Microsoft Marketing Automation Solutions

What's Microsoft strategy take on Marketing Automation?

The context of recent acquisitions of marketing automation Tools (see recent Adobe's acquisition of Marketo), leads us to believe that more is coming. As everyone is looking at big providers, Microsoft is one of the ones that has not yet taken a clear take to the marketing automation essentials.

Adobe -  Microsoft Strategic Partnership for Enterprise Customer Experience

Adobe and Microsoft have been partnering the past two years to align business processes supporting enterprises in the digital transformation of their customer experience. This partnership continues to gain traction among enterprise customers as we bring joint solutions to market. According to an Adobe statement, more than 100 enterprises now leverage Adobe and Microsoft joint digital experience offerings.

By leveraging Adobe Campaign with integration through Microsoft Dynamics, the Dynamics 365 users enable custom and personalized content delivery to helps meet marketing and funnel goals, all through the Adobe platform.

The Open Data Initiative

Adobe recently joined Microsoft and SAP to launch the Open Data Initiative allowing customers to move beyond CRM into behavioral, transactional and operations customer data.  Although this will not be available to the public very soon, it’s a promise that customers will be able to stitch these business data sources in the hopes of customer experience to tap into the Adobe Experience Platform (aka Adobe Cloud Platform). That will be possible by using a standard data model, including the AI capabilities by Adobe Sensei for insights across any channel in real time.

So were does these leave the 80% SMB and SME Microsoft Dynamics 365 customers?

Do you want the straightforward truth or the complicated answer?

The simple answer. Microsoft released Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing module earlier this year, but their partner and customer channels had an overall unwelcoming reaction to the rather unfriendly and untypical pricing model. An exciting marketing automation tools and technology, currently underused, our favorite for  Marketing Automation on Microsoft Dynamics is ClickDimensions. It is native integration with Microsoft Dynamics, developed for marketing purposes,  easy to integrate, easy to use, and a great tool overall from our hands-on experience.

The more complicated answer is that Microsoft does not have a clearly outlined strategy for marketing automation just yet and everyone is waiting for this to come out any day now.

How do You Manage Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing?

We are curious to find out about your own model of integrating and experiencing marketing automation with Microsoft Dynamics.  Do you have challenges, questions or suggestions? If you need any assistance with Microsoft Marketing Automation or if you just have suggestions on this topic, please reach out to lniculae [at] nnc-services [dot] com.