Dynamics 365 for Marketing – Exciting Updates in October Release

Wave 2 of the Dynamics 365 2020 Release is just about here. And there are some pretty exciting innovations that will improve the way businesses do business.

The release includes substantial enhancements and hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, among others.

While the entire 2020 release plan is immense – and laid out in a 486-page document that you can download here –  the October release includes some notable upgrades.

Without diving too deep into everything the new release has to offer, here is a quick overview of some of the exciting bells and whistles you can expect specifically in Dynamics 365 for Marketing in the month of October.

DYNAMICS 365 FOR MARKETING

Microsoft understands customer engagement is the key to every business development process. This month, they add meat to their highly touted 360-degree view of customers with smart improvements to relationship-building processes and capabilities.

• In-Place Editing of Email & Forms. No longer will you have to disengage from a customer journey to create or edit email communications or forms. In-place editing keeps the focus where it should be – within the customer journey. You can also create or edit marketing forms related to an event within the event itself. This one is a big improvement and just makes smart sense.

• Enhanced Content-Rich Social Media Creation and Management. The entire social media post creation experience has been redesigned for ease of use, better management across multiple channels and enhanced scheduling features.

• A Redesigned, More Efficient Customer Journey Canvas. The new design offers a more intuitive approach to building customer journeys. The experience is further enhanced by no longer needing to hop between the canvas and the toolbox when creating the journey. One of my favorite new features is the inclusion of negative journey paths that allows you to create alternate journeys and follow-up events for those customers not meeting a certain condition (like not opening an email or not clicking on a specified link). This alone is a real game-changer.

• Running Webinars within Microsoft Teams. With the onslaught of virtual events, the October release enables you to manage webinars and video meetings in Teams, directly from the Dynamics 365 Marketing platform. You can create and host live events – and integrate them directly into Marketing events. Businesses are already looking for better alternatives to Zoom and other video conferencing platforms and Microsoft is definitely stepping up to the plate.

• Expanded Entity Options for Easy Data Collection. Before now, forms had to be connected to a lead or contact. But with the new release, forms no longer need to be mapped this way. Instead, marketers can store form submissions to other entities. and workflows can be created to move the data to where it needs to be.

The entirety of Dynamics 365 October Release is enormous, with updates and enhancements made throughout the entire suite of applications including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, Commerce, Fraud Protection, and Business Central. There are also notable Microsoft Power Platform features in the new release, including substantial improvements for Power Apps developers.

Suffice to say Microsoft continues to create and deploy exceptional CRM capabilities – and Dynamics 365 is increasingly fortifying its place as the industry innovator.

And there is certainly more cool stuff to come.

By Christopher Smith, Founder & CEO of Empellor CRM. 

Read “How Do I Find CRM Talent?” here.