Marketing wizardry with Dynamics 365 Marketing

Dynamics 365 Marketing is Microsoft’s answer to next-generation marketing campaigns, insights, and journeys. Marketers no longer need to use various tools and applications to enable a holistic marketing approach but can find everything they need within one powerful suite of business applications.  

What is Marketing for Dynamics 365? 

Dynamics 365 Marketing is a marketing automation application that empowers businesses with intelligent features and processes to turn leads and prospects into profitable clients. The application is user-friendly and designed for the creatively complex mind of a true marketeer. 

Best of all, as a Dynamics 365 application, Marketing seamlessly integrates with the Dynamics 365 Sales app, ensuring close alignment between marketing and sales and offering built-in AI-fueled intelligence that delivers next-generation campaigns and experiences.   

Dynamics 365 Marketing and Data Protection 

With an increased focus on data protection, marketers are often faced with the challenge of marketing to leads and opportunities while ensuring strict compliance with data regulations. Usually, this poses a problem as marketers can’t just focus on spreading the word but need to ensure that the word only reaches those who have opted in to hear it.  

Marketing applications are also getting increasingly smarter at detecting communication that is not compliant. This stresses the need for organizations to invest in marketing automation tools that take care of compliance for you, empowering marketers to do what they do best – market! 

Dynamics 365 Marketing features inherent data protection and regulation compliance features that make it easy for marketers to ensure compliance and manage customer and lead’s communication requirements. One of the best features of the Marketing application that I love is the Subscription Centre. 

Managing Contact Preferences with Dynamics 365 Marketing 

As a next-generation marketing automation tool, Dynamics 365 features an easy-to-use subscription center that enables marketers to create subscription lists and communicate to prospects and clients based on their terms, preferences and unique requirements.  

The worst thing a marketer can do is send mass communication to a bulk list of contacts. In the digital age, people want to choose the source and context of the communication they receive. This also serves as one of marketing’s biggest advantages: the more targeted your communication can be, the better your brand is perceived and the better your chance of future ROI on marketing efforts.  

Therefore, with Dynamics 365 as your marketing automation weapon of choice, you can use the subscription center to segment the types of communication that you send and, best of all, give your prospects and leads the opportunity to choose what is most relevant to them. 

Setting up Subscription Centers with Dynamics 365 Marketing 

Setting up and managing a subscription center with Dynamics 365 is simple, fast and easy! The application contains a default marketing subscription center which must be included in each marketing email. Without this link and a physical address, you cannot send emails. 

Below is a step-by-step guide to setting up and managing the subscription center in Dynamics 365 Marketing: 

1. Navigate to the Marketing Forms tab under Internet Marketing in the Dynamics 365 Marketing application. Ensure that the Default Subscription Center page is set to live 
2. Navigate to the Marketing Forms tab under Internet Marketing. 
3. Select the Default Subscription Center Form to view your current subscription form. 
4. Should you want to add a subscription option (for example events, newsletter or webinars), navigate to the subscription lists tab under Customers in the Dynamics 365 Marketing application. 
5. Select new and create a new subscription list. Provide a meaningful name & description for this new subscription list to ensure your fellow marketers can know the purpose of this new list. 
6. Ensure you save this new subscription list record. 
7. Refresh the application. 
8. Navigate back to the Subscription Center form as described in steps 1 & 2 and select edit at the top. 
9. In the right-hand toolbar, you will find the new subscription list under the Subscription list tile. 
10. Select the list and drag it onto the form. 
11. Click Save and the Subscription Center form will be published back into a Live state. 

Once you have added a subscription list to your subscription center, contacts can manage their communication preferences for that specific list. When a contact receives a mailer and clicks on ‘manage subscription preferences’ or ‘unsubscribe’ the lists they have previously subscribed to will automatically be ticked. If they wish to unsubscribe, they can simply untick those lists and submit the form.  

Very important to note is that, should a contact choose the ‘do not email’ option they will automatically unsubscribe from all communication, highlighting the need for you to make the implications clear on the form. 

Apart from subscription management, Dynamics 365 Marketing offers advanced lead and customer segmentation and targeting with various other tools to empower marketers to deliver next-generation event, campaign and webpage experiences.