A key channel for Dynamics 365 Marketing is events. From one-on-one consultations to large global conferences, you can harness an entire range of event management capabilities right inside the Marketing application. You can nurture event attendees into loyal customers by connecting events with your broader customer engagement activities.
Some of the biggest challenges when organising events are attracting the right attendees, ensuring their engagement, and optimising event follow-up to reap the benefits of running your event. This article outlines how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing can help you overcome these challenges and make your event marketing successful.
- Attracting the Right Attendees
When planning an event, you will have an idea of the types of people you are hoping will attend, whether prospects or customers. Microsoft Dynamics Marketing helps you identify, persuade, and win a commitment from your target audience through:
- Robust segmentation with a 360-degree customer view
- Easy-to-design, personalised, cross-channel registration campaigns
- Leveraging pre-engagement to increase impact and build loyalty
D365 provides access to powerful segmentation capabilities. By connecting to Microsoft Customer Insights (Microsoft’s customer data platform, you can use demographic, firmographic, or behavioural data to create dynamic or static segments. To save time, you also can use natural language to generate segment targets. Customer Insights also provides more enriched data such as affinities, lifetime value, and churn models, among other data points.
The benefit of this advanced segmentation is crafting one or more highly personalised journeys for target segments that leverage what you know about them to ensure the most effective messaging across multiple channels to drive the highest attendance.
This sophisticated understanding of your targets also ensures that pre-engagement is well-designed to cement attendance and create customer loyalty, allowing you to gather more data. Options include multiple event reminders, pre-engagement surveys or polls, and an attendee confirmation button to drive commitment.
2. Increasing Attendee Engagement
Zoom burn-out is accurate, and when you are planning an online event, a fundamental challenge is how to keep your attendees engaged during the event itself. This starts with planning and thinking creatively about making the format more engaging and interactive using D365 facilities.
A new feature within Teams is the ability to use PowerPoint live and presenter mode directly to deliver a highly polished presentation, with your team quite literally alongside you. Using new video and content layout options will help keep your delivery fresh and engaging.
Additional features such as polls and surveys can be shared in real-time to make your session interactive. And you can use this data to learn more about your audience, their needs, and preferences.
You can also measure and improve your engagement performance by tracking engagement as a metric in reporting, including time attended.
3. Delivering Effective Follow-up
Another critical challenge of event management is to keep the momentum going with effective follow-ups for event attendees. Great follow-up is vital to building loyalty, especially if you nurture event attendees through a marketing funnel, and Dynamics 365 Marketing makes this easy.
Through its integration with Dynamics 365 Marketing, Teams can now automatically export attendee information directly to Marketing the marketing app. This means that you can use rich information gathered during your event combined with existing customer data to create segments for action while the event is still fresh in the attendees’ minds.
Using these segments and other data collected to create personalised messages and compelling customer journeys, you can continue the conversation. Creating and sending out post-event surveys is also made simple and can contribute further to your customer understanding and provide you with feedback to further improve and refine future event experiences.
This invaluable information can be reviewed in built-in dashboards and customisable analytics reports.
Through its advanced feature set, intuitive workflow and deep integration with Teams and Customer Insights, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing provides an excellent 360-degree solution for event management. It helps you overcome many critical challenges of event management and ensures they become a virtual channel within your marketing mix.