Creating marketing emails is a core part of any digital strategy, and a marketing platform like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys (formerly known as “Marketing”) makes real-time email campaign creation and management a breeze. If you’re a current Outbound Marketing customer, you may be wondering what the transition to Real-Time means for you and the things that you currently do in the Outbound area of the application. Namely, all the time and energy you’ve spent building and sending marketing emails in your Customer Journeys. But good news: you can very quickly and easily import your existing emails to use in Real-Time Marketing!

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 how to code to create Dynamic content in your emails.

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, but we also cannot forget the desktop experience. Dynamics 365 Marketing has recently added further responsive design options to help your emails flux based on the device it’s being viewed on.

Whether it be a new product rollout, lead re-engagement, subscription upgrades, or any other sales and marketing endeavor, every business needs a strategy to get their message to their target audience in a structured, automated way. That’s just what customer journeys do, by providing highly customizable and personalizable options to build your own outbound and real-time marketing campaigns. Building a customer journey is a straightforward and intuitive process that uses tiles to establish elements of the journey – from who is sent along the journey to every step that occurs along the pipeline. There are quite a few tile options that allow for a huge variety of journey objectives to serve the needs of any business.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dynamics 365 Marketing provides multiple ways for companies to collect data from web forms and import submission data into Dynamics 36 with marketing forms. Dynamics 365 Marketing forms allow you to build and customize web forms that can be then hosted on landing pages or using the form capture feature. This blog will walk through the capabilities of form capture and the reasoning behind using it in place of embedding Dynamics 365 forms.

Dynamics 365 Marketing is a comprehensive digital marketing platform that gives users the ability to create a wide variety of content including landing pages, forms, email designs, marketing automation campaigns, and more. With either system customizations or Power Automate workflows, marketing admins can effectively control the production and sharing of digital marketing content.

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.

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.

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.

Virtual events are cost-effective and can be highly valuable for any company. Dynamics 365 for Marketing simplifies the huge number of logistics and details necessary to make an event worth it. See how the comprehensive marketing solution can help manage your digital events.

Attracting, capturing, and closing on high-quality leads has become an art form in today’s ultra-competitive digital age. What used to be a combination of cold-calling, print ads, and a bit of luck has shifted to social media, personalized messages, drip campaigns, and an overall focus that’s more on the customer, not your company. Companies must adopt at least some form of most of these practices in order to stay competitive in today’s environment, but that’s a lot easier for large corporations than small and midsize companies.