Successful companies have used shared moments to increase engagement, build confidence, and foster loyalty.
Moments connect us to the brands. There are endless examples from FIFA World Cup to Microsoft or TED. We loved those brands through shared experiences across our lifetime. They invested in increasing brand awareness, driving higher lifetime value and reducing churn.
Unfortunately, this is all going to sidetrack with COVID. The way we work to communicate has fundamentally changed. Microsoft recently surveyed 30,000 people in over 31 countries. It showed that people both want flexibility and in-person connection as we come out of the pandemic.
For customer engagement businesses, this dichotomy means something. As leaders, marketers, and educators, companies need to keep this hybrid environment. We will see that for the foreseeable future.
Challenges Result In Missed Business opportunities
Disconnected From Overall Lifecycle
Now, this has created several challenges. Even throughout the pandemic, customer expectations have been increasing. And they expect organizations to know them to deliver ongoing value throughout the lifecycle. So many events have been done one-off and are disconnected from other parts of the business.
Current Systems Are Not Effective
Many of our current systems are not really optimized for this kind of environment. Events’ frequency and complexity have made it challenging for businesses to produce with existing systems. As the systems rely on point solutions or manual processes to get things done.
Some professional service organizations use about 80 seminars a year as a critical part of their lead generation process. Nearly all of these were managed manually in MS Excel. They spend too much time and energy planning, managing, and tracking attendees. Also trying to coordinate follow-ups. It was taking staff away from more valuable customer engagement moments.
Attracting The Right Partcipants Is Tough
Now, we all have had digital event overload. But how to break through the noise and attract the right people? How can we efficiently execute personalized campaigns to increase registrations? Pre-engage audiences with little reminders? And communicate the value of our event? How do we capture insights? And learn from the audience in advance to better tailor the content and the experience?
It’s Hard To keep Engagement High
It can be hard to keep the audience’s engagement up during the event. How do we keep audiences attention without a significant lift? Given this high volume of digital events to engage so many different audiences, the frequency has gone up. And this becomes challenging to keep both frequency and high engagement quality.
Post Event Engagement Is Hard
Every moment is an opportunity to move customers to the next step in their engagement with us. Moreover, to make them feel like an audience of one. It is the key to developing loyalty. Unfortunately, following up with attendees and engaging them personally after an event is often a challenge. It is because of a lack of information and disconnected systems.
These challenges lead to missed business opportunities and conversations. And also the leads fall through the cracks. Moreover, data valuable to serve customers personally is not being leveraged. The worst case is that it can often make brands feel tone-deaf to customers.
Dynamics 365 Marketing and Teams are coming to revolutionize digital and hybrid events to support this new era. They will be infused with intelligence to empower us to design and execute experiences more efficiently across the customer lifecycle. Moreover, to deliver customer value with greater impact and less effort.
Elevate Customer Experiences With D365 Marketing
Dynamics 365 Marketing is Microsoft’s marketing automation platform, enabling you to elevate your customer experiences end to end. It is built from the ground up, in the cloud for the cloud world. You can create highly engaging outbound communications.
You can design real-time customer initiated journeys. They connect customers via their preferred channel, whether emails, SMS, push events, or even human-assisted media. You can leverage Microsoft’s industry-leading AI investments. And to both make your work more leisurely as well as more impactful.
Engage Customers In Real Time
Win Customers And Earn Loyalty Faster
Personalize Experieces With AI
Build customer Trust With A Unified, Adapatable Platform
D365 Marketing is not just for marketers, despite the name. It goes across sales, marketing, service, commerce. And any function across an organization looking to elevate customer experiences.
You can set up and exceed business goals with robust testing across content and channels, engaging customers in new and beautiful ways at each moment. You can analyze these experiments and learn deeper customer information. And tune that flywheel over time to optimize for business impact.
And you can do all of these on a unified platform. Leverage the complete form of what Microsoft brings across Dynamics, Azure, Microsoft 365. To deliver secure, compliant, and accessible experiences, which ultimately will build loyalty.
Dynamics 365 Marketing + Microsoft Teams
Run world-class events, webinars and meetings as part of a connected customer journey:
Simplify Event Planning
Increase Attendance
Improve Attendee Engagement
Enable high impact follow-up
As we all know, virtual events and webinars have just become an everyday way of life. Let’s look at how Teams and Dynamics 365 Marketing come together to create great engaging experiences.
How To Create An Event Using D365 Marketing Event Management Capabilities?
- To create an event in the D365 Marketing app, you have to check that you want to stream it. And you can see that Teams Webinar is the default streaming provider available right there for you.
2. It will automatically configure everything for you, and you will get an attendee URL.
3. All you need to do is copy that. And send that to your attendees and get going.
Simple to conduct events using Microsoft Teams from Dynamics Marketing. Similarly, from Microsoft Teams, it’s effortless now to create meetings and webinars.
4. You can have some great options- Like requiring attendees to register. You can report all the attendees. And their activities during the webinar. It is if you have all this rich attendee information.
5. With Dynamics for Marketing, you can easily follow up with participants. And this integration is right here native in Microsoft Teams.
6. As you click on that, it will detect your Dynamics organization. You can configure that. And then all the magic happens. You have taken all of the event attendee information and exported that into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.
7. We have created customer segments for you. For people that registered, for people that attended or people that cancelled the registration. With each of these segments of customers, we have created a journey. It sends them a notification email as a great starting point.
8. But now, you have the full power of Dynamics Marketing. It creates a customized journey. It does different things based on whether they clicked on the email or links within it. You can continue nurturing the interactions with these customers.
9. In D365 Marketing, you can also do advanced things. Like creating exclusive personalized emails for each customer that goes through this journey.
So there, you can see how Teams and Dynamics Marketing together can create great engaging customer experiences.
Conclusion
People want to engage safely and seamlessly while also driving high value. Companies want to be able to increase agility and engage people. Companies expect people to prioritise in-person interactions for specific high-value experiences. And expect more from those moments. They also desire digital experiences for flexibility, scalability, health safety, and so on.