Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 for email marketing
When customers ask us about email functionality in Microsoft Dynamics, I love answering that yes, you can send and track emails, as well as build email nurturing campaigns.
Whether you use Microsoft Outlook or the CRM system itself, you can send emails to your contacts or your leads about anything. The system tracks these emails and stores them centrally so that anyone on your team can see previous records of communication. If a prospective client responds to your email, it will also be tracked in the system to keep that communication filed together.
When you invest in a CRM system, you want to make sure that it allows for centralised communications. You can avoid the issue of continually asking team members about their sent emails and requesting that they forward them onto you. Microsoft Dynamics provides you with access to these communication records, which takes out that middle step. By tracking emails in one place and comparing them with relevant records in your CRM system, you can have robust customer relationship management that provides a trusted set-up within your business.
It also means that everyone in your business has access to the same set of data. You won’t have to be disturbed by someone asking you for a particular email when you are out of the office; they can go straight to the system and access it themselves.
The same applies with Microsoft Outlook. In Outlook, you can track an email and push it into the CRM system against a particular record. The beauty is that with Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can actually track the email against the specific area that you are working on. It doesn’t just dump all of the emails against the contact record. If you have several opportunities in process, such as multiple deals for a particular company, then you can actually assign the email to its related opportunity, much like a folder for different opportunities. But because they’re all linked to a company and or a contact, each of those emails is also viewable against a contact, so you can easily view all of your ongoing opportunities at the same time.
You can use this application with customer services as well. For example, if you’re dealing with incidents and you have emails relating to a particular service case, those are also distinct and isolated. But because you can link them to a contact, you could also view all of the emails with the contact to get a full feel for the relationship. That brings together two key parts of your customer life cycle—sales and customer service. Across the whole lifespan of the customer relationship, you can see what communications are going out between your customers and employees.
You can also build campaigns in the system as well. You can focus on either email communication alone, or a hybrid campaign of emails and phone calls. The CRM system allows you to track all of your communication using powerful visual workflows. If you choose a campaign that starts with an email, a phone call, and then a follow-up email, you can easily see what step of the marketing alternation journey, as we call it, others are working on. This is an important way to nurture relationships. The system does most of the hard work for you, even when sending personalised emails. You can set up the system to merge personalising components, such as first names or customer preferences, which allow the automated campaign to still feel like it’s coming directly from you.
These tools are powerful for brand awareness and keeping people interested in your business. With Microsoft Dynamics 365, your CRM system can send and track emails in the system for you, as well as help you run targeted marketing automation campaigns.
