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Real-time marketing overview

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Dynamics 365 Marketing isn't just for marketers anymore. With AI and natural language input assistance, business users can build trigger-based journeys that reach customers across multiple touch-points, growing relationships from prospects, through sales and support. Dynamics 365 Marketing’s real-time marketing features enable organizations to:

  • Engage customers in real-time
  • Win customers and earn loyalty faster
    • Working across all customer touchpoints, real-time customer journeys are truly an end-to-end experience.
  • Personalize customer experiences with AI
    • Turn insights into relevant action with AI-driven recommendations for content, channels, and analytics.
    • Customer Insights segment and profile integration allows organizations to seamlessly leverage the deep customer understanding in Customer Insights.
  • Grow with a unified, adaptable platform
    • Easily customize and connect with tools you already use.
    • Efficiently manage compliance requirements and accessibility guidelines.

How to engage with customers in real-time marketing

When reaching out to your customers with real-time marketing, there are three important things to consider: who, what, and when.

The who is your audience – who is this communication for? In Dynamics 365 Marketing, your audience is defined by a segment. This is a subset of your contacts that meet some criteria. For example, you could have a segment containing customers over the age of 60 who live in North America, a segment for customers who earn more than $100,000 per year, or a blanket segment with all your active contacts. Learn more about segments:

The what is the content and form of your communication - what are you sending? In real-time marketing, this can be an email, a push notification, or a text message. These channels can be used separately or together in one campaign. Learn more about channels:

The when can be as straightforward as a planned time when you want to send the communication, but with real-time marketing, it can also be an event that triggers the communication as part of a journey. You can combine emails, push notifications, and text messages into journeys that can operate over either a segment of contacts at a planned time or that can respond to a trigger to reach customers in the moments that matter. Learn more about journeys:

Note

Real-time customer journey orchestration features are available in all geographies where Dynamics 365 Marketing is available. You can find a list of geographies on Product Availability by Geography.

Transition from outbound to real-time marketing

Learn about making the move from outbound to real-time marketing in the free Transition from outbound to real-time marketing playbook. The playbook covers key information, including:

  • Setting up and configuring Dynamics 365 real-time marketing
  • Migrating your marketing artifacts
  • Identifying potential challenges
  • Retiring the use of outbound marketing