In my last blog post, I introduced our new guide, Improve Consumer Engagement with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. In this post, I will focus on some enhancements Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing provides to email marketing campaigns.
Master the Email Basics
How often do you receive an email with inconsistent spacing, fonts, and other formatting issues? Does it inspire you with confidence when a brand cannot get the basics of sending an email right? Probably not. Sending emails today has become complicated.
There are multiple options for everything: browser types and versions, operating systems, form templates and factors, specialized needs and requirements for mobile, desktop, tablet, as well as emerging technologies like watches and IoT devices. In fact, an estimated 35% of business professionals check email on a mobile device.
Remember the old adage, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression? To ensure your email is opened and increase your chances for engagement, it is imperative to optimize emails for a variety of devices, especially mobile. Emails that display incorrectly on mobile may be deleted within three seconds. Can you afford to lose email subscribers over a poorly designed email template?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing can mitigate that risk with easy-to-create, customizable email templates that are tested for today’s mobile lifestyle. In addition to email templates that will reflect your organization’s branding standards and provide a starting point to help you work more quickly, Dynamics 365 Marketing also contains out-of-the-box tools such as:
- Advanced layouts based on responsive design techniques that help make content look good at any screen size
- A harmonious color palette with a manageable number of colors you can easily adapt to your own organization’s identity
- Tried-and-true designs that have been tested against a wide range of web and email clients to help ensure they will look great everywhere
These capabilities come together to make it simple and easy for you to ensure you are getting the basics right. Keep your templates and emails simple, and to a single topic. Simplicity ensures that your recipients aren’t overwhelmed with irrelevant content. Keeping it simple also helps ensure your emails work across the plethora of form factors and devices your recipients are using.
Light-Up Your Emails With Video
Say your organization recently announced a new product. Would a video with a message from a well-known person be a great way to educate the community? What about a video story from one of the first consumers to benefit from the new product? Using video in your email messages can be tricky, but the results can be well worth it. Product launches and customer stories are effective ways to use video. And, according to Forrester, including video in an email leads to an astonishing 200-300% increase in click-through rates.
Dynamics 365 Marketing allows you to easily add video to your marketing content. You can also leverage other Microsoft tools to quickly snip and edit video content and create templates that help manage when and how video is used in your marketing messages. Additional email performance analysis can then be used to help you analyze open and click-through rates to better understand how your consumers are interacting with the video.
