Level up customer journeys with advanced orchestration features in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Marketers design customer journeys to provide the right message at the right time for customers to take the next step. However, with customers playing an active role in shaping their own experiences in how they engage with the brand, marketers are faced with the challenge of designing increasingly complex journeys. With more opportunities than ever for interactions, you must take care not to overwhelm customers with unwanted messages. That’s why we’re delighted to introduce advanced real-time marketing orchestration tools in Dynamics 365 Marketing that help you engage customers at key moments without bombarding them with spam.  

Engage the right audience effortlessly with the new segment builder 

Targeting the right audience is critical for creating highly personalized marketing campaigns that yield high conversion rates and improve engagement. Previously, the segment builder in Dynamics 365 Marketing required a deep understanding of database schemas. The new real-time segment builder is marketer-friendly, allowing you to reach customers through segmenting on demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data. 

Here are some of the benefits of the new real-time marketing segment builder:

• It’s powered by Artificial Intelligence. Just describe, in plain English, how you’d like to create the segment, then review and use it.  
• There’s no need to memorize relationships between tables. The builder automatically populates all the possible paths between customer profiles and the selected data table for you. 
• View segment size and membership estimates before publishing.  
• Enjoy a consistent creation experience between static and dynamic segments.
• Include or exclude individual members. 
• Query segments based on their customer data in a consistent manner, without having to worry about which segment type to choose first. 
• Segments refresh frequency can be adjusted after publication. 

Test your journey triggers to provide seamless experiences  

Customers expect consistent and uninterrupted experiences in their interactions with brands. With custom trigger testing, you can simulate a customer’s experience, using yourself as a test subject. You can evaluate the journey based on the attributes defined in the custom trigger to identify and address issues before they affect real customers. 

As an example, imagine a journey triggered when a customer abandons their cart. The journey sends a reminder email with an offer of 30% off if the customer completes the purchase. By testing this trigger using yourself as a contact, you can validate that the journey functions as intended and that the offer is received. This helps with rolling out the campaign to the actual customer base with more confidence and avoids any surprises. 

Boost your productivity when sending journey reminders 

To improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, it’s crucial to remind customers to take action on key tasks such as filling out a registration form or completing a purchase. 

We are introducing enhanced recurring reminders capabilities to streamline the process of moving customers down the funnel. The reminder feature allows sending emails, text messages, and push notifications to increase engagement chances, instead of simply repeating the same marketing messages on the same channels. You can even set the number of repetitions or a time limit to make sure that messages aren’t sent indefinitely.  

Track the customer’s exit from the reminder loop, too. By capturing different branches separately, such as cart checked out, cart not checked out, and cart expired, you can target and follow up with each segment appropriately. 

Optimize customer engagement by controlling the number of messages sent 

Consumers are exposed to many messages daily. Additionally, they also sometimes qualify for multiple journeys, receiving multiple messages from the same brand in a brief period. Marketers must be careful not to overwhelm their customers, which can result in lower message engagement rates, increased unsubscribe rates, spam reports, or important messages being missed. With frequency capping, you can optimize engagement by controlling how many messages are sent.  

Frequency capping allows you to define the maximum number of messages your customers receive through a particular channel (email, SMS, push, and custom channels), per day, week, and month. Transactional messages are always excluded, and individual journeys can be left out of the cap so that important messages can be received. You can view whether a message was blocked by the frequency cap and for which users. 

By monitoring engagement rates with marketing messages, you can fine-tune your message frequency. You’ll make sure that you’re striking the right balance between keeping the brand top-of-mind and not overwhelming customers with too many messages. 

Key takeaways about customer journey improvements with advanced real-time marketing orchestration 

Get greater engagement from your customers in 2023 with Dynamics 365 Marketing. Thanks to our advanced marketing orchestration features, you’ll interact with customers on their terms, engaging them when and how they expect, without delivering disjointed experiences or spamming them. You’ll spend less time designing and maintaining your customer journeys and feel more confident that you’re delivering seamless, high-quality experiences. 

Next steps 

Start using our new features and get ready for the ones coming soon:  

• Target the right audience using the new segment builder | Microsoft Learn 
• Test all paths customers take before publishing journeys | Microsoft Learn 
• Send reminders within journeys to drive customer actions | Microsoft Learn 
• Prevent message fatigue with message limits | Microsoft Learn

Consult the release notes to learn more about exciting updates to Dynamics 365 Marketing, including preview and general availability dates.

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