How to Navigate the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Customer Journey

This blog post is based on a short demo that we recently did featuring Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Journey.

If you’d like to follow along and watch as you read, you can tune in here.

The Customer Journey is where all of the automation happens inside of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.

When you open Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, you will see “Customer Journey” under “Marketing execution” on your left-hand side toolbar.

For this demo, we created a Customer Journey example to show you exactly how it works.

In this example, you will see your automation design by scrolling from left to right.

The first thing you do is start with a segment, and then from this segment of customers, you send them an email.

Next, we look at the trigger to see if they opened our marketing email(s) or not.

If the person completes the trigger, they will proceed down the positive path, indicated by the check mark.

Path 1: Opened Email

Path 2: Didn’t Open Email

You don’t always need a complex journey – many Customer Journeys only have a few components, like a simple email blast.

Inside your D365 Marketing Customer Journey Toolbox, you will see four main areas:

• Content
• Actions
• Targets
• and Flow Control

Targets are the entry point for your journey. We are starting with Segments. Segments are a list of people we are marketing to. The Record Updated target can start someone into this journey when a record is updated inside of your environment (similar to Workflows).

Once you define who you’re marketing to, you want to define what to include in this journey, whether you are sending a marketing email, triggering an event, pushing a marketing form, or something else.

There are also several Actions you can take, like creating an Activity record (i.e. a task for a sales rep to follow-up with the customer) or Creating a Lead based on the interaction and nurturing you’ve been doing.

You can even Launch a Workflow to launch automation within the Customer Journey.

To connect a LinkedIn campaign, you may need help from your system admin or CRM partner. There are many benefits to tying D365 Marketing to LinkedIn, and the Dynamics 365 Marketing LinkedIn integration is excellent.

Flow Control helps you organize the Customer Journey in a logical way to produce the most effective outcomes for your marketing campaigns.

You can have a schedule where you’re sending an email at a specific time of the day. Inside of Dynamics, based on email addresses, you’re collecting information on when they’re opening emails the most frequently.

The technology becomes smarter; therefore, helping you improve your communication timing, and later allowing automated scheduling on a person-by-person basis. The schedule helps you send emails at the time that each individual is most likely to open your marketing emails based on the Scheduler tool.

Like you may have seen in other Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Demos from Ledgeview Partners, the Customer Journey is drag and drop. Once you click on anything in your Toolbox, plus icons will appear on your screen and show you where you can place your tools.

The Properties tab will then let you configure your tool.

For this example, we create a “New Activity” that is a task. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing gives you the ability to add information specific to the activity you’ve selected. You can fill in whatever makes the most sense for your business.

Like you may have seen in other D365 Marketing Demos, there is an Insights tab for Customer Journey too. For Customer Journey, once it is executed, you will gather information about your delivery results, responses over time, etc.

All of the information you collect can be used to optimize your Customer Journey and make edits over time.

Unlike this campaign, a Drip Campaign in your D365 Marketing Customer Journey may be a bit more complex, containing multiple wait steps, triggers, and schedules.

Watch the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Customer Journey Demo and more like it via our resource library.

If you would like to learn more about what’s possible with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing for your organization, contact us to request a personal demo.