Marketing Lists built from sales data in your Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment can be invaluable marketing tools if assembled and utilized properly. These lists are especially effective when integrated into your marketing automation platform. Doing so allows you to efficiently target the most appropriate audience for any given campaign. What’s more, once you’ve linked your Dynamics instance to your marketing automation platform, building these lists out is fairly straightforward. It helps to have a full understanding of marketing list basics, as well as some knowledge of the more effective automated marketing campaigns that work well with them.
The Basics of Marketing Lists in Microsoft Dynamics
Most, if not all, CRM platforms include functionality that allows you to create marketing lists in various ways. In Microsoft Dynamics 365, you organize your lists by assigning it a name, a type (Lead, Contact, or Account), and by specifying whether the list is static or dynamic. Static marketing lists require the user to manually add or remove list members, while dynamic lists update automatically based on your preset criteria with an Advanced Find.
While both static and dynamic lists can be fed into your automation platform, dynamic lists are more convenient, ensuring that the very latest CRM data is included in anything being sent over to your marketing automation platform. Static lists can still be valuable however, as campaign ‘triggers’ can be set to activate when a key piece of a list member’s data has been updated, or they can be used to better align your Sales and Marketing teams by allowing Sales to manage and create lists while Marketing messages to those lists.
To set up your dynamic marketing list in Microsoft Dynamics 365, simply name the list, set the List Type to Dynamic, and then set the Targeted At field to Accounts, Contacts, or Leads. From here you can create your advanced find, which will set the criteria for your list. If you are creating a static marketing list, you will either be manually adding members to your list or adding them via a lookup. What you select as your list criteria is crucial as this is what will eventually determine which leads will be included in a particular campaign.
Effective Marketing Lists to Drive Your Automated Campaigns
A good starting point for campaign automation derived from Dynamics 365 lists is a simple ‘Added to List’ trigger. This is a trigger that will activate a campaign action once a member has been added to a specific list. For example, perhaps you would like to send an email to participants at a trade show. You’ve collected their contact data and entered it into your Dynamics 365 instance. If you’ve set up a list that specifically includes show participants, you can automatically send them an email thanking them for stopping by your booth, then asking them to fill out a form, visit a website, or take some other type of action that allows you to gauge their interest in your product or service.
Another potentially valuable list trigger is one that is ‘lifecycle sensitive’. A good example of this is when a customer has a contract end date that is approaching or has recently expired. This type of workflow requires a status change or date calculation field in the Dynamics 365 record, like ‘contract end date + 6 months’, or something similar. You can then formulate a marketing list that is set to populate when those specific field conditions are met. From here it’s easy to trigger an automated action based on this list by targeting the list members with an email reminding them to renew their contract.
Looking for more ideas on triggers in Microsoft Dynamics that can feed your marketing automation efforts? Read more here.
There are numerous other ways to leverage marketing lists to enhance the power of your automated campaigns. Incorporating lead scoring is a great way to formulate effective lists, as is anything where you have data that indicates a lead or potential lead has expressed interest in your product or service. Website visits, email click-throughs, form completions, phone calls, and event attendance are only a few of the actions that can be recorded and tracked in Dynamics 365. Any and all of this data can be converted to criteria that allows you to build highly-targeted marketing lists, allowing you to sharpen any automated marketing campaign.
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