The guide to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys

The new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights package merges two apps into one: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing. This updated version now consolidates Customer Insights – Journeys (previously Dynamics 365 Marketing) and Customer Insights – Data. 
  
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys is not only for marketers anymore. With AI and natural language input assistance, enterprises can build trigger-based journeys that reach customers across multifold touchpoints, growing relationships from prospects through sales and endorsement. 
  
This upgraded kit of Dynamics 365 features will initially allow you to expand your staff functionality and increase the efficiency of your work processes. 
  
So, if you are considering boosting your biz, this guide will be informative and beneficial for you.  
  
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys is an excellent instrument for enterprises, transforming customer interactions. It proposes a complete platform to craft cool, impersonated, and impactful customer journeys.
  
Customer Insights – Journeys assists companies in four main manners. Firstly, it attracts charterers in real-time, letting them instantly connect with users by sending emails or texts when they are most likely to respond, ensuring immediate and effective communication. Secondly, it builds customer relationships faster by forming smooth experiences at each step. Thirdly, it personifies client experiences with the help of AI. Fourthly, it broadens using a consolidated, flexible platform.

The associated outputs are these:   
  
•    Dynamics 365 Customer Insights: caters the maximum specialties for a deeper comprehension of your customers.  
•    Dynamics 365 Sales: tracks accounts and contacts, nurtures sales from the lead to the order, and creates sales collateral.  
•    Microsoft Dataverse: securely retains and drives the info utilized by business applications.

Customer segmentation lets companies divide their audience into distinct groups rooted on shared singularities, like demographics, behavior, and preferences. 
 
The instrument gives its users several evident gains: it offers different segmentation types, including demographic segmentation (age, gender, location), behavioral segmentation (purchase history, website interactions), and predictive segmentation (recognizing high-value clients). It also gives a hand in making dynamic segments that update in real-time based on customer behavior and delivers thorough audience profiles for a finer customer characteristics’ understanding. 
  
The Customer Segmentation tool’s actions and functionalities are separated into two units: Outbound and Real-time Marketing. 
  
In Outbound Marketing, users can efficiently implement such things: 
  
•    design dynamic demographic, firmographic, or behavioral segments, generate dynamic behavioral segments from customer journey results 
•    export dynamic segment members to Excel 
•    create a static segment 
•    work with segment templates 
•    market to segments on LinkedIn with LinkedIn Matched Audiences   
  
In Real-time Journeys, they can perform these: 
  
•    produce a demographic segment targeting leads or demographic segments using related tables 
•    preview segment members 
•    add subgroups to segments 
•    use interactions for segment creation 
•    apply Copilot to target the right customers employing the query assist 
•    individually run their customer list 
•    make static snapshots of dynamic segments.

When united with marketing automation software, Email Marketing upgrades communication processes and allows businesses to attract their audience more productively. 
  
The benefits of this tool speak for themselves: it manages sending messages to different groups, makes emails more pertinent, and includes dynamic content. It also automates email campaigns, ensures timely customer communication, and allows building email content more easily.  
  
This tool lets its users maintain the following actions: 
  
•    preview and test-send emails their emails  
•    link to surveys, events, marketing pages, Microsoft Teams events, calendar elements, docs, and videos kept in the asset library 
•    add personalized data to Customer Insights – Journeys emails 
•    use AI to kickstart email creation (with Copilot) and check their message-content spam score 
•    use brand profiles in emails, QR codes for event registration, links to content, or URLs, intensified HTML controls, and import HTML snippets 
•    use custom fonts in Customer Insights – Journeys and the email accessibility checker; check their messages for flaws and prepare them for delivery 
•    compile insights from their email outcomes 
•    create and personalize outbound text messages and notifications 
•    add Customer Voice surveys to text messages 
•    schedule emails from Timeline and a lot more 
  
As a result, companies can advance email marketing with personified, timely, and involving communication using email creation and automation features.

Forms and pages play a critical part in gathering key information from customers, boosting lead generation and involvement. 
  
The core characteristics of this instrument are the following: marketing forms gather key information, while pages display products, increasing brand visibility. Forms and pages attract potential customers, guiding them through the sales process. Interactive forms and pages encourage user interaction, fostering stronger connections. Plus, data from forms and page interactions helps tailor marketing messages, improving relevance.  
  
If to talk about a more detailed list of the tool’s functions, they are displayed below: 
  
In Outbound Marketing, the charterer can  
  
•    outbound form creation 
•    potentiate prefilling for marketing forms 
•    deploy pages that contain Customer Insights – Journeys forms 
•    manage Customer Insights – Journeys forms to edit a live form, un-publish a form, form field properties, style your forms using Embedding Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys Form on External Pages 
•    integrate a custom captcha into the form  
•    set up subscription lists and subscription centers 
•    design forms for landing pages, event registrations, or subscription centers 
•    market websites and redirect URLs setups to track web activity  
•    customize form confirmation messages and operations  
•    potentiate progressive profiling for forms 
•    settle form notifications for lead alerts 
  
In Real-time Journeys, the utilizer can  
  
•    create Customer Insights – Journeys forms  
•    drive duplicate records 
  
Generally, Marketing Forms and Pages help businesses collect data effectively, automate tasks, better engage customers, and analyze performance.

It aids users synchronize interaction with enterprises across multiple touchpoints and make sure everything runs fluently in their acquisition processes. 
   
The instrument's advantages are as follows: it guarantees a steady customer experience by delivering personalized messages across channels, automatizes workflows via rationalizing marketing targets, ensures real-time adapting thanks to replying quickly to customer performance for a more appealing interplay. Finally, it aids in implementing data-driven optimization by using insights to refine strategies and improve campaign effectiveness.  
  
Using Customer Journeys permits to 
  
•    produce journeys using Copilot AI assistance  
•    create a trigger-based journey 
•    apply a Dataverse trigger inside a journey  
•    set a business target and measure progress through a journey 
•    run A/B tests in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys  
•    add email carbon copy recipients to journeys 
•    impersonate journey versions using multiple journey branches  
•    set calm times to prevent messages from sending during unwanted hours  
•    limit the number of messages sent with frequency capping 
•    export customer journey insights into a CSV file 
•    automatically pick the best time to send an email message  
•    manually schedule contacts and email delivery 
•    build and manage customer journey templates
  
Therefore, the Customer Journeys functionality helps businesses automate marketing, improve campaigns, and deliver personalized experiences that yield better results.

Lead management is crucial for businesses to capture, foster, and transmute leads into loyal customers, ensuring a smooth sales pipeline transition. 
  
The apparent gains of this instrument include helping to set the priority for the high-potential leads based on behavior, demographics, and involvement, tracking leads through customizable workflow management, receiving real-time notifications for timely follow-up and engagement with qualified leads, and improving collaboration between sales and marketing teams.

The scroll of the actions the user can perform with the Lead Management tool contains the following:  
  
•    creating, viewing, and managing Lead-Scoring Models in Dynamics 365 
•    visualizing results from your scoring model  
•    lead qualifying 
•    LinkedIn lead generation 
•    lead, task, phone calls, sales activities creating in journeys  
•    building lead and contact matching strategies 
•    keeping automatically generated contacts from confusing users  
•    maintaining lead nurturing workflows, lead handoff to sales teams, lead conversion tracking and automated lead follow-up actions 
  
To generalize, Lead Management helps companies turn leads into customers, boosting revenue and success.

It can be used to organize and execute successful events, including conferences, seminars, webinars, and trade shows. 
  
The obvious pluses of the instrument are the following: strategic event execution to plan events, meet marketing goals and involve audiences, increased audience engagement to design events to captivate attendees and foster meaningful interactions, smooth logistics management, from venue selection to attendee registration, and successful tracking through tracking attendance, demographics, and involvement to assess event effectiveness. 
  
Here is the list of operations the user can implement with the assistance of Event Planning:  
  
•    seamless contact, registration, and attendance management in one system 
•    session, session track, and speaker managing  
•    attendee passes to afford access to certain sessions or tracks managing  
•    venue managing for tracking buildings, rooms, and room layouts 
•    guest logistics for checking in hotels, room allocation, and reservations implementing; sponsors and their sponsorships for each event tracking  
•    Microsoft Teams webinars and live events creating 
•    sponsors and their sponsorships tracking 
•    Dynamics 365 Customer Voice surveys for event feedback and analysis integrating 
•    attendance history of each contact, involving events and sessions attended reviewing. 
  
As a result, Event Planning gives businesses the possibility to manage their event strategy productively, from start to finish.

This tool is only available in Outbound Marketing. It is crucial for modern enterprises to set up a sturdy online presence and productively interact with their audience. 
  
The profits of Social Media Posting involve the following: boosted visibility through regular social media posts, which increases a brand's visibility, ensuring that the audience sees the company’s content and remains engaged with its brand, increased audience attraction due to engaging social media posts that prompt likes, comments, and shares, fostering interaction and strengthening connections with the audience, increased brand recognition through the activity on social media, and multiplied traffic generation, thanks to compelling social media content.  
  
Here is what the utilizer can do with this tool: 
  
•    schedule and post messages  
•    edit, reschedule, or cancel posts  
•    integrate with LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms  
•    create LinkedIn Matched Audiences from Dynamics 365 segments  
•    post updates directly from Customer Insights – Journeys to LinkedIn 
•    enable lead sync from LinkedIn to Customer Insights – Journeys 
•    analyze leads and lead performance  
•    see the sync status for LinkedIn data  
•    view and create time-based items with the marketing calendar 
•    monitor social media engagement metrics  
•    track click-through rates for posted links 
•    generate reports on social media campaign performance 
•    identify trends and insights from social media data 
•    optimize posting schedules based on audience behavior and engagement patterns 
  
So, using this instrument allows scheduling posts, tracking performance, and improving strategies.

Accessing and interpreting analytics in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys is vital for companies to gather utility insights into their marketing struggles and client behavior, which potentiates informed decision-making and optimization of marketing strategies. 
  
The benefits of the tool can be presented so: access to actionable insights from analytics data, cross-journey analytics, aiding in identifying trends across campaigns, assisting in evaluating marketing efforts in real-time, adjusting strategies for better results, real-time visualization, and providing interactive data analysis. 
  
The actions that can be performed with the help of the Marketing Analytics instrument look like this:  
  
•    Customer Insights – Journeys analytics  
•    contact, lead, and email insights  
•    journey operational, aggregate cross-journey, aggregate channel, and marketing effectiveness analytics  
•    measure marketing effectiveness using UTM codes  
•    utilize marketing analytics templates and sample reports for Power BI 
•    track customer engagement across multiple channels  
•    analyze customer behavior to optimize marketing strategies  
•    identify trends and patterns in customer interactions  
•    monitor campaign performance in real time  
•    evaluate the impact of marketing efforts on lead generation and conversion  
•    collect actionable insights to drive data-driven decision-making 
•    implement A/B testing to accomplish marketing strategies 
Shortly speaking, the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys equips marketers with actionable insights from advanced analytics. Besides, the system enables data-driven decisions and boosts campaign performance for business growth.

Copilot in Customer Insights – Journeys transforms marketing journey creation with AI, making it accessible and instinctive for marketers of all levels through its simplified and intuitive interface and everyday language interpretation. 
  
Its advantages include, firstly, increased targeting accuracy as Copilot's Query Assist translates language into segment queries, ensuring accurate audience targeting, which helps campaigns reach the right audience with customized messages. Secondly, they include reinforced journey creation thanks to the use of AI that speeds up journey planning by suggesting actions based on goals, making campaign mapping easier. And thirdly, they contain smart content generation via generating email content based on AI, which saves time and encourages creative automation, allowing marketers to focus on strategy and strengthening campaign impact.  
  
The operations Copilot assists to implement are the following:  
  
•    targeting the right customers using query assist 
•    creating journeys using AI assistance 
•    using AI to kickstart email creation 
•    supplying smart image recommendations 
•    refreshing and perfecting messages  
•    styling emails with AI-assisted themes  
•    automatically optimizing email subject lines for better engagement  
•    recommending personalized email content based on customer behavior  
•    providing suggestions for improving email design and layout  
•    analyzing past email performance to inform future content creation  
•    integrating with third-party AI tools for advanced data analysis 
•    predicting customer preferences and interests to customize email campaigns; identifying potential email deliverability issues and provide solutions  
•    offering real-time insights into email campaign performance for quick optimization 
  
Thus, Copilot improves journey creation, personalizes campaigns and increases targeting accuracy. With Copilot AI assistance, marketers execute effective strategies confidently, driving better results and business growth.

All of the above tools in various combinations have been successfully used in the company’s projects. There is a project for illustrative examples below. 
  
An automotive company from Germany 
  
A German automotive company asked for our help to improve their marketing performance with Dynamics 365. They needed a Subscription Center, customer segments, and lead generation forms. They also wanted integration with Germany's main company database, lead scoring, opportunity management customization, and social media integration to boost efficiency and customer engagement for business growth. 
  
Based on this request, the UDS team implemented the following functionalities:  
  
•    Customer Segmentation: customer segments were created and implemented (static and dynamics) based on demographics, behaviors, and other criteria (using marketing/subscription lists).  
•    Email Marketing: email marketing campaigns were designed and executed, and personalized emails based on customer data and behavior were created.  
•    Marketing Forms: forms and form templates for lead generation and externally hosted forms were built and customized.  
•    Social Media Management: content on social media platforms was scheduled and published, and social media engagement was analyzed.  
•    Lead Management: leads were captured, tracked, and managed through the sales funnel. And lead scoring was implemented (the custom lead score model and the predictive lead scoring were applied). 
•    Customer Journey Automation: customer journeys and workflows were designed and automated with triggered actions based on customer interactions. Real-time journeys were used. 
•    Analytics and Reporting: real-time analytics and returning to campaign performance were provided using Power BI reports and dashboards.  
•    Collaboration and Communication: collaboration among marketing teams was facilitated using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint and integrated with Teams for real-time notes during client calls.  
•    Integration with Clarity, Hotjar, and Google Analytics: Clarity, Hotjar, and Google Analytics were integrated to control user behavior.  
•    Customer Insights: insights into customer behavior and preferences were collected.  
•    Dynamic Content: dynamic content adapted to the customer preferences and behavior was successfully implemented.  
•    Subscription Center: a subscription center with integrated subscription management forms was set up. 
  
Thanks to the UDS team operating, the customer received: 
   
•    Enhanced marketing efficiency: email campaign creation time reduced significantly, boosting marketing productivity.  
•    Increased lead generation due to using marketing forms: the number of new leads generated from marketing forms was increased more than 4 times and saw a substantial 4.5-fold increase, enhancing the client's ability to attract potential customers effectively.  
•    Complete competitor product insights: the customized solution enabled the client to analyze competitor products and productivity.  
•    Streamlined SMM: a systematic process for creating and posting content across multiple platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram were established, improving content planning and management as per the marketing calendar.

Here are a few practical tips for implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys in marketing strategies:  
   
•    Set clear goals for your marketing using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys.   
•    Collect necessary data from various sources to build your marketing strategies effectively.   
•    Segment your audience for targeted campaigns using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.   
•    Design your customer journeys.   
•    Try out A/B testing to improve campaign performance rooted on insights.  
•    Connect the data and systems smoothly for centralized information and refined collaboration.   
•    Personalize the content by using what you know about the customers.   
•    Regulate and analyze the campaign performance using analytics instruments.   
•    Keep changing and improving your marketing plans based on insights from the analytics and feedback.  
   
By following these simple tips, you can prosperously implement Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys in your marketing strategies and considerably increase your business indexes.  

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys offer a powerful kit of instruments for elevating your marketing strategy, including customer segmentation, email marketing, lead management, event planning, social media posting, marketing analytics, and AI assistance. This toolkit will permit your company to drive growth and deliver exceptional customer experiences.  
  
Moreover, you can contact the representatives of our company any time and get detailed advice on any issue you are interested in. 
  
You can see the webinar on this topic by following the link: Empower Your Marketing Strategy with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Journeys