A leading brand of professional services, PwC, reports that despite many companies making significant investments in gaining and retaining customers, only 51% of them are actually building a coherent marketing strategy. While building such a strategy can be a complex endeavor, it is worth the effort, as an effective strategy imminently leads to a boost in sales through increasing brand awareness, while attracting new customers, and generating leads. Read this article to learn how powerful solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights can assist companies in building marketing strategies.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and its key features
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a powerful customer data platform that can be integrated with other CRM and ERP applications from Microsoft. This particular solution focuses on analyzing customer-related data and facilitating the creation of effective and personalized experiences, providing the following features and functionality:
1. Data processing
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights can connect with numerous data sources, including social media platforms, mobile apps, CRM systems, and websites, centralizing data on a single platform. Due to powerful tools for data preprocessing, users of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights can apply advanced cleansing techniques to integrated data, ensuring its accuracy. Furthermore, the system can enrich integrated data with additional information, including purchasing behavior or demographics.
2. Customer analysis
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights supports data-driven decision-making for creating effective marketing strategies through real-time analytics, visualizations, and several other useful features. These include customer segmentation based on machine learning algorithms, allowing the grouping of customers based on their similarities such as preferences or characteristics. Customer journey mapping is another useful feature that helps visualize customer interactions with the brand and identify potential issues and touchpoints.
3. Creating personalized experiences
The detailed customer study supported by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables a deeper market understanding, helping companies create more personalized experiences for stronger emotional connections. This enhances marketing strategies, making efforts and investments more effective.
4. Enforcing data accessibility
Effective marketing campaigns do not work without delivering content easily accessible to different customers. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps brands ensure content is accessible to its recipients by aligning it with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The platform also provides an accessibility checker.
5. Compliance with legal requirements
Working with customer data involves a lot of sensitive information, which needs adequate protection. Processing such data directly without utilizing a dedicated platform like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights requires enforcing data security methods, which is usually a rather complex task. Meanwhile, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is already equipped with solutions that help companies comply with legal requirements. These include:
- Consent management for data collection and processing, and policies on fulfilling requests for opting out or data deletion;
- Data governance features for defining rules on data masking, data classification, and data retention compliant with industry regulations;
- Microsoft Azure security capabilities such as authentication, encryption, and auditing for maximum protection of confidential data against unauthorized access.
Improving Marketing Strategies with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
As illustrated above, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights has rich functionality that helps companies understand their customers better and build more cost-effective marketing strategies. As a result, brands are creating more relevant and engaging content based on the individual preferences and expectations of their customers, and sending it on time through the optimal channel, such as a push notification, email, or text message.
At the same time, the success of campaigns can be effectively measured through the analytical tools included in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, which monitor the opening of messages, clicking the links they contain, as well as the following conversions and feedback.
Which Companies Can Benefit from Implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights?
Enterprises of different sizes and from various industries can find value in this customer data platform. Examples include e-commerce, retail, banking, healthcare, education, hospitality, and travel. In fact, it is not the industry that should determine whether Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is needed but the market approach adapted by an enterprise.
Below are the features of a company that will find this solution particularly useful:
- Customer-centric focus, prioritizing customer loyalty, and satisfaction, aiming to increase retention;
- Preference for leveraging data for strategic decisions;
- Engagement in complex customer interactions handled through numerous channels and a large volume of transactions;
- Diverse product or service portfolio or high customization;
- Interest in providing personalized experience to customers;
- Search for marketing and sales optimization possibilities;
- Continuous improvement mindset;
- Global or large-scale operations.
Additionally, this solution is highly recommended for companies operating in industries with strict regulatory compliance requirements.
Bottom line
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offers companies a holistic solution for marketing challenges. With its help, enterprises can unlock the full potential of their customer data, which is one of the best sources of knowledge for building cost-effective marketing strategies and campaigns.
