Using In-App Marketing in Dynamics 365 Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales includes in-app marketing features that allow you to create, send, and track promotional emails and other activities for selected Accounts, Contacts, and Leads. These tools can be especially useful when a salesperson or sales team wants to conduct targeted outreach without moving to a separate marketing application. For example, imagine your company has introduced a new product and wants to send a promotion to Leads collected at a recent event. You can create a marketing list for those Leads, send them promotional emails, and manage their responses within Dynamics 365 Sales.

Create a Marketing List

Marketing lists determine who will receive your outreach. Dynamics 365 provides two types:

• Static marketing lists allow you to manually add Accounts, Contacts, or Leads.
• Dynamic marketing lists use a query to determine which records belong to the list.

A dynamic list can be helpful when you want membership to remain based on defined criteria. For example, you could build a dynamic Lead list that includes everyone you met at a particular event. When creating a marketing list, you choose which type of record you're targeting. If you create a marketing list using Accounts, Dynamics 365 uses the Account's Primary Contact as the person you're contacting.

Send an Email with a Quick Campaign

Once you have your audience, you can create a Quick Campaign to perform an activity for the members of your marketing list. For an email promotion, you can select Email as the activity type and then compose the message you want to send. Dynamics 365 provides a basic text editor with simple formatting functionality. You can also use existing email templates or incorporate HTML you've created elsewhere. You can send the email from an individual user or configure a queue for the activity. If you're using a queue to send emails, the associated user needs the appropriate Exchange licensing and mailbox configuration in Dynamics 365.

Track Quick Campaign Results

After sending a Quick Campaign, Dynamics 365 lets you monitor its progress. You can review information such as the number of successful and failed activities. An individual email activity record is also created for each email sent, and those records are associated with the Quick Campaign. When customers respond, their responses can be tracked within the campaign.

Manage Responses with Queues

Queues can provide a convenient way to manage responses to marketing outreach. Instead of requiring one person to handle every response, campaign responses can appear in a shared queue. From there, team members can pick an item themselves or route it to another employee. For example, if a prospect responds to a campaign asking for additional help or information, that response can appear as a queue item. The team can assign it to the appropriate salesperson and remove it from the queue once responsibility has been established. This gives teams a more organized process for turning marketing responses into sales follow-up.

Use Campaigns for More Complex Outreach

Quick Campaigns are useful for relatively straightforward outreach. For longer-term marketing initiatives, Dynamics 365 also provides Campaigns. A Campaign may be more appropriate when:

• You plan to perform multiple activities.
• You want to send several emails over a period of time.
• Your campaign involves more than one marketing list.
• You need to record additional information about a larger marketing initiative.

Within a Campaign, you create individual Campaign Activities.

Create Campaign Activities

A Campaign Activity represents a specific activity within the overall Campaign. For example, you could create separate Campaign Activities for multiple promotional emails. Campaign Activities can contain information such as:

• Marketing lists
• Communication channel
• Start and end dates
• Financial information
• Included or excluded records

When you're ready to execute an activity, you can distribute it to the selected marketing list. This provides more structure than a Quick Campaign when your marketing initiative involves multiple steps.

Manage Email Unsubscribes

Promotional email also requires a way for recipients to communicate that they no longer want to receive marketing messages. Dynamics 365 can include an unsubscribe link in your marketing email. When a Lead or Contact clicks that link, Dynamics 365 updates the person's marketing preference to indicate that marketing materials should not be sent. That recipient can then be automatically excluded from future promotional emails. This allows a recipient's preference to be reflected directly on their Lead or Contact record.

When In-App Marketing Makes Sense

In-app marketing isn't designed to replace a complete marketing automation platform for every organization. Instead, it can be useful for focused outreach performed by individual salespeople or sales teams. Potential use cases include:

• Announcing a sale or discount to selected customers
• Following up with Leads at a particular point in the sales process
• Nurturing selected Leads
• Contacting clients about an upcoming subscription renewal
• Reaching out to determine whether a client needs an upgrade
• Notifying customers when their salesperson is leaving or moving to another office

In these situations, the communication may be primarily text-based and sent from someone the recipient already knows.

Understand the Email Design Limitations

The email designer available through these in-app features provides relatively basic editing functionality. You can create templates or one-time messages and apply basic formatting. You can also use HTML, but doing so may mean creating the email in another application and then bringing that HTML into Dynamics 365. For highly designed marketing emails, these capabilities may not provide the visual design experience your marketing team needs.

When to Consider Customer Insights - Journeys

As your marketing requirements grow, there may be a point when the built-in Dynamics 365 Sales marketing tools are no longer sufficient. Consider a dedicated marketing application such as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys when:

• You want visually appealing, highly designed emails without needing HTML and CSS expertise.
• You regularly run campaigns for large audiences, such as more than 5,000 contacts.
• You want advanced analytics showing email delivery, opens, clicks, and other engagement.
• You need complex dynamic segmentation.
• Your campaigns involve more touchpoints and elements than in-app Campaigns provide.
• You need marketing forms or pages.
• You want lead scoring based on marketing interactions.
• You need event management functionality.

These requirements go beyond the more sales-focused outreach that in-app marketing is designed to support.

Choose the Right Marketing Approach

Dynamics 365 Sales in-app marketing can be a useful option when your organization needs straightforward, targeted customer or Lead outreach. Marketing lists help you define your audience, Quick Campaigns provide an easy way to send individual promotional activities, Campaigns support more structured initiatives, and queues can help your sales team manage the responses that follow. For smaller businesses, teams with limited marketing requirements, or salespeople conducting focused outreach, these tools may provide the functionality you need without requiring a separate marketing application. When your organization needs sophisticated email design, larger campaigns, advanced analytics, complex segmentation, forms, lead scoring, or event management, a dedicated solution such as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys may be a better fit.