User Review
( votes)Companies today live in an interesting time. So many product offerings and services are so similar that customers now have plenty of choices. While in the past, customers would have selected the best or cheapest product, they’re no longer doing so. Instead, customers are all about who provides the best experience.
Thanks to technologies like machine learning, big data, and artificial intelligence, companies have a deeper understanding of what their customers want. Using the data provided by these tools, they can create engaging email campaigns and focused marketing strategies. However, there’s one area that companies still aren’t utilizing these tools: events.
When planning a professional event, it’s crucial to focus the same amount of effort on the experience as product offerings. Ensuring that the information presented or those in attendance meet (or exceed) customer expectations is yet another way organizations can increase customer loyalty and, in the end, ROI. Creating this great experience starts with the right platform, which is where Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing comes in.
Below, we’ll review how JourneyTEAM relied on the features, tools, and insights within the solution to organize and coordinate one of our biggest events.
A Quick Review of Dynamics 365 Marketing
Built underneath the Dynamics 365 umbrella, Marketing is an app that provides you with all the tools necessary to create a successful marketing campaign. Users are able to create personalized customer journeys that nurture leads and move them down the sales pipeline with robust, scalable tools. Lead management, webinars, event management, multichannel campaigns, and customer journey creation are a few of the tools that support both the creative and logic-driven aspects of a successful marketing campaign.
How We Used Marketing to Coordinate Our BTS Event
The Business Technology Summit (BTS) is our most anticipated event of the year. During the event, a series of workshops and discussions held by top industry experts where topics such as the latest Microsoft products and updates and new trends are discussed.
Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, the 2020 BTS was held online, which presented some unique challenges in terms of customer experience. We wanted to make sure that attendees still had a great experience despite watching sessions remotely. Below are just some of the tools within Dynamics 365 Marketing that enabled us to provide an engaging, informative event for attendees.
ClickDimensions
ClickDimensons features tools like lead scoring, web intelligence, reporting, and other marketing tools, all of which helped us focus our efforts on targeting the right people, and improve our marketing and sales strategy.
For example, we analyzed the specific time of day that potential attendees’ were opening our email campaign messages and discovered that many read them either first-thing or mid-morning on Mondays and Tuesdays with numbers tapering later in the week. From then on, we sent emails prior to the beginning of the week to avoid our email being lost in individual’s inboxes.
Web Forms
To test Marketing’s third-party integration, we integrated our registration form built on Power Automate, which we accomplished with few issues. When an attendee finished registering for BTS, Marketing created an event record containing all their information and shared it back to our Wix platform. From there, we were able to organize and analyze it freely.
For payment processing, we utilized the Wix/Marketing 365 integration as well. Wix features a robust payment platform that we wanted to utilize rather than creating one within Marketing. The integration also allows us to easily track and analyze payments.
Event Management
Because we had so many sessions and breakouts, we relied on Marketing’s event management tools. These features ensured that session details like start/end times, number of participants, speakers, streaming information, and more were organized, accurate, and accessible which helped the event run smoothly.
The Pros and Cons
Although Marketing 365 is a customizable, scalable tool, it doesn’t come without some challenges. Some of the obstacles we experienced while coordinating our BTS event include:
- Integration: Integrating Wix into Marketing 365 was tricky, but possible.
- Lead targeting: What we feel is a major limitation to the solution is it only allows for contact-level lead targeting, meaning all leads must have a contact record within Marketing 365.
- Time: Unfortunately, we did not have enough time to truly test the capabilities of Marketing 365 features and the integration with Wix.
However, the challenges we ran into were minimal compared to the benefits such as:
- Scalability: As our numbers for the event grew, Marketing 365 handled it with ease, and we’re confident it will continue to handle fluctuating workloads as our event grows.
- Faster, more informed decisions: Marketing 365 gathered information from registration records, emails, and more into a single, central location, eliminating the need to jump between multiple platforms and tools. As a result, we were able to make faster, more informed decisions.
- Insights: The data we received from the solution was truly invaluable. We were able to see how our messages were resonating with customers, how our messages were received, and where improvements were needed.
Arguably one of the biggest benefits to using Marketing was the amount of time it saved on mundane, time-consuming tasks like data analysis or data entry. Marketing automated those processes so we could stay focused on creating a stellar customer experience.
Strengthen Your Customer Journey with JourneyTEAM
Improving your customer journey is a continuous process. As customer behaviors and trends change, so should your customer experience. Keeping up with these trends requires the right platform, which is where Microsoft solutions come in. At JourneyTEAM, we’ll help you identify the products you need to create a truly unforgettable experience. Contact us today to get started.
NEXT STEPS:
- Join a free consultation and ask all the questions you wish.
- Plan your Deep Dive meeting – Get your organization’s Customized Solutions presentation.
Jenn Alba – Marketing Manager – 801.938.7816
JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more. [email protected]
