that can help you connect with customers in the ways that matter most. Now, AI has been harnessed in Dynamics 365 Marketing for a new, imaginative feature called Content ideas.

Here’s how to use Content ideas to quickly generate on-message content to create personalized customer experiences:

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 practices that can lead to more effective customer journeys.

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 social, and no matter the platform they are surfing, their personal and professional wires are likely to cross on social media. With that in mind, a company is remiss if they don’t leverage that.

The search is always on for how businesses can achieve more with the effort they put in. To achieve the goal of more results with less effort, the Dynamics 365 Marketing 2021 Release Wave 2 focuses on engaging customers across all touchpoints when that contact will have the most impact, personalizing customer interactions using their own data for a heightened sense of connectivity, and making the strong and speedy business decisions that are afforded to Microsoft customers through AI-driven 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.

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.

Microsoft continues to expand the functionality of the Dynamics 365 Marketing to provide better tools for businesses to connect with their audiences. New to the armory of features is SMS messaging and push notifications for mobile apps. This gives new ways to take control of communication efforts all within the same system. Currently, these features are only in public preview, so they don’t quite have their full functionality. However, they can still be utilized to get a taste of their full potential and help to brainstorm ways a company could benefits from them.

CRMs are powerful tools for automation and record keeping, but did you know that they can also take on a bulk of digital marketing activities too? Finding an all-in-one CRM solution can drive success and help teams exceed expectations, all within a single workspace.

Effective marketing strategies and tactics are designed to cultivate enough interest to make sure each sales-focused interaction has a stable foundation. Creating lead scoring models in Dynamics 365 Marketing autogenerates a score to indicate each contact or account’s likelihood of closing a deal based on interactions with websites, emails, events, and more. Scoring leads allows users to focus on the most quality prospects by cutting through cluttered sales pipelines and highlighting each lead’s progress towards becoming sales ready.

New real-time marketing features in Dynamics 365 Marketing provide users with tools to engage customers in the moments that matter using a variety of customizable dimensions like branching paths and triggers. Insights can be harnessed by AI capabilities to automatically generate recommendations for actions when it comes to content, channels, and analytics.

Segments (marketing lists) and integrations also allow organizations to seamlessly leverage customer profile information to ensure each customer engagement utilizes the full range of tools available for an overall personalized experience.

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.

These simple tactics can be used to make sure every email packs a punch to get the most out of marketing efforts.

Event management is a complex feat from start to finish, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. Event planning and management tools within Dynamics 365 Marketing help guide users through every step of the process from preliminary budgeting, registration, session planning, webinar broadcasting, post-event analytics, and beyond. Users can utilize two helpful features within the event work area to manage event sponsors and vendors.

Digital marketing strategies became more crucial than ever this past year, especially when many businesses realized an effective digital presence was a key factor in maintaining successful operations. Dynamics 365 Marketing takes the guesswork out of campaigns and makes it easy to put together polished digital marketing content while managing it all in one cohesive interface. Check out some of the key functionalities of Dynamics 365 Marketing that allow for a high degree of customization to branded marketing content.

Digital marketing platforms typically focus on email marketing or social media marketing, while avoiding other important digital marketing aspects like landing pages, forms, and event management, Dynamics 365 Marketing differentiates itself by housing all of the features above in one place and integrating with the powerful contact and account management capabilities of Dynamics 365 Sales.

For marketing forms specifically, the true benefit lies in embedding marketing forms on external websites and collecting contact information that can be used in email campaigns or tracked as leads in Dynamics 365 Sales.

Dynamics 365 Marketing comes out-of-the-box with a wide range of functionality. Customer journeys provide everything from quick, single-email blasts to much larger, dynamic, multi-step marketing automation processes. Content tiles within Customer Journeys allow users to drag and drop different marketing activities like emails, phone calls, appointments, workflows, and much more within a campaign.

In addition to these tiles, Custom Channels can be created to expand upon the base tool set. Custom channels can be things like social media platforms or SMS marketing that can be used within a customer journey just like the default tiles.

When it comes to creating consistent, high-quality digital marketing content, templates are key. Content templates ensure that brand standards are met by including default colors and logos that are consistent with the brand. Templates also provide management with a way to approve design elements without needed to approve each piece of content.

Dynamics 365 Marketing provides out-of-the-box templates for landing pages, forms, marketing emails, and more while giving managers the tools to create customized templates for digital marketers to use in day-to-day work.

As part of Dynamics 365 2021 Release Wave 1, Dynamics 365 Marketing received an overhaul of its email designer last month. The new designer gives a more modern look and feel in addition to new features. With the changes, users may find it a bit jarring when opening an email record for the first time. However the new layout should feel overall more streamlined after getting better acquainted.

Managing live events can be incredibly stressful and difficult for staff. From planning to taking money and managing registrations, it is imperative to have a set system and process for conducting live events. Systems like Dynamics 365 Marketing make it easier by managing registrations, logistics, and payment in one place.

But what about the check-in process? If the check-in process is mismanaged, the check-in desk can get backed up or post event reporting can be negatively affected. In this blog we’ll cover how organizations can utilize the Dynamics 365 mobile app and event registration QR codes to ensure the check-in process runs smoothly.

Currently there is a decent selection of fonts available in Dynamics 365 Marketing when creating content like email messages, marketing forms, and marketing pages. While more fonts will be added in future updates, many marketers prefer to use fonts that adhere to brand standards or frankly just look better than available fonts. Web fonts provide marketers with the flexibility to stretch their creative muscles within the context of text within an email design or marketing page.

Microsoft has made no delay in getting started with planning updates to Dynamics 365. Recently, Microsoft put out its plan for the 2021 Release Wave 1. A multitude of enhancements and features are coming to the Dynamics 365 applications, including Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The updates to Marketing aim to make content creation easier, allow it to be distributed through more channels, and give users better tools to analyze their data. Many of these updates are expected to become available in April with the rest rolling out in the months after.

Dynamics 365 Marketing is Microsoft’s premiere digital marketing application built directly into the Dynamics 365 ecosystem. For those of you using Dynamics 365 Marketing already, you may see changes here and there as Microsoft pushes out new releases as part of Dynamics 365 2020 Release Wave 2.

Some of these features are not very visible and require additional steps to enable. We’ve put together a list of 5 new features in Dynamics 365 Marketing that can immediately impact your marketing operations and make life easier for your marketing team.

In the work-from-home era, companies like professional service organizations have been forced to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Engaging with audiences without in-person interactions can seem like a daunting task. However, applications like Dynamics 365 Marketing do the work to help companies keep their customers engaged.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing has proven itself a powerful catalyst for creating and maintaining strong customer relationships. Microsoft’s update release wave 2 further enhances Dynamics 365 Marketing by giving users better tools for, and better control over, the processes they already do so well.

There are big quality of life and UI enhancements coming to Customer Journeys, increased functionality and performance monitoring for social post, and integration with Microsoft Teams for easy webinar and event management.

Coming soon, the Customer Journey entity will see a revamp making it even easier to create and manage automated marketing campaigns. These campaigns range from a simple email blast to an extended drip campaign that reacts to how the target interacts with the campaign content. Learn more about building more complex customer journeys here. Here is a glimpse at what’s coming to early release in September and general availability in October.

The May 2020 Update for Dynamics 365 Marketing was recently released. With this release come new features, performance upgrades, and bug fixes. If you have been watching Dynamics 365 updates closely, you’ll know there have been regular, monthly updates over the last 6 months.

The May release marks the final point in the Dynamics 365 Marketing 2020 release wave 1 plan. All features mentioned in release wave 1 plan are now generally available to all Dynamics 365 Marketing implementations. So what are the new features you should be aware of? Let us go through them.

Digital marketing technology and strategies are constantly evolving. With new technologies, many new marketing strategies develop quickly to help make use of the new mediums we now have access to. One such marketing strategy, drip marketing, is a modern way to market to a specific set of potential customers through targeted emails with relevant information that can help convert them into an opportunity and ultimately a customer.

Microsoft’s new marketing platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, can help provide businesses with the tools they need to execute complex marketing strategies like drip campaigns.

Utilizing an integration between Dynamics 365 Portals or Power Apps Portals, Dynamics 365 Marketing can provide a front end to interact directly with a potential customer. Marketers can use marketing pages built on these portals to engage with their audience by registering for events, filling out forms, or performing other marketing actions and have it sync directly with the marketing platform behind it. This blog will explain how exactly the integration between Dynamics 365 Portals and Dynamics 365 Marketing works and what can be accomplished with it.

The variety of list types can be confusing, so it’s important to understand the difference. There are two main list types: the marketing segment and the marketing list. Marketing segments are designed to be paired with customer journeys so a marketer can guide members of a selected subset of contacts through a journey of content that can include marketing emails, marketing forms & pages, events, and more.

Monitoring online behavior associated with a website, social media pages, and landing pages is essential for marketers. Tracking this behavior can give insight into what messaging your audience is connecting with and how they are accessing it. Dynamics 365 Marketing gives marketers the tools needed to track their audience and learn more about what content they connect with.

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Marketing contains a comprehensive lead scoring system that helps marketers do exactly that. With an easy-to-use UI-based scoring module, it is simple to create scoring models that rank leads and automatically target them.

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.

Live events require significant time and resources to figure out the logistics and ultimately put on a successful event. Dynamics 365 for Marketing makes it possible for organizations of any size to organize and manage everything that goes into a live event.