Dynamics 365 Marketing is a marketing-automation application that helps turn prospects into business relationships. The app is easy to use, works seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Sales, and has built-in business intelligence. However, there are some real-world challenges which are yet to be solved by Dynamics 365 marketing. One of the such desired feature is “Drip marketing campaign”
What is drip marketing?
Drip marketing is a communication strategy that sends, or “drips,” a pre-written set of messages to customers or prospects over time. These messages often take the form of email marketing.
Drip marketing is not supported by Dynamics 365 Marketing as a standard feature.
There are ISVs like Click Dimensions which are built on top of Dynamics 365 platform and supports to build customer journeys to enable drip marketing. Because, it is an ISV that clearly means an additional money on licenses, maintenance and support.
The other way is a workaround using Dynamics 365 Marketing. I have one of my customer who wants to do drip marketing and has the following problem statement.
” Customers navigate to website and fill out the form where they show their interest in different products to purchase as listed on the web form. Upon submitting their interest through web form, it creates lead in Dynamics 365 CE. As soon as the lead gets created, contact enters in to customer journey of Dynamics 365 Marketing. Customer journey then sends email based the product interest shown by the lead. Marketing email contains tailored content w.r.t different product.”
This clearly is a drip marketing scenario.
Drip marketing automation in Dynamics 365 Marketing
Below is how could achieve drip marketing in Dynamics 365 Marketing.
- Created product fields on Lead entity that would store Dynamic content based on the product.
- Created Marketing emails in Dynamics 365 Marketing that would have Dynamic content from products mentioned on lead
- If a product interest shown is equal to “Yes”, then dynamic content will be pulled in the Marketing email.
- Created multiple segments as per the order in which the customer journey has to send the emails. For example,
- Segmentation A – Query where potential customer has shown interest in any product. This will be used to send a welcome email.
- Segmentation B – Query where potential customer has shown interest in specific product. This will be used to send the targeted dynamic content.
- Once the segmentation is done, the next task is to pull up these segments in to customer journey. Created customer journey and pulled required segments as shown below. Microsoft recommends having one segment per customer journey.
Now if you observe, I have placed multiple schedulers in this customer journey and that is the key as the this along with segmentation would play a significant role in drip marketing. These scheduler will trigger emails after waiting for certain time period. For example,
- First scheduler will wait for 24 hours to send the first welcome email.
- After the welcome email has been received by contact. Scheduler from second segment will become active as the wait time of it is 48 hours. So customer would receive another email in next 24 hours of first email.
- After the second email, third scheduler will become active as the wait time is 72 hours. Hence customer would receive email after 48 hours of second email based on the product interest they have selected.
- And so on…..
At some point if you want customer to step out of customer journey let’s say if an opportunity is won or lead is qualified. You can place a suppression segment in to customer journey so that if customer purchases from you, they won’t receive further emails from customer journey.
This is how you can achieve drip marketing automation.
Vaibhav Sharma 