Want to send better performing and highly targeted marketing campaigns? Microsoft Dynamics 365 allows you to easily map your customer journey by helping you access a visual representation of the steps customers follow when completing a specific action, such as signing up for a product trial, completing a sale, or subscribing to a newsletter.
The more steps involved to complete the specific action, the better and more detailed the customer journey maps will be. For a majority of brands, the steps a potential customer could take toward becoming a customer include Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, and Advocacy.
Why Is Customer Journey Mapping Important?
Organisations should spend quality time to map customer journeys as it will help them better support their sales funnels, better target their marketing initiatives and campaigns, and align marketing and sales to the same conversion plan. It also helps them identify problem areas in the funnel, resolve pain points of customers, synchronise all touchpoints of customer interactions, and improve customer experiences.
Undoubtedly, getting a customer journey map may take time and effort, but the payoff is a data-driven, stronger, and purposeful sales and marketing strategy that everyone can agree on.
How To Map Your Customer Journey With Microsoft Dynamics?
Let us find out how you can leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 when it comes to mapping and optimising your organisation's touchpoints.
Step 1:
Define your journey: The first step is all about documenting all the possible ways through which an existing or potential customer can engage with your brand, from sales to marketing, to customer success. This could include:
Social media (paid, organic, or both)
Email (through marketing or through sales/direct)
Phone calls
Face-to-face interactions, word of mouth recommendations, and referrals
Customer support (personal and automated)
Events (webinar, trade show, networking, etc.)
Online content (business website, promoted profiles, partner websites, etc.)
Step 2:
What’s in Microsoft Dynamics 365?: In this step, you should ask yourself if Microsoft Dynamics 365 is able to capture sales, marketing, and customer support data. For instance, basic marketing data you will require in Dynamics 365 CRM should include:
Competitor Entity: You need to capture who you’re losing (and winning) to the lead and opportunity stages.
Campaigns Entity: Find out different ways to leverage both Lead Source and Source Campaign.
Marketing spends and potential return on investment.
Step 3:
Define your goals: These goals may be general in nature or they may be created by you or important to you for each line of service you offer. Using previous Dynamics 365 CRM data, you can ascertain:
What was your average deal size?
How many opportunities and leads did it take to get to the sales goals?
How many marketing qualified leads (MQLs) do you expect and at what rate do you turn them into sales qualified leads (SQLs)?
Step 4:
Get started with the best lead source: Once you have supporting data of which all your lead sources drive the biggest sales dollars and highest quality leads, it's time for you to ascertain which is your best source? Is it SEO, memberships, paid search, trade shows, or anything else?
It is important for you to remember and keep track of why you selected this lead source so that your marketing, sales, and customer success teams are fully aware of why you started with it.
Step 5:
Get everyone in the team involved: If you want results beyond expectations, it's important to bring everyone wholeheartedly on board. In other words, every individual team member who engages with any part of the funnel should be a part of the process.
For most organisations, this will include marketing, support, customer success, and sales teams. Thereafter, you need to invite everyone for a meeting to have a positive and collaborative discussion about what's happening at each stage in real-time, in terms of not just what the data depicts but also about what the actual conversations are like.
Want to learn more about using Microsoft Dynamics and how to map customer journeys? Call certified Microsoft Dynamics 365 experts at C.I.G. Consultants and find out how you can leverage Dynamics 365 marketing automation platform to improve your customer journey.