Is D365 marketing functionality a problem for Microsoft?
I’ve worked and consulted for with several organisations using Dynamics 365, some implementing, some optimising their D365 deployment, or assessing implementation of a CRM platform and actively considering D365 as part of the selection exercise. Over the years and across these different contexts a trend emerges; there are some issues around D365’s marketing functionality.
If we cast our minds back to the era of GDPR implementation, the spring of 2018, I was working an organisation with a limited budget looking to implement a marketing-lead CRM tool that would also be used for Customer Service and Account Management. It’s all-roundedness and cost effectiveness won the day in the procurement exercise, however that all-roundedness was propped up in a marketing sense by a 3rd party extension. The Click Dimensions plug-in allowed the organisation to map and build customer journeys using an interactive interface in a way that has become standard for marketing automation tools today. At this point the native D365 Marketing tool did not offer that functionality, and it seems that Microsoft have been playing catch-up and never quite catching up in the intervening years.
Fast forward four years to a global organisation utilising D365 Sales to manage generated leads and using basic nurture campaigns via D365 Marketing to follow-up. Previously I had a spent a couple of years consulting on the implementation of HubSpot Marketing for another education-based organisation. At this point the difference between D365 and HubSpot was stark. The ease of the HubSpot UX and UI enable fast set-up of necessary data syncs and the intuitiveness of the customer journey and campaign management in HubSpot shaded the equivalent functionality of D365. The level of up-front configuration required to make D365 viable and operational was significant compared to the ‘plug and play’ functionality of HubSpot.
By late 2022 I was consulting with a public sector organisation with D365 deployed across marketing, customer service, customer voice and operational workflows. The D365 learnings here were significant. The nature of the organisation meant that the protection of personal information was paramount. To the extent that the enterprise architecture effectively hamstrung effective data syncing, making segmentation an uphill task, a result was that the marketing functionality was not being utilised effectively; the Email Editor in D365 Outbound Marketing was not enabled, rather the engineering team were hard coding HTML all customer emails! This meant there was a perception that D365 was slow, which to a degree was unfair as the use of D365 functionality was far from ideal. This did provide the opportunity to turn things around and happily my team able to make significant improvements, implementing a drag and drop newsletter for the marketing team to build and own, and implementing a raft of automated emails for core customer journeys. However, there was still a naggin doubt I the organisation that D365 was the best-fit long-term tool from a marketing stand-point. A system assessment exercise got underway comparing D365 with a number of competitors including HubSpot and Iterable. This direct comparison exercise demonstrated that D365 continued to play catch-up across key functional areas of email optimisation, personalisation, A/B & Multivariate testing, segmentation, journey orchestration and engagement scoring.
The period that this exercise encompassed saw Microsoft re-position it’s D365 marketing offering, launching Customer Insights and Journeys with it’s Realtime Marketing engine. The parallel transition from Outbound marketing to Realtime marketing was not without its challenges. It’s clear that some areas of Outbound marketing functionality are yet to be fully enabled in Realtime, and whilst the Realtime functionality sees a forward leap for UX and UI which is essential, there are still basic gaps to be filled, for example around A/B testing.
There are still some fundamental gaps. One of the key pieces of functionality that HubSpot provides is website tracking and the ability to build segments and automations based on customer behaviour on a website. The good news is that D365 Realtime marketing now finally boasts website tracking, roughly three years behind HubSpot, but frustrations remain. There’s still no way in D365 to use website visits or clicks to build a segment, and no way to use the visits or clicks for lead scoring. We can trigger follow-up emails based on website activity but not build segments to enable more sophisticated journeys.
Returning to our central question, it’s fair to say that whilst Microsoft ARE making big strides to improve the D365 marketing functionality proposition it’s imperative Microsoft keep-up with the market; nimble tech start-ups and fresh-to-market platforms offer deeper personalisation, sophisticated multivariate testing, engagement scoring and predictive AI-models. CRM and marketing professional crave this kind of enhanced functionality, and Microsoft need to keep developing at pace so that D365 remains a relevant tool in the marketplace.
