Dynamics 365 Marketing: 2022 Second Release Top Features

With the latest update release, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing further helps refine user experiences for improved customer conversion rates. Leveraging on data and AI, D365 Marketing now allows automated personalisation at scale. The collaboration between D365 Marketing and Sales has also been tightened to improve user engagement and accelerate sales. Marketers will finally be able to handle customer engagement of multiple brands and lines of business individually under the wider enterprise level.

Below, we list down the latest enhancements in the D365 Marketing Release Wave 2 plan that will impact the way you approach your marketing campaigns.

1. Close leads fast by automating handoffs with sales

Marketing and Sales modules are becoming more connected with the second-wave enhancements. Marketers will now be able to seamlessly transition leads from a customer journey to sales sequences for quicker conversion.

For a promising lead, marketers can easily and directly create sales activities from the journey, such as phone calls and tasks to hand them off to the seller. This ensures that the customer gets the right attention during the right time while marketers simultaneously accelerate the deal.

Dynamics 365 Marketing Release 2022- Handoffs with Sales

Sequence designers will also now be able to use the same interface in both modules. After certain criteria in the marketing customer journeys are met, you can trigger not just a task but an entire automated sales sequence.

General Availability: Oct 2022

2. Improve collaboration with a shared analytics dashboard

Understanding the contributing factors that drive leads through the different stages of the pipeline is crucial to streamlining your business strategy.

With the enhanced integration of D365 Marketing and Sales, new out-of-the-box analytics capabilities will provide a shared view of the business pipeline so that marketing and sales teams can align on common goals.

Marketers will be able to analyse top-performing journeys, channels and marketing assets that are contributing to pipeline development and revenue generation for a thorough study of best-working practices.

Dynamics 365 Marketing Release 2022-Wave 2-Aggregate Analytics

General availability: Dec 2022

3. Scale your multi-brand business effortlessly

Contemporary businesses work at a massive scale. A parent company can have multiple subsidiaries or a single company can operate under various brands.

Most of the time, these diverse entities are overseen by a centralised marketing mechanism while trying to maintain differences in approach and identity. Now, D365 Marketing will allow organisations to separate business and customer data across different brands as required.

Marketers will be able to manage brand-specific customer engagement strategies. Marketing journeys, content and digital assets can be effortlessly organised across organisational boundaries, allowing for their reuse and customisation at the enterprise level.

With access to marketing analytics across brands and business units, managers will be able to gain insights into brand-specific marketing performances to identify and develop sources of growth.

General Availability: Oct 2022

4. Create lead capture forms that convert visitors to customers

Winning and retaining customers has become ever more competitive. Businesses need to capitalise on the moments they get with users to gain their attention and create revenue-generating opportunities.

Over the entirety of the sales process, lead capture forms are crucial to gather marketing information so that users can be converted into valuable customers at the right moment.

Dynamics 365 Marketing Release 2022-Wave 2- lead capture forms

With this wave, the marketing forms are receiving a much-needed uplift. You will now be able to effortlessly create dynamic and engaging forms, especially with the help of ready-to-use templates.

Smart forms will also be able to automatically alter fields based on users’ past interactions as well as set them on a customer journey.

General Availability: Dec 2022

5. Grow audience interactions with AI-powered personalised content

Not every customer is the same, and every customer has their specific needs. Compelling, personalised content and offers boosts your chances to nurture leads, engage customers or prevent them from churning.

More than ever, today, we can consider D365 Marketing and Customer Insights as two halves of the broader marketing solution. Customer Insights brings in rich customer data from different sources, while Marketing helps target customers based on their preferences and behaviours. With the new engagements, leverage data and AI to deliver impactful hyper-personalised content to grow your audience interactions.

Based on your specified rules, the AI model will now be able to automatically select the best content for each of your customers. Such personalisation at scale will help improve your customer journey attainment and return on investment.

Marketers will also be able to create different content variations and define rules on the type of customers to target with each variation at different steps in their journey. The performance of the AI model can then be compared with that of a control group to further analyse and improve customer profiles and marketing strategies.

General Availability: NA

6. Reach customers in real-time on their preferred channels

With this new update, Dynamics 365 further improves its focus on moments-based marketing. Engage your customers in real-time and in critical moments by delivering compelling content through your preferred communication channels during their customer journey.

Now on top of built-in channels such as SMS, email and push notifications, you can also deliver content efficiently through custom channels such as WhatsApp.

Dynamics 365 Marketing Release 2022-Wave 2- Microsoft Teams

Use real-time marketing personalisation, consent and analytics tools to improve personalised targeting and maximise customer engagement.

For improved consistency and efficiency, you can also create templates for your custom channels, plug them into customer journeys and review deliverability analytics.

General Availability: NA

7. Target the right audience easily with the new segment builder

Effective marketing campaigns ensure you get better returns on marketing investments. Targeting the right audience segment lets marketers make the most out of their campaigns.

The new Dynamics 365 Marketing segment builder now allows you to build precise segments effortlessly without any technical know-how: simply describe the segment in natural language or use the intuitive drag-and-drop logic builder.

Dynamics 365 Marketing Release 2022 Wave 2- builder
You can start creating segments directly based on leads and contacts. To further narrow down your audience, you can also preview and estimate the number of members in the draft segments during the creation process.

General availability: Oct 2022

8. Grow your business with 3X maximum monthly interactions

Scaling up your business should not be hindered by the limitations of your tools. Dynamics 365 now allows you to reach customers at scale with personalised experiences. The new real-time marketing journey orchestration allows businesses to reach up to 100 million contacts and send up to 300 million messages per month, increasing the previous limit by threefold.

Grow your business effectively through additional interactions spread out across multiple marketing campaigns and strategies.

General availability: Oct 2022

What’s next?

Reach more customers and build lasting relationships with the latest Marketing Wave 2 release updates.