Leverage your leads in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing

There are various goals that an organisation may try to achieve using marketing, one of them being lead generation. Defined as expressions of interest, leads within Dynamics 365 provide your organisation with an effective way to keep track of business enquiries. 

Within Dynamics 365 Customer Insight- Journeys, there are several ways that leads can be used, which we explore below…  

Leads as a basis for Customer Segmentation 

Effective customer segmentation can make a significant difference towards how successful your marketing efforts are. However, creating smart customer segments can be a challenge if you are not using all the customer information available within the system.  

The Segment Designer in D365 Marketing is a powerful tool that allows your employees to categorise contacts correctly and group them most efficiently. Despite segments being contact-based, leads can also be utilised within the query logic when creating them.  Additionally you can utilise Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights alongside the Segment Designer to create personalised and targeted customer segments using natural language queries. Copilot can even provide suggestions about additional  segments you may not currently have for improved performance. 

For example, you could segment all leads that expressed interest in a particular event, so you can send them relevant marketing communications before and after the event.

To understand more about segments within Dynamics 365, read our blog on Marketing List vs Marketing Segments.

Automatically identify orphan leads  

Within Dynamics 365 Marketing, features such as Segments and Customer Journeys require that each lead is associated with a contact. However, in sales scenarios, leads are often created as the initial point of contact without requiring a contact record to be linked to them.   

Manually identifying all orphaned leads and creating contacts would be a time-consuming task. To overcome this, Dynamics 365 can identify orphaned leads and link a contact record for each new or existing unmatched lead record, using custom workflows. 

As a result, organisations can be confident they are reaching all the necessary people with their marketing efforts. 

Categorise marketing leads 

More often than not, leads may be used by various departments across your organisation. Especially if contacts are being automatically generated from leads (marketing or other areas), it can be hard to keep track of which team should be handling particular data.  

You can easily avoid this confusion by applying a marketing flag on the contact entity, to clearly differentiate the automatically generated contacts from other types of contacts. This makes it easier to quickly tell the two types of contacts apart, and to set up the necessary views for sales teams, and other departments. 

Easily avoid this confusion by using a marketing flag on the contact entity, making it easier to gain an overview of what leads are related to what team. These flags can either be added manually or be a part of the workflow. 

Further features can be applied, such as: 

• Flags can be removed or added automatically based on certain actions. For example, a marketing flag is removed from a contact once the lead associated with it is turned into an opportunity 
• Create specific lists related to flagged contacts, making it easier for marketing teams to have an overview of the data 

Using this functionality provides your business with a more organised database, making it easier for teams to work with the correct information. 

To summarise, it is known that Dynamics 365 Marketing is strongly focused on using contacts. However, we hope that this blog has demonstrated that leads are useful throughout the process and can still be used to support marketing efforts. Discover more about the benefits of Dynamics 365 Marketing in our expert blog. 

For more information on Dynamics 365 Marketing, please email us at info@pragmatiq.co.uk, call us on 01908 038110 or fill out the form below and our expert team will be in contact with you shortly.