Dynamics 365 Customer Insights: an intelligent marketing orchestration platform
What is Dynamics 365 Customer Insights?
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is the module of Marketing automation of the Microsoft ecosystem. Beyond being an emailing tool, it is a tool designed to orchestrate the entire cycle: attracting, engaging, qualifying and transmitting leads.
The platform covers all interaction channels: email, SMS, events, web, social networks. Each interaction feeds a unique database (thanks to Microsoft's Cloud Dataverse architecture) that automatically qualifies your prospects via a behavioral scoring.
Mature leads then naturally switch to Dynamics 365 Sales, without breaking or re-entering information to transform prospects into business opportunities. This cloud marketing platform also guarantees the native RGPD compliance of your marketing automation with consent management and automatic respect for contact preferences.
The profiles that get the most value from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Of course, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is used by marketing teams to attract, qualify, and convert. Depending on the missions and the role of each person, the tool is adapted to find information useful to everyone:
- Marketing managers and CMOs manage their multi-channel campaigns and accurately measure the ROI of each action.
- The marketing ops create sophisticated automated paths and refine segmentation without a line of code.
- Event teams manage their webinars and physical events from end to end, from automatic participant scoring to personalized follow-up paths.
But the Marketing module goes beyond the needs of marketing teams:
- For the sales teams : the marketing module allows you to receive qualified leads accompanied by all the engagement history: pages visited, content downloaded, qualification score.
- For the DSI : data governance and GDPR compliance are facilitated through native integration with the information system.
Thus, a marketing manager can create an automated customer journey that detects the most engaged prospects. Those who have downloaded two white papers and participated in a webinar for example. These qualified contacts automatically switch to sales representatives with a score of 85/100 and their complete history.
Key features of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Creation and orchestration of multi-channel customer journeys
The Customer Journey Builder allows you to design personalized and scalable marketing experiences. You can manage your marketing campaigns across all channels (email, SMS, push notifications, social ads, events) with smart triggers based on:
- Behavior such as a click or a visit to the website,
- Demographics,
- Business events such as birthdays or contract renewals.
The integration of A/B tests continuously optimizes your performance both in terms of the message addressed and on the routes.
For example, you can create a journey for a prospect who, when they download a white paper on digital transformation, enters a nurturing journey dedicated to B2B leads. 3 weeks later, they will receive more advanced content such as a blog article, a case study or a demo invitation, depending on their level of engagement.
Lead scoring and automatic qualification
The automatic lead scoring qualifies your prospects according to two dimensions:
- The behavioral scoring which awards points according to actions: site visit, content download, webinar participation, email opening.
- The demographic scoring which weighs according to the profile: sector, company size, function, budget.
This scoring acts in a way like a thermometer that measures the temperature of the engagement of prospects. You can set up a threshold at which the lead is considered qualified. So as soon as a prospect reaches the threshold set to become Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), it automatically switches to the Sales module with all its history. On the other hand, if his commitment decreases, he falls back into nurturing.
For example, you define that a lead becomes an MQL at 85 points. A prospect visits your site (+10 points in your scoring), he downloads a white paper (+25 points) and participates in one of your webinars (+50 points). With this last action, he passes the defined threshold and automatically appears in the sales pipeline with the complete history of his journey.
This system eliminates leads sent to the sales team too early, which are usually a source of frustration and friction between teams.
Complete management of events and webinars
Event Marketing module orchestrate your physical and virtual events from end to end in a single tool:
- Managing registrations with landing pages, forms and possibly payments
- Pre-/post-event communication with invitation, reminder and follow-up emails
- For virtual events: integrating the webinar with a Teams or Zoom connection in particular
- For physical events: check-in and badges
The real advantage? The follow-up of the commitment which automatically scores participants according to their involvement. A post-event nurturing process is then adapted to the level of commitment: very active participants towards commercial contact, the others towards maturing content. Thanks to these paths, each event becomes a generator of qualified leads.
Advanced segmentation and precise targeting
Advanced marketing segmentation creates ultra-precise audiences that are updated automatically according to your criteria. To best target, you combine demographic, behavioral and transactional criteria through the connection with the Business Central module.
Exclusion segments protect your reputation by keeping out existing customers, competitors, or recently solicited prospects. It is also possible to create segments for A/B testing to improve your performance.
Here again, the RGPD rules are respected. Segmentation takes into account the consent and contact preferences of the people who enter the segments.
For example, you can create an ultra-targeted campaign for IT directors in the industry working in companies with 100 to 500 employees and who have uploaded content to Azure in the last three months and whose score is less than 50 points and who have not been contacted for 30 days.
Thanks to the Marketing module you talk to the right prospect, with the right message and at the right time.
ROI measurement and marketing attribution
Native dashboards automatically display performance in real time: opening rate, leads generated, conversion rate.
Multitouch attribution reveals which campaigns and content contributed to each business opportunity. You calculate the ROI per campaign by crossing the cost invested on the campaigns and the turnover generated to highlight the contribution of marketing to the company's turnover. And at the marketing team level, you know what worked to allocate your budget to high-impact actions.
For example, if an email campaign cost €5,000 and generates 150 MQLs, including 12 opportunities for €300,000 in sales. The ROI is x60. These objective data transform the marketing budget into a measurable investment.
To go further in performance analysis, the integration of the marketing module with Power BI allows personalized advanced analyses and data visualization.
GDPR compliance and consent management
Marketing natively integrates GDPR compliance with:
- Consent management thanks to double opt-in and the possibility to unsubscribe
- The preference center for contacts who can manage their choices themselves
The tool automatically keeps track of consents and changes. The courses only contact people who have consented, with the possibility of hosting data in Europe. Thus, the Marketing module guarantees compliance without sacrificing performance.
The concrete business benefits of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Improving the quality and speed of leads
The Marketing module improves lead generation performance thanks in particular to scoring, which eliminates curious people with no real purchase intention. Your salespeople receive leads sent at the peak of their engagement, already aware of your offer.
Businesses that deploy effective marketing automation notice a 77% improvement in lead conversion rate according to a study by Firework. This is possible thanks to the qualification of leads and the reduction of sales cycle time thanks to better knowledge of leads.
Aligning marketing and sales around common goals
The eternal marketing/sales conflict is being resolved. The two teams can define together the MQL qualification criteria. Visibility becomes shared: salespeople see the marketing history of each lead, marketing tracks the future of its leads in the pipeline and any requests to the customer support.
A loop of Feedback is established naturally to refine the scoring. Thanks to Dataverse, the sales and marketing team work on a single database, which allows for a single version of the truth, shared KPIs on the marketing contribution to turnover and a seamless customer journey that even goes up toField intervention if needed.
With the Marketing and Sales modules, teams can work together rather than in silos and thus gain more efficiency on the conversion rate. Operationally, you can set a goal for the marketing department to generate X MQLs per month and set a 24-hour deadline for Sales to contact these leads.
Gain operational efficiency and scalability
Automation frees your teams from repetitive tasks and personalizes your messages at scale for thousands of contacts. Teams no longer have to manually send messages and follow up on Excel.
The cost per lead decreases mechanically: thanks to automation, you generate more leads with the same resources. It also makes it easier to set up tests and optimizations thanks to the time saved. Organizations that automate reduce The cost of acquiring qualified leads while increasing their generation volume.
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How do you successfully deploy Dynamics 365 Customer Insights?
Audit your marketing processes and define your qualification strategy
Success starts with strategic framework.
You need to:
- Identify your existing customer journey with its contact points and content,
- Define your MQL precisely: what are the demographic and behavioral criteria that leads must meet,
- Map your personas and their buying journey,
- Map your existing marketing content and the gaps that need to be filled.
From these elements, you can define your qualification strategy and define the KPIs associated successes.
Chez Askware, we conduct this marketing audit by combining strategic vision and technical feasibility. Our dual expertise ensures that your strategy will be translated effectively into the platform. Deploying Marketing without a qualification strategy defined beforehand means taking the risk of digitally reproducing the existing disorder.
Set up and personalize according to your customer journeys
Marketing is configured to reflect your specificities:
- Scoring with points per action and qualification thresholds,
- Typical paths for the nurturing of cold leads, for the acceleration of hot leads or even the onboarding of customers,
- Forms and landing pages in your brand colors and with the fields you need.
In addition to configuring the Marketing module, integrations exist to link with your tools (website, CMS, events, telephony). You can go further by uniting customer data to create engaging experiences using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
The ideal is to focus on standard settings before considering custom development. 365 Marketing covers 90% of needs without heavy customization. Power Automate completes the device for advanced flows.
The Askware team configures Marketing to reflect your real customer journeys by balancing functional power and ease of use so that the tool adapts to your strategy and not the other way around.
Integrate Marketing Dynamics 365 with your website and digital tools
Marketing needs to connect to your digital ecosystem to capture every interaction and be fully operational.
- Tracking website visits via tracking pixel records the pages viewed and feeds the scoring.
- Forms integrated on your site capture contacts directly.
- LinkedIn sync automatically enriches your profiles (if Sales Navigator is activated).
- Connections to Teams, Zoom, and other platforms unify webinar management.
This connectivity eliminates disconnected marketing automation: without visibility on web behavior, it is impossible to score precisely.
The Power Platform can also extend the capabilities of Dynamics 365 for complete transformation.
Train teams and drive adoption
Like any new tool, its adoption is crucial. For this, several actions must be carried out.
First of all, it is necessary to put in place a policy of Change Management to explain the concrete benefits and involve users in the configuration.
Training should be designed for marketers creating campaigns, marketing ops setting up complex journeys, and administrators managing the system. Identify internal champions to accelerate ownership and provide support for the first uses.
One gradual deployment limit risks: start with one or two pilot courses, measure and adjust before generalizing. Adoption can be monitored using concrete indicators such as the number of active paths, the engagement rate or the quality of leads.
At Askware, we support your teams in initial management and continuous optimization, beyond technical deployment.
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Dynamics 365 Customer Insights orchestrate your customer journeys, automatically qualifies your leads and precisely measures your contribution to turnover. Success depends as much on the strategic framework as on the technology itself.
Askware supports you at every stage: auditing your marketing processes, defining your qualification strategy, configuring paths and scoring, integrating with Sales CRM from the Marketing module and your digital ecosystem, team training and continuous optimization. Our dual expertise in consultancy and integration ensures that your investment generates measurable results.
Ready to transform your lead generation with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights? Talk to our experts to find out how to optimize your marketing processes and align your teams around common goals.
