My last post focused on optimizing email campaigns with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. In this post I will focus leveraging Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to know your audience and communicate to them personally.
Know Your Audience
Today’s consumers expect a more personalized experience with your organization. 74% of marketers agree that targeted messages and personalization of emails and text messages improves consumer engagement rates. Think about the impact a simple email or text including the consumer’s name and content tailored to their needs can have.
For example, a customer who has just purchased a new home might be more responsive to an email congratulating them and providing them with information on home and gardening events in their area. An automotive customer who has scheduled a vehicle repair might appreciate a customized appointment reminder with an embedded link to wayfinding, to make their appointment on time.
Statistics support this notion. Personalized promotional emails have been shown to have a 29% higher unique open rate and 41% higher unique click rates than non-personalized mailings. To compete for your consumer’s attention and stand out from your competition, it will pay to ensure your emails are hitting the right target audience with the right messaging.
The challenge is turning unknown prospects into customers and delivering this personalization at scale via email and text. Dynamics 365 offers tools like marketing landing pages that enable you to track and identify how a consumer is interacting with your site. The data is captured in your Dynamics 365 Marketing database, which can then be used to create richly segmented consumer journeys. For example, if a consumer spends 10 minutes browsing a product or service, Dynamics 365 Marketing can track this engagement. Enabling you to send the customer through a journey that is tailored for that product or service.
In addition, Dynamics 365 Marketing offers innovative, dynamic content-generation tools that enable you to create tailored email, text, and landing pages specific to your consumer. Delivering the right message at the right time is also important. Dynamics 365 also offers the ability to schedule when an email or text is sent and can be based on specific user action, such as a visitor who browsed a certain product or service on your website.
Finally, many organizations leverage enterprise consumer experience platforms like Sitecore or Adobe for their web and mobile experience. Dynamics 365 Marketing can receive website behavioral data from your enterprise consumer experience platform to help identify a consumer and further personalize the journey.
Studies indicate that this ability to segment emails and texts, and individualize campaign messaging, are considered the most effective personalization tactics for 51% and 50% of marketing influencers, respectively.
Best Practice
Personalized content is important, but the value can be degraded if the branding and theme isn’t consistent across the journey. Leverage content blocks to ensure common areas such as the headers and footers of your email templates, landing pages, and any linked content is consistent. Leveraging reusable content blocks in your templates will also allow you to more easily manage branding changes and remain consistent throughout the consumer journey.
