Introducing Dynamics 365 for Marketing as part of the Dynamics 365 Business Edition Release

Dynamics 365 for Marketing is a new module in the widely anticipated Dynamics 365 Business Edition. This new module is targeting small and medium size businesses looking to implement Dynamics 365 Marketing Capabilities while Enterprise / Large organisations are advised to opt for the Dynamics 365 Adobe Marketing Suite instead.

The Business Edition Marketing module is built on the Dynamics 365 CRM Platform allowing for a number of advanced configuration and customisation features available in the powerful Dynamics CRM platform. Although this is a brand new module (i.e. not an incremental release), it does seem to come with a large number of advanced features that you wouldn’t normally expect from a first release application.

According to the publicly available Dynamics Roadmap, Dynamics 365 for Marketing first release will include the following features:

• Customer Journey
• Email Marketing
• Event Management
• Lead Management (Generation, Nurturing, Lifecycle, Scoring, Prioritization and Insights )
• Marketing Analysers with Power BI
• Marketing Pages
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Connector for LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

You can see full details of each feature at the Dynamics Roadmap here:

https://roadmap.dynamics.com/#edition=1#application=a9ab9157-e42a-e711-810d-3863bb363e80

The Customer Journey feature is about the orchestration of the customer journey to allow marketers to create multi-step, multi-channel marketing campaigns. The feature capabilities according to the Roadmap include:

• Simple drag and drop design
• View and edit marketing content in one place
• Embedded content designers
• Event driven extensible automation
• In place insights
• Easy visualisation of journeys

The Customer Journey feature seem to be built based on the same designer used in Business Rules. Here is a screenshot of how it looks like:

Dynamics 365 for Marketing allows for the creation and managing of Professional Marketing Emails and Email Campaigns. This includes the following features:

• Simple, no-code drag and drop content designer
• Many professional email templates ready to reuse
• Basic and Inbox email previews
• HTML Editor to edit the entire email content with no restrictions
• Complete performance results and Insights for emails sent
• Ability to use data from Dynamics 365 entities in emails, also including custom entities
• Heatmap, geographical location maps and other advanced visualizations of email results

Personally, I’m really looking forward to it. Just not sure I have enough hours in my week to allow me to learn all these new modules and enhancements frequently released into the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform.