While we may not have adequate measurement, one of the lasting repercussions of shutdowns, closings, quarantines, and widespread work-from-homes due to the pandemic will be to propel a shift toward a B2C-type experience within B2B impacting how customers expect to be understood and communicated with. It will also compel chief marketing officers (CMO) and marketing operations leaders to re-examine the value proposition offered to their customers and demonstrate how agile they can be in responding to deep, widespread changes in their selling environments.

CMOs: success requires reinvention

A recent Forrester report examining the concerns of European business and technology leaders underscores the need for CMOs to increase their focus on customers—ensuring that the customer experience is always at the core of leadership, strategy, and operations. Reinvention of marketing leaders’ roles, their teams, and marketing functions will be the theme for successful CMOs in 2021.

The pandemic conditions that disrupted normal marketing and sales created disjointed customer experiences that translated into lost customers and decreased revenue. The challenge ahead is to utilize and optimize new ways to discover, nurture, and gain long-term loyalty from customers.

Forrester states that CMOs will re-emphasize customer loyalty and the programs that strengthen it. The study also predicts that the spend on loyalty and retention marketing will increase by 30 percent in 2021.

30 percent increase in loyalty and retention marketing spending in 2021—Forrester Predictions 2021

Move confidently in an unsettled environment

The competitive advantage will go to marketing organizations that can quickly address the new realities and implement solutions that succeed both now and throughout the settling process that will occur in this unsettled environment. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, in concert with other Microsoft Dynamics 365 products and Microsoft Teams, offers powerful but easy-to-use technology to achieve:

• Greater personalization
• Optimized virtual events

Both capabilities are improving the ability of the New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) agency to help New Zealand businesses compete around the globe.

An island nation extends its business reach

NZTE is a government agency with a mission to spur trade and help grow the island nation’s economy. The agency works across 50 countries and currently works with more than 6,000 businesses across all industries, ranging from food producers, tech startups, service providers, and manufacturers.

“By using the Dynamics 365 Marketing event management feature, we created a better customer experience and personalized the interactions, resulting in a 400 percent increase in engagement.”—Jonathan Southee, Director Digital Delivery, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise

Deeper understanding for greater personalization

Data is the key to a deeper understanding. NZTE is using Dynamics 365 Marketing for email communications, campaigns, and a host of other marketing activities. The agency takes advantage of the Dynamics 365 common platform to make sure its data is fully utilized across Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service applications. This data is the foundation for the design of orchestrated customer journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing that help guide the customer and continually strengthen business relationships.

Dynamics 365 Marketing also extends the usefulness of customer data through integrated analytics. An organization such as NTZE can set the business goals for journeys and measure the progress toward those goals. Built-in analytics dashboards provide cross-journey insights and companies provide the ability to monitor customer journeys and channel KPIs in real time. To help organizations respond to changing circumstances during a campaign, Dynamics 365 Marketing provides customizable out- of-the-box templates to target segments and content to get the word out quickly.

In a period when many analysts, including Deloitte, raise concerns about uncertainties in CMO budgets, Dynamics 365 has also helped NZTE reduce operational costs. By consolidating its marketing, sales, event management, and other tools, NZTE has fewer systems to license and maintain. In fact, it allowed the agency to reduce the number of systems it supports to only one, reducing its overall licensing bill by NZD50,000.

Greater results from events

NTZE, including its regional teams, holds more than 300 events a year. In order to optimize how it runs events and utilize the data involved, it began using the Dynamics 365 Marketing event management capabilities. They created a customer-facing, web-based portal that synchs with its Dynamics 365 apps. Through myNZTE, customers can learn about and choose events they want to attend, register online, and access a wide variety of content. Jonathan Southlee, Director Digital Delivery for NTZE, observes that, “Our customers highly value our events, and it’s critical that we provide them with the best experience possible because events can lead directly to trade deals.”

CMOs: focus on customer loyalty

Building and strengthening customer relationships is imperative to a marketing organization’s success, especially in an environment where the customer base is dispersed and often distracted. Gartner reports that loyalty will be a key factor: 79 percent of CMOs surveyed will look to existing customers to fuel growth in a post-Covid-19 environment. Deeper customer understanding, customer journeys that reflect that understanding, and bringing people together without person-to-person interactions are essential to achieving that goal.

Learn more

• Gain an overview into Dynamics 365 Marketing and other products in Dynamics 365.
• Explore additional business continuity solutions and resources from Microsoft.
• Contact your Microsoft sales representative or our sales team.
• Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The post Changing the customer experience for better customer connections appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

With the global disruption of the pandemic, healthcare organizations are particularly challenged to promote telehealth services and engage patients and providers while adhering to strict compliance and security regulations. Marketing automation and customer data platform (CDP) tools such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights are expanding the ways in which healthcare organizations can create communications that are personalized and relevant while respecting those regulations.

A centralized system must be secure and speedy

Sharing information across its health network is at the center of Healthdirect Australia’s mission. The nonprofit helps a population of more than 25 million Australians access the right healthcare at the right time by providing government-funded telehealth services through helplines, video calls, an online symptom checker, and a mobile app. It also delivers information to other health organizations about benefits for their customers, including service enhancements, product launches, and other advances.

To build a reliable and flexible engagement platform that could distribute information while maintaining data privacy, Healthdirect Australia chose to move to Dynamics 365 Marketing.

“We needed a centralized system to help us improve consistency and remove the risk of content duplication,” said James Harris, Marketing Manager of Healthdirect Australia. With that system now in place, the organization is further extending its value, as Dynamics 365 Marketing is being used to increase productivity by bringing Healthdirect Australia’s data together in one place. 

“Before using Dynamics 365 Marketing, we couldn’t adequately scale our communications,” says Harris. “Now, we can scale as required to share information and quickly provide Primary Health Networks with the latest messaging about our services. Our speed of delivery has gone from weeks to days [and] we’re able to get our message out to the right contacts much more quickly than we could before. When COVID-19 hit, we used Dynamics 365 Marketing to communicate with the Primary Health Networks, which then distributed that information to health workers on the front line.”

One industry, many concerns

The complexities, dynamics, and regulatory concerns of healthcare organizations are increasingly finding solutions in powerful marketing automation and CDP products.

Microsoft is moving quickly and strongly to meet the demands and requirements of healthcare’s fast-tracked transition to digital. Although many organizations were focused on digital transformation even before the global health crisis of 2020, the pandemic drove rapid innovation from solution providers. Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights increased their focus on the unique needs of healthcare in extraordinary circumstances.

Perhaps the most impact will come from Microsoft’s first industry-specific cloud offering, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. This initiative will enhance patient engagement, empower health team collaboration, improve clinical and operational insights, and make it faster and easier to provide more efficient care. Significantly, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is designed with the regulatory guidelines that healthcare is bound by in mind. It helps ensure the end-to-end security, compliance, and interoperability of health data. 

Commitment to compliance

Whenever an organization is dealing with people’s healthcare information, security and compliance are top-of-mind concerns. Those organizations should know that Dynamics 365 Marketing helps them meet HIPAA-compliance at the highest level. Microsoft Dynamics 365, along with other Dynamics 365 apps and Microsoft solutions, has received certification for the HITRUST CSF as Microsoft is one of the first hyperscale cloud service providers to receive this certification.

At the company level, this means one large concern is a checked box.

“Because Microsoft helps keep Dynamics 365 Marketing compliant with data protection standards in the Australian Government Information Security Manual, we have complete peace of mind that its data security meets our requirements.”—Paul Noone, Office 365 Administrator and Developer, Healthdirect Australia

Stop the siloing: information-sharing made secure

Complying with patient record confidentiality while striving for more personalized in-patient communications is a key challenge of the digital transformation of healthcare, due to the sensitivity of the personal information being handled, including patient demographics and medical histories.

Like many healthcare providers, Dayton Children’s Hospital in Dayton, Ohio used a siloed approach, storing clinical information in one system, managing call logs in another, and handling web registrations and marketing contacts in another.

However, the separation of information hampered both the care teams and the marketing team. Dayton Children’s Hospital decided to address the situation using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to close the gap and establish a scalable, highly-secure, and HIPAA-compliant data foundation that spanned both clinical and marketing information.

Now, the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights foundation allows the marketing team to easily create new dynamic segments based on patient age, guarantor’s address, and other relevant personal activity information such as sports-related injuries. Those segments can then be pushed to Dynamics 365 Marketing for marketing campaigns.

As a result, Dayton Children’s Hospital has gained the ability to give its marketing campaigns the information to create personalized messaging while being fully confident of its HIPAA compliance: a closed-loop marketing process between Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

A successful healthcare organization has information management challenges as part of its ongoing operations. Optimizing all its information to communicate and serve patients while providing safeguards for privacy is a delicate balance that is readily achievable using Dynamics 365.

Learn more

• Gain an overview into Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Explore additional business continuity solutions and resources from Microsoft.
• Contact your Microsoft sales representative or our sales team.
• Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The post How healthcare organizations can share information securely appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

When building a marketing technology (MarTech) stack, both the best-in-breed and single vendor approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. Today’s business realities has marketing operations teams and business leaders re-examining the best way to get necessary tasks accomplished: “one-for-each” or “one-for-all”.

A changing landscape

Digital transformation is driving marketing leaders to make decisions between two competing approaches to building a marketing technology stack. On one side is best-of-breed, defined by Technopedia as “the best system in its referenced niche or category. Although it performs specialized functions better than an integrated system, this type of system is limited by its specialty area.” That second sentence contains the key appeal of best-of-breed (BoB), the belief that selecting individual vendors for essential functions delivers better performance than an integrated system. Many companies have bought into that view.

A survey of more than 300 marketing, sales, and advertising professionals by business-to-business (B2B) marketing agency Walker Sands reports that the best-of-breed strategy has been gaining popularity over the last decade and commands more than 40 percent of their respondents’ marketing stack. That tilt is in some ways caused by the BoB message that single-vendor solutions do not offer superior quality apps—an assertion that is now being challenged.

The single-vendor solution

Today’s integrated enterprise solution is focused on the capabilities and usability of its apps, as well as the advantages of choosing a single vendor. Usually offered as a comprehensive, integrated software suite that uses one data mart, this approach provides the implementation, operational, and training advantages of single-source integration as well as features and capabilities of specific products that are competitive with a BoB offering. The question of whether the ease of use, capabilities, and business value of its individual products can equal the value of their best-of-breed counterparts is the key consideration when deciding which path to follow.

The power of the single-vendor shared platform

TPC Logistica Inteligente (TPC), one of the main logistics operators in Brazil, depends on a complex corporate sales process with cycles that last on average eight months and involve several areas of customers. When the company’s main need was the implementation of a robust customer relationship management (CRM) tool, after a detailed analysis of the main solutions on the market, TPC opted to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, which share a common platform.

Following a thorough implementation plan presented by Microsoft and its partner Inove, TPC completed the adoption in less than two months. For a company that makes approximately three million deliveries a year, the implementation aspect of the product “was important and decisive,” says Silas Faria, Innovation Manager, TPC.

The speed and smoothness of the implementation was the beginning of fast-tracking impact of Dynamics 365 on TPC. With Dynamics 365 Marketing in operation, TPC was able to instantly start tracking mail and phone and qualify its customers. This breakthrough enabled TPC to improve customer relationships and increased the company’s visibility in its market.

With Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales natively aligning with each other and the engineering advantage of an adaptable shared platform, TPC saw how it could readily integrate additional Microsoft solutions, creating, in effect, a “best-of-breed” solution that shared a common data model and the Dynamics 365 customer engagement platform. The best of both approaches.

Building out to build business

Choosing Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales created opportunities to smoothly integrate additional Microsoft solutions as well as an array of ISV third-party solutions. TPC now feeds its data into Microsoft Power BI dashboards to acquire insights to support decision-making. The company used Microsoft Power Apps to create an application that combines business data with information on available storage space in its distribution centers.

For TPC Group, Dynamics 365 is a “best-of-the-best” solution. Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales have transformed its understanding of its customers. Power BI and Power Apps improved how information is gathered, analyzed, and used to grow business. “We have gained speed, process quality, and strategic management,” observes Eduardo Leonel, Commercial and Marketing Director, TPC. All accomplished with the single-vendor Dynamics 365 solutions and platform. Further, TPC has an easy path to adding other Dynamics 365 applications for customer engagement, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Consumer Insights and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

The impact of choosing Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales is impressive. TPC’s decision has triggered a significant increase in the company’s conversion rate: it added 16 new, highly-complex projects in 2019 compared to only two in the previous year.

Seeing the path forward clearly

The integrated solution promises quicker and smoother integration and deployment in a competitive business environment that doesn’t tolerate slow reactions or performance disruptions. And in the case of the Dynamics 365 solutions, it brings the same drive as a BoB company has to be the best in each product category.

Muddying the waters is the disruptive action of some larger single-vendor suite providers to augment their solutions by acquiring their BoB competitors. On the surface, this would appear to present a “best-of-both-worlds” option, but integration obstacles still exist within this hybrid approach, particularly in the challenge of seamlessly connecting applications that originated with different vendors.

While Dynamics 365 is a single-vendor solution that is easy to configure, use, and extend, it also offers BoB advantages. The Dynamics 365 applications are built upon an adaptable, expandable platform and a common data model that unifies data across all your business processes and enable interoperability among apps.

At the same time, each Dynamics 365 application team—including Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance—is focused on engineering a best-of-breed level performance. For example, Dynamics 365 Marketing provides a powerful combination of marketing automation with events management, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights integration, a connector to LinkedIn, and AI-based capabilities. Aligned marketing and sales applications from Dynamics 365 can help companies understand customers better, collaborate remotely, optimize buying processes, and adapt to rapidly changing environment.

The choice for many companies, particularly those with ambitious growth plans, may be a single-vendor consistency that encompasses an array of best-of-breed products. Having to choose between the two alternative approaches could be a thing of the past.

Learn more

Learn more about how the combination of powerful, fully featured Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Sales, and other Dynamics 365 solutions can meet these challenging times.

• Gain an overview into Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Explore additional business continuity solutions and resources from Microsoft.
• Contact your Microsoft sales representative or our sales team.
• Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The post Why you should select an integrated platform for MarTech needs appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The past six months have highlighted how difficult it is to stake out ground when the landscape is constantly changing. The world has changed, and that, in some way, is a part of most conversations. Businesses, corporations, and enterprises are responding by searching for trends, pouring resources into data collection and analysis, and trying to get a handle on—if not a step ahead of—this fundamental reshaping of the global business landscape. The challenges are multinational, and effective solutions will be launched and reshaped over time, but one aspect of the next era is apparent: speed and agility will be essential. Businesses must respond more quickly than ever to circumstances that change rapidly.

Rapid changes with a gradual recovery

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reveals that, rather than the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic decreasing, there has been a more negative impact on activity in the first half of 2020 than originally anticipated, and the recovery is projected to be more gradual than previously forecast.

In its June 2020 report, IMF states that global growth is projected at –4.9 percent in 2020, nearly two full percentage points below the April 2020 World Economic Outlook (WEO) forecast. With 2021 global growth projected at 5.4 percent, this would leave 2021 GDP roughly 6.5 percentage points lower than in the pre-COVID projections made in January 2020.

When the change is this dramatic and rapid, the response must be equally agile and responsive.

Creating rapid responses in an accelerated timeframe

Today, agility drives a company’s success and it involves transforming organizations so they can run faster and leaner even while increasing their activities.

Companies are moving to increase their agility, some by creating new organizations within their structures. Over the past three years, Larsen & Toubro (L&T), has undertaken extensive digital transformation and realized significant benefits with proven ROI. The group created L&T-NxT, a digital startup, and turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 to monitor its pipeline and increase win rates with marquee customers.

To build momentum rapidly, L&T-NxT needed a digital selling solution in weeks, not months. Other vendors that L&T-NxT evaluated would have required four to six months of implementation. But the startup deployed Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Relationship Sales in fewer than 30 days.

Increasing agility with remote selling

As L&T-NxT expands its global presence, remote selling plays a critical part in its strategy. Its distribution teams use Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams to collaborate seamlessly in the context of opportunities, without worrying about security or unexpected restrictions affecting where they can work. And now that Dynamics 365 Marketing integrates directly with Microsoft Teams, organizing and managing webinars and online meetings is even more efficient.

One additional factor to consider when transforming an organization to operate at faster speeds is how quickly a solution can be productive.

“Dynamics 365 had most of the sales and marketing capabilities we needed right out of the box, so implementation was extremely quick, and we were able to see the benefits almost immediately.”—Anantha Sayana, Chief Digital Officer, L&T Group

Speed begins with implementation and moves quickly from there.

Digital transformation: moving quick takes root

Discoveries, Inc., a Japan-based company, promotes the digital transformation of an organization with its own cloud products and consulting. It focuses on the human element as a gating factor to timely action, and its mission is to improve the digital experience for employees so an organization can work efficiently with a small number of people. Dynamics 365 Marketing is the core digital tool for this flexible seminar operation, a quick start to an effective solution.

The President and CEO of Discoveries, Inc., Yuichiro Shimada is driving his company growth on the belief that digitization of operations is essential in order to realize a flexible and efficient way of working—even with a small number of people. For Discoveries, that meant organizing and conducting 80 seminars a year, primarily to source leads. Its challenge was to provide advance event preparation, online guides, email instructions, and then all the post-seminar follow up with a staff of only two people.

When the impact of COVID-19 began to appear in Japan earlier this year, the company switched from in-person to online. The entire lead generation process is now centrally managed by Dynamics 365 Marketing in the Discoveries environment, which automates most actions.

By using Dynamics 365 Marketing at the core of marketing digital experiences, Discoveries was able to deploy its user-friendly event management capabilities and powerful email features quickly, all under demanding circumstances. Now, the company reports that the number of leads per year has increased by as much as 50 percent with its effective use of Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Bringing solutions to customers quickly

Some might think that the smart response to unpredictable business conditions is to hang back and see how things settle out. But, when your technology is already proven and you’ve demonstrated a commitment to continuing improvement, then you should be bold. The acceleration of the market landscape creates opportunities to rapidly discover innovative approaches and respond to new customer needs.

Marketing and sales applications from Dynamics 365 can help your teams understand customers better, collaborate remotely, optimize buying processes, and adapt to rapidly changing environment.

There is no time better than the present to think fast, act quickly, and adapt rapidly.

• Learn more about Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Explore additional business continuity solutions and resources from Microsoft.
• Contact your Microsoft sales representative or our sales team.
• Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The post Ways you can deliver quick and agile customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

One very unsettling aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic is how it has exposed weaknesses in the communications plans that are meant to helpful. But in this moment, a communications cacophony rules. Medical and governmental authorities have messages they need to get to everyone. Businesses have a set of specific messages for employees and another set for customers. There are calls for calm and calls for action.

In times like these, strong, focused communications are a critical part of crisis response. Most importantly, there is no harmless margin for error. Erroneous information, late-arriving instructions, and confusing “next-steps” can all have dire consequences.

Can history be our guide?

Ironically, best practices are derived from accumulated experiences. The world has never seen this situation, so in some ways the best practices for addressing a modern global pandemic are being formulated right now.

By collecting communications usage and effectiveness reports as the emergency continues, we’ve gained some key learnings to help you prepare your communications plans for the next phase:

1. Choose your target audience carefully

Don’t fight chaos by trying to overwhelm it. Every customer is being swamped with information—much of it repetitive—from email, television, radio, social media, government mailings, Emergency Management official announcements, and more. Add in frantic phone calls and online video chats and you have a truly cluttered environment for your message.

Recognize this context and adapt your communications to it. Avoid sending blanket emails to your entire customer list. Use sophisticated segmentation capabilities in marketing automation software. That way, you’ll target the right audience for specific types of messages. Customers will recognize that your communications are focused and useful, while other companies may be clogging their inboxes.

2. Get the word out quickly

Your communications will reach its target audience when they are likely under pressure. Keep that persona of a stressed individual trying to absorb and process critical information as rapidly as possible as you develop your communications plan.

Take steps to make sure your communications are timely. You can leverage easy-to-use content-creation tools and built-in customizable templates to quickly get the word out.

Help recipients with sight or hearing conditions to grab the information clearly by checking the accessibility. There will be plenty of anxiety in the situation; good communications can reduce that unease and make for a more effective result.

3. Empathy should guide you

It’s a fine line, but as an emergency’s first impact is absorbed, companies can give in to the temptation to shift to tone-deaf promotional campaigns. “We’re here to help” is very different from “We’re listening and here’s how we’re helping.” Center your communications on demonstrating that you are committed to understanding on a deep level what people are going through. The human connection can be the strongest communications tool.

4. Make it easy to take the next step

Use your customer interactions insights to identify their imminent needs and guide them to the next step. Consider creating a web landing page as a single source for resources to help customers take action quickly. In times on uncertainty, the more clearly you can convey your understanding and present the way forward, the more valuable your communications will be.

5. Improve digital meetings and events

The COVID-19 emergency response that included isolation and distancing has quickly impacted the most basic of activities: human in-person interaction. We have to come to grips with the reality that virtual meetings will dominate the next phase and learn how to optimize their effectiveness. Microsoft Teams is an easy way to adopt digital engagement with its easy-to-use audio, video, chat, and screen-sharing capabilities.

During a recent interaction, our key partner ON24 shared some best practices for organizing digital events. For example, online meetings or events need to be paced differently than group gatherings: shorter segments, audience polls, or other participatory events can hold peoples’ interest as there is no “audience” to share experiences.

Let’s now look at how some of Microsoft Dynamics 365 customers have leveraged these good practices to manage emergency communications.

There is no playbook for this situation, but action is the only option. – Team Rubicon

Watch the video below to learn how Team Rubicon uses Dynamics 365 to serve communities during crisis.

A crisis has its own timetable and waits for no one. Team Rubicon brings together the skills and experiences of military veterans with first responders, medical professionals, and technology solutions. Leveraging their abilities, training, and experience, they help people prepare, respond, and recover from disasters and humanitarian crises.

Because its strength is its volunteers, Team Rubicon must have the ability to rapidly communicate to those volunteers wherever they may be, then assemble response units to meet the most dire needs.

Team Rubicon considers the skill set and availability of volunteers as it maps response plans, but the pandemic created an additional factor: identifying volunteers who would be high-risk because of age or medical conditions.

“Become part of the fabric of American communities, continue to serve communities after the disaster, and never stop imagining how technology can improve how we operate.” – Art dela Cruz, President and COO, Team Rubicon

Calling Team Rubicon into the battle against COVID-19 demanded rapid communications informed by precise segmentation. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing met the challenge.

The Team relied on Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales solutions to quickly engage with more than 120,000 volunteers, including activating the volunteers with the lowest risk for COVID-19. Its initial response included the swift establishment of more than 80 COVID-19 response operations running nationwide, including a drive-in testing center in Charlotte, North Carolina that is able to process 1,000 tests a day—there are three more in the planning stages—and a 250-bed field hospital in Santa Clara, California.

Timely communications: Getting it right the first time

On the opposite side of the world, COVID-19 began its attack on New Zealand. The Ministry of Health tasked Manawanui, a private organization, with sending critical crisis-related information to people with disabilities and capturing the requirements for personal protective equipment (PPE) for their caregivers.

One critical challenge: Manawanui had to accomplish this on the same day the Ministry of Health delivered its instruction.

Timing is everything. Manawanui had completed set-up of Dynamics 365 Marketing only days earlier so it considered using its incumbent solution for the first campaign. However, the organization decided to go with Dynamics 365 Marketing to meet the daunting deadline.

“Customers and their caregivers needed personal protective equipment quickly. Only 11 hours after launch, Dynamics 365 was connecting us with New Zealanders in need.” – Marsha Marshall, CEO Manawanui

Their trust was rewarded. Manawanui launched the app and ran a campaign that met their goal in only 11 hours. Today, Dynamics 365 Marketing continues to excel under crisis conditions, enabling Manawanui to successfully contact thousands of disabled New Zealanders and their families to ensure that they continue to receive support at this critical time.

Changing communications paradigms

True to its tumultuous nature, the COVID-19 pandemic is contorting what we would consider “normal” in how we create, distribute, and measure the effectiveness of communications campaigns.

First, the way they’re received defies past experience. Organizations may see dramatic spikes in communications to their audience such as employees and customers. When your target audience is so hungry for information, creative strategies and compelling subject lines become essentially irrelevant. These statistics are likely an anomaly brought about by the impact of the pandemic, but they may signal a foundational change in how we conceive and create campaigns that use marketing automation.

Second, it will be intriguing to track how the compressed time frame with which the pandemic hit and the communications response alter expectations going forward. Launching a nationwide campaign in a single day, as Manawanui did, is a highly impressive feat, achieved under extraordinary pressure. Will companies demand this level of speed outside of crisis conditions? What will the performance expectations for customer communications campaigns be once normalcy (or however close we can come to it) returns?

There is no doubt that communications are changed in a crisis. The question looking ahead is how will customer engagement be transformed by this crisis?

Learn more about Dynamics 365

• Explore the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales applications to manage relevant communications and accelerate digital selling
• Learn how to support your COVID-19 responses using Dynamics 365
• Please contact your Microsoft sales representative or contact our sales team via chat, phone, or email

The post Key learnings from emergency communications appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

When people hear the words education and automation in the same sentence, many automatically presume the topic is online education.

But automation crosses disciplines. As the population and social circumstances change, post-secondary education institutions face a shifting array of challenges, including attracting and retaining enrollment as well as reaching the segment that has left without completing degrees.

In the United States, we’re accustomed to thinking of college admissions as being highly competitive with the accompanying presumption that all institutions are full. Why would colleges that are turning applicants away be concerned with marketing?

What the numbers say

The facts paint a different picture. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, over the past three admissions years, overall postsecondary enrollment has decreased. While the 1.3 percent drop in 2019 represents a slight uptick from the previous year (a decrease of 1.7 percent), the overall trend is negative.

During the 2010s, unduplicated fall-term enrollments dropped below 18 million students and declined by more than two million students. The downward trend in enrollment is relatively new. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Fall enrollment in degree-granting post-secondary institutions increased between 2006 (17.8 million students enrolled) and 2016 (19.8 million), followed by a decrease of 6 percent between 2010 and 2016 and continued decreases through 2019. Overall, a decade of declining enrollment.

Educational institutions must educate themselves

In this environment, it’s imperative to look for new approaches to reverse these trends. Marketing automation, often thought of as a capability solely built for business, is coming more to the forefront of solutions in education.

Think about decreasing enrollment. The capabilities of marketing automation can be valuable in identifying, reaching, and nurturing prospective students. By establishing ongoing personalized communications with this audience, institutions can identify trends in goals, interests, and obstacles that affect students and potential students. By reflecting that the school truly understands their concerns and directions, they can open a powerful communications channel and become a strongly considered destination option for those students.

In short, don’t let the name fool you. Marketing automation can provide educational institutions with comprehensive tools to address their current enrollment deficits as well as get ahead of the concerns that they will face in the coming years.

Clearer vision when looking ahead

Marketing automation can also be an important tool in helping administrations get in front of changing expectations of students. For example, the email marketing, events management, and survey capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing provide college administrators and admissions departments insights into what students think of their education, the institution, their goals, their expectations, and other driving forces.

With that level of information coming in, educational decision-makers can make adjustments to demonstrate that they are responsive to student concerns. They can also better communicate their case as the destination-of-choice for cohorts as they arrive at college age. As the saying goes, knowledge is power.

Don’t overlook the returning student population. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports that in the past five years, there have been 3.8 million “Some college, no degree” students who have re-enrolled. Staying meaningfully connected with them through continuing communications, perhaps even creating a personalized journey for them to guide their return, can have significant impact on enrollment over time.

Making technology more comfortable to use

Innovative solutions providers are refining their technologies and interfaces to integrate more readily into the halls of academia. Educational institutions benefit from developers’ experiences with business enterprises.

Businesses adopting marketing automation often look for the technology to be used across their marketing organization, reducing their reliance on technical people and support and empowering their own people. Technology solutions providers have responded by making the user interface and operation more accessible. That’s good news for educational institutions that could be wary of unanticipated or unwanted implementation and training obstacles.

Admissions and alumni relations organizations should look for built-in features such as easy email content design and email campaign management. Of course, every college participates in events, and any marketing automation solution they consider should offer extensive, easy-to-use event management capabilities.

Transforming from ivy-covered to data-driven

The trends are clear and so is the mandate—transform how you connect, communicate, and continue with your student population, both present and future.

In this pivotal moment, educational institutions must recognize that they need innovative solutions to address the societal transformations their students face. Marketing automation can help attract and enroll students more effectively and form a lasting relationship. In a competitive space, it differentiates your institution, provides a consistent message, demonstrates awareness and responsiveness to student needs, and helps you do what all outstanding places of learning must do—nurture relationships.

Read the Top Signs You’ve Outgrown Basic Email Marketing eBook to learn how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing can be a transformative technology to your college or university. Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The post Why educators should be looking at marketing automation appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Nonprofits (or not-for-profits) exist in a highly competitive world. According to a report from Giving USA, the sector is large and with one crucial exception, growing:

• Donations. American organizations and individuals provided record-breaking levels of support in 2017. Strong support continued in 2018, with total giving from individuals, foundations, and corporations exceeding $427 billion. That’s a rise of 0.7 percent from 2017 giving or a 1.7 percent decrease after adjusting for inflation, and a 9 percent increase from the $390.05 billion in donations in 2016.
• Organizations. In Fiscal Year 2018, the Internal Revenue Service recognized more than 1.7 million tax exempt organizations under section 501 (c).

The same report by Giving USA also noted that giving by individuals declined slightly by 1.1 percent in 2018. This represents an opportunity for growth to farsighted nonprofits.

The competition for donors is challenging

Even though smaller nonprofits tend to be more focused in terms of cause or geography, they still must compete for funds and donors with larger, more established entities. Moreover, the number of competitors is increasing. In 2018 alone, the I.R.S. approved nearly 84,000 applications for tax-exempt status.

How can nonprofits successfully compete?

For many nonprofits, the tools and techniques of marketing automation offer a way to reach and embrace new donors.

Because many nonprofits get their start as a response to an emergency, disaster, or an unmet community need, their cause is often promoted through free media coverage. Marketing is an afterthought. But marketing is crucial to long-term viability.

Recognizing this, the industry has been looking at the changes in marketing that for-profit businesses have made and are adopting many of these to their own situations, creating the specialty of nonprofit marketing.

With adjustments to accommodate the target audience of donors as opposed to customers, marketing automation brings powerful capabilities to nonprofits:

• Speak with one voice. Standardize the voice and messaging of the organization and personalize communications using data the app gathers.
• Create and strengthen loyalty. Help steer new donors onto a path of greater generosity, participation, and advocacy.
• Improve productivity. Empower the staff to move from routine tasks to improving relationships with key donors.
• Energize involvement. Automated communications can point donors to matching gift opportunities, volunteer needs, and other organization sites.
• Content marketing tells your story. The mission of a nonprofit involves issues that people care about and provides unique opportunities for motivating storytelling.

Marketing automation advances your message

A nonprofit’s advantage in gaining attention to its cause and work, and the sense of emergency, is not as much of an advantage in the regular rhythm of its existence. After answering the call, people can settle back to ordinary life, except for the nonprofits themselves.

In the absence of a rallying cry, nonprofits return to a normal voice and that is the voice they use for ongoing communications with donors and prospective donors.

Communication leads to loyalty

Marketing automation solutions make it much easier for a nonprofit to establish and maintain its voice, personalize messages, create more effective outreach schedules, and track responses.

A model for building a member base for a nonprofit is to attract single donors and nurture them to become loyal members. From there, those loyal members can take on additional roles within the nonprofit such as a volunteer, influencer, recruiter, advocate, fundraiser, or a combination of those activities.

Deployed strategically, marketing automation can bring both consistency and flexibility to this process. Consistency of voice, message, ask, and other touchpoints reinforce elements that may have attracted the donor in the first place. At the same time, insights from information gathered throughout individual communication and response interactions help to personalize communications and reach donors where they are most receptive.

Keep in mind that while marketing automation offers new levels of communication, nonprofits are still driven by human connection. Organizations should be alert to the possibility of allowing automated reach vs. the personal touch swinging out of balance and losing donors who feel slighted.

Improve your team’s productivity

As with introducing any type of technology, an organization can expect to spend significant time in both planning how to use its marketing automation capability effectively and in training people how to use it well.

But once that’s achieved, marketing automation nurtures donors through regular communications, freeing staffers to concentrate on one-to-one donor relations and other productive tasks.

Energize everyone’s involvement

Automated communications can point donors to matching gift opportunities, volunteer needs, content marketing of human-interest stories, and other organization sites. Staffers can shift to individual donor prospecting and servicing. Administrators can develop long-term plans and have them set up on the app in advance.

Content marketing: Stories worth telling

In the effort to attract engagement, nonprofits can share important, impactful stories of challenges, misfortunes, and metaphorical hills to climb. These are stories that people want to read and are the heart of a nonprofit’s appeal. Automated marketing can make it faster and easier to reach out to donors and prospective donors and alert them to new stories on their sites.

Marketing automation expands the nonprofit reach

The objections to adding marketing automation to nonprofits, including ramp-up time, product cost, and potential staff resistance, are falling away as organizations see the long-term benefits of an active, customizable donor relationship tool. Marketing automation software such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing offers extensive capabilities from advanced email features to event management tools to collecting in-depth information on donors to help you personalize communications.

The investment in marketing automation increasingly seems to be essential to keeping today’s nonprofits active, growing, and fighting for their share in an environment with more that 1.7 million competitors.

Read the Top Signs You’ve Outgrown Basic Email Marketing eBook to learn how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing can help you improve your company’s marketing efforts. Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The post Five ways nonprofits can benefit from marketing automation appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The selling landscape is undergoing fundamental changes, many of them driven by the effects of B2B customers’ experience as everyday consumers. Many retailers have created personalized, nearly immersive, online experiences for each customer. Consumers shopping for goods and services continually experience fresh and delightful interactions, from highly customized offers and recommendations to frictionless channels to 24/7 interactions.

The impact of B2C on B2B

Today’s B2B buyers have high expectations, and those expectations will not be met if B2B buyers are accustomed to sophisticated consumer interactions in their personal lives. Executive B2B buyers are not impressed by marketing driven by large, relatively impersonal data analysis that leads to inconsistent and conflicting interactions or sales outreach that doesn’t cater specifically to their needs at the right time.

The source of the problem may be largely invisible to the companies perpetuating this issue. Many organizations believe themselves to be customer-centric, while their buyers may not agree. That’s a significant disconnect. Clearly, B2B has much to learn from B2C companies.

Customer experience – the rewards for getting it right

Many B2C organizations have strategically embraced modern technologies like customer data platforms (CDP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to gain a 360-degree view of their customers and follow through on those insights to optimize customer engagement.

The rewards for getting this engagement right are substantial. Many buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. In terms of the potential benefits a great experience can have on sales success, a McKinsey study reported that organizations can expect:

• 10-15 percent lower customer churn
• 20-40 percent increase in the win rate of offers
• Up to 50 percent lower service costs

Take a new approach

B2B companies must move away from their legacy approaches based on large, relatively impersonal data analysis and move to solutions that unify relationship data across the full customer lifecycle. That way, they can gain insights that help build credibility and trust with buyers. They can run multi-channel campaigns to increase sales-ready leads, create personal experiences, and use guided process and AI to anticipate and respond faster to customer needs. They can build the ongoing, high-quality relationships that are necessary for long-term success.

Four principal goals

Turning prospects into engaged customers is a process. In order to achieve these goals, organizations must focus on 4 key priorities:

• Nurture more demand
• Personalize buyer experiences
• Build relationships at scale
• Make insight-driven decisions

Each of these drives results by using deep reservoirs of data in making technology feel more human.

Nurture more demand

Relying only on conventional, basic email marketing as the primary source of leads is simply not effective enough. In fact, the more focused and demanding the customer universe is, the more essential it is to gain deep insights into what those customers expect. Northrop & Johnson,  a leading global yacht brokerage, competes for multi-million dollar customers using technology its industry has been slow to adopt. Using Dynamics 365 for Marketing has created a decided competitive advantage: Vital insights into their customer base have helped to drive a 70 percent increase in charter sales.

In any industry, companies need to generate leads across multiple channels, nurture large numbers of leads while prioritizing each one, and use data-driven insights to deliver leads that are sales-ready. Nurturing more demand is critical to growth.

Personalize buyer experiences

It’s time to end friction, inconsistencies, and the “do you know who I am?” part of the customer experience. Companies can acquire a holistic view of buyers, predict buyer intent, and orchestrate a connected, personalized journey for customers.

In an era where guests have more choices than ever for leisure and entertainment, Tivoli delights its guests by using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to stay one step ahead of expectations and transform the guest experience. With its deeper understanding of guests, it can add new chapters to its long tradition of imagination and innovation.

Build relationships at scale

Mutually beneficial relationships don’t simply happen with more data. Companies need to build credibility to establish and grow relationships with customers.

As HP approached its 80th anniversary, the global technology innovator decided to embrace new capabilities that would help it create the sales workforce of the future. HP already has one of the world’s largest implementations of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. For the next step in its journey, HP decided to use Microsoft Relationship Sales, which combines Dynamics 365 for Sales with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Within just four months of rolling out the training program, HP noticed it was generating significantly more leads through relationship selling.

Together, Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn enable the company to have increased information about, and impact on the sales relationships that are added to its sales pipeline, even as that pipeline experiences exponential growth month over month.

Make insight-driven decisions

Here’s where sales and marketing can truly align: utilizing data to uncover insights that lead to better-informed decisions throughout the sales process. This can improve performance, empower employees, and enable the company to gain increasingly effective strategic insights.

With more than 1,500 pubs serving guests throughout the UK, Marston’s launched a business transition by bringing together guest data that was scattered across multiple systems into Dynamics 365. With their locations’ guest data now unified, Marston’s will gain a complete view of guests, which can be harnessed to generate customer satisfaction and strategic insights. This approach helps drive improved performance throughout the company, including the opportunity to empower employees – an often-overlooked aspect of a company’s success.

Aligning sales and marketing: The intelligent way to succeed

It’s possible to create exceptional experiences, drive more qualified leads, and increase revenue if an organization has the vision, process, and technology to harness all the data available. This requires high-level technology with well-defined business goals and sales and marketing applications fueled by keen intelligence. We have a compelling offering to accomplish just that with Microsoft Dynamics 365.

You are invited to learn more about what intelligent sales and marketing can do to bring your sales and marketing approach to today’s level of competition. Please contact us to speak with a Microsoft expert or Microsoft partner near you.

The post Turn prospects into engaged customers with intelligent sales and marketing appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Digital transformation is essential to thriving and growing – and in some cases, surviving – in nearly every industry in every corner of the world. Making that transformation with minimal internal disruption and positive outcomes is the central goal of many organizations.

Every organization’s transformation must take careful consideration of its past, including legacy systems and solutions and its future including evolving market or business trends, while planning its present-day course of action. Five very different companies are transforming how they can improve the ways they use their data and create more effective journeys for their customers.

Break down data silos to know your customers better

Headquartered in Copenhagen with 30 locations worldwide, DHI specializes in solving the toughest challenges that water environments face.

With a broad reach and diverse worldwide customer base, DHI realized that it needed a digital transformation to reduce manual processes with automation.

Breaking down data silos was the priority. Without a way to unify the company’s data sources, it couldn’t develop modern tailored customer journeys.

With its digital transformation, DHI can create a rich profile of customers and prospects. Data from tracking who reads its blogs, subscribes to its webinars, uses its applications, and other interactions, DHI’s digital transformation helped reduce the manual processes involved in a single customer journey by two-thirds. Customers now receive follow-up communications faster and sales has the profiles to focus on their most important customer interactions.

When the goal is to know your customers better and faster, bring the benefits of digital transformation to your company as quickly as you can.

Shorten sales cycles from a long road to a personalized journey

The pressure on manufacturers to optimize plant operations in unrelenting. Vorne, based in Illinois, helps these companies meet those demands by using data-driven insights.

In the past, Vorne’s data on sales leads was spread across documents, spreadsheets, applications, and departments. The sales cycle was long – often more than a year – and leads were getting stuck at different stages. It had a limited ability to craft personalized messages.

By moving its customer data to modern automation, the company gained the ability to identify and precisely target communications at the bottlenecks, which has helped to double the number of leads to trial. “We discovered that we’re not losing leads because of product features or price but simply because we were losing touch with people,” said Vorne. Now, the company can craft highly targeted messages that support precise customer journeys and customers are responding.

Vorne has doubled the number of leads that move to product trial while on track to double its sales efficiency and throughput. Add to that its improved lead nurturing capability and ability to personalize each customer’s journey and you have a company poised for growth.

Recognize the power of the personal touch

When your business is selling luxury yachts, you have very demanding customers. Northrop & Johnson, the largest superyacht brokerage in the United States, caters to a small group of high-value clients with precision marketing and exemplary sales and service.

Because relationships are at the center of its business, Northrop & Johnson knows every insight into its customers is invaluable. In an industry where technology hasn’t been widely embraced, the company was able to use modern technology to create a strong competitive advantage.

“All this new technology and talk of customer journeys is foreign to this industry.  And it requires a special solution to make automated campaigns work when every customer contact is so important and unique.” – Keith Perfect, Northrop & Johnson’s Director of Technology and Intelligence.

Northrop & Johnson now has a central hub for all marketing, sales, and customer relationship activities. Since its deployment, the company reports a 70 percent increase in charter sales.

When it comes to navigating new channels for its business, Northrop & Johnson sees the modern side of the personal touch. 

Save time and reduce costs through automation

Founded in 1996 to provide end-to-end help for companies looking to transform themselves digitally, ACTUM Digital believes that strong and continuing customer relationships are crucial to its success.

In undertaking its own digital transformation, ACTUM Digital gained the ability to replicate and then tailor templates for future campaigns. This dramatically increased efficiency. With just a few clicks, campaigns could be recreated for new events, significantly reducing time needed to organize and follow up on events. The company now has a 360-degree view of each client’s event history with the company, from invitation to RSVP to what content they viewed on the ACTUM Digital website.

Handwritten notes are now gone for good, taking with them the possibility of misplaced customer data. Automated systems record customer actions, including website interactions and the opening or forwarding of marketing emails.

The resulting leads from these events are stronger and more sales-ready, according to Karel Beránek, Dynamics 365 Product Owner at ACTUM Digital.

“The leads that Marketing is generating today are much stronger than they used to be.” – Karel Beránek, Dynamics 365 Product Owner at ACTUM Digital.

With 300 percent more events on the calendar and more sales-ready leads, ACTUM Digital joins its customers in seeing the rewarding impact of digital transformation on its own business success. 

Engage your communities through events

For consumers around the globe, the Microsoft Store is not only a retailer for the latest Microsoft products, but the location for a wide range of events, from small business workshops to gaming tournaments to summer camps. Stores often hold multiple events in a day. Everyone is handled by a community development specialist (CDS) with the assistance of store associates.

The store associates are a key part of the effort and their involvement reflects directly back on each Microsoft Store. It’s important that the CDS communicates their schedule and responsibilities clearly.

To manage the more than 200,000 hours of events held around the globe annually, Microsoft Store uses the event management capabilities in Dynamics 365 for Marketing, one solution to manage event scheduling, registration, and attendance.

Technology-based event management makes for strong communications and easier inclusion. A CDS can schedule an event calendar, and Microsoft Store associates know exactly what’s expected of them. What could be a complicated process with numerous pitfalls becomes simple to understand and use. The good feeling spreads when everyone has a role in the Microsoft Store’s entire community events initiative.

How can you transform your organization?

Each of these companies transformed their marketing in different ways, but everyone used Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing. You’re invited to visit our site, see the product capabilities, and try the application for free.

The post Five ways companies are transforming marketing appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In an era of increasingly sophisticated digital tactics, one question that is often raised is, “Are events still relevant?”

Clearly the answer is yes for many companies. According to research by SiriusDecisions, B2B companies with revenues ranging from $100M to $1B devote between 30-40 percent of their marketing program budgets to in-person events. Their challenge is to attain the maximum effectiveness from that spend.

In a new webinar, Cheri Keith from SiriusDecisions joined me to share the essential elements of a modern event strategy. It’s an opportunity to explore the strategies and tools that can improve an event’s effectiveness for the company and the experience for its attendees.

Start with a strong taxonomy

Internal buy-in is key, but you can’t assume that the classifications of various types of events, including their duration, budget parameters, and expected ability to influence content are fully and consistently understood throughout an organization. There can be large disconnects regarding how events are planned and managed and the level of time and resources devoted to any specific event or even an event category.

Having a strong and well-communicated events taxonomy can help put everyone on the same page, smoothing the way for not only more coordination across various groups within the organization but also acquiring more valuable data in the post-event phase.

Identify the three core pillars for a modern event strategy

Organizations should align their goals and focus their activities on three pillars:

• Event support to bring together principles, processes, organizational interlock, and technical infrastructure for successful event creation and attendance.
• Event logistics overseen by internal managers and aided by external specialists in organizing and staging events.
• Event experience generated from a holistic view of an event that focuses on the complete pre-event, event, and post-event experience for each attendee.

This webinar examines how each of these pillars are essential to a successful event and how they fit into an integrated event management framework.

Maintain messaging consistency

One pernicious challenge with events is inertia, or the tendency to fall back on what was done previously without due regard for changing markets, products, campaigns, or even company direction.

That problem is addressed by creating a campaign framework that enables marketers to comprehend the customer lifecycle and coordinate core campaign elements across all the organization’s marketing and sales efforts. This webinar explores how you can leverage event data throughout the customer journey to make sure your communications are on-message and appropriately timed for successful engagement.

Putting insights into action

In addition to helping you view the elements of a successful event in the context of internal buy-in, consistency with core messaging, and memorable experiences, the webinar outlines how the capabilities of Dynamics 365 for Marketing provide a powerful yet easy-to-use way to organize events with ease.

Watch the webinar: Organize successful modern events with ease

Watch the webinar to see how you can optimize resources by connecting the tools, tactics, and metrics used for in-person or digital event planning. Get a road map for implementing best practices and see how thoroughly and quickly you can create a personalized customer journey for every invitee. You’ll find that however complex and challenging events can be, you will be able to organize successful modern events with ease.

[msce_cta layout=”image_left” align=”left” linktype=”blue” linkurl=”https://info.microsoft.com/ww-Landing-Organize-Successful-Modern-Events-with-Ease-Video.html?lcid=en-us” linktext=”Watch the webinar” ][/msce_cta]

The post How to organize successful modern events with ease appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.