Microsoft Dynamics 365 | Marketing Manager Highlights in Business Central (Demo)

I want to show you how a marketing manager might use Dynamics 365 Business Central. We’ll take a look at campaigns, contacts, and customers. We’ll also examine interactions and do a quick integration. So let’s get started.

The point of view that I’m going to use in this demo is that the marketing objective is to gather, organize, and manage leads, and then prepare and deliver the leads to the sales organization. We’re going to create two campaigns. The first campaign is to create a campaign that will recognize interactions with new customers or new contacts that I’ve just made at a recent trade show.

Create and Import

Here’s the first campaign card right here, and the first thing I want to do is import all the new contacts into Business Central. To do that, I’m going to use a configuration package. I’m going to use the configuration package right here. Let’s open that up. You can see it’s a fairly simple one; I’m just looking at one table down here, the contacts. The table ID is 5050. All I need to do now is import from Excel, where I’ve got my contacts, into this configuration package and then apply that package. So I’ll import from Excel. Here’s my Excel file right here. I’ll import it. And I’m done with that part. We can take a look at the new records here. Click on this. This shows me all the new records that will be applied in this configuration package, and I don’t have a lot of information in each lead. I basically have their email address and then their names. And the names are over here. So I’m going to go ahead and import this into Dynamics 365 Business Central. I’ll apply the package. And now I have those new leads in Business Central. I don’t need the configuration package anymore.

Segmentation

Let’s go back to the campaign card here. The main thing about a campaign is not so much the campaign card, but the segments that are part of it, and a segment is just a group of customers or contacts that are going to be part of the campaign. So let’s look at the segments. Here are the segments, and again, the segments are just groups of customers or contacts. At this time, this is a brand new campaign. I don’t have any segments in it. I don’t have any customers or any contacts. So what I want to do is create a segment, and I’m going to create a segment for a group of contacts that I just imported. So let’s go ahead and do that. So I’m setting up a new segment, and what I’m going to do is set up a segment for each salesperson who has contacts assigned to them from that new group. So let’s set up one for Robin. To do that, I’ll specify the salesperson code here. Just use this drop-down. These are all the salespeople in my system.

Interactions and Create Email Templates

I’m going to specify an interaction template. Let’s use that. I’m also going to send an attachment, so the first thing I want salespeople to do is reach out to the new contacts and offer them a discounted price on a specific item I’ve got set up for them. To do that, I’ve got an attachment. The attachment is for this chair that I’ve got in my inventory. I’m going to offer this at a discount, so I’m going to select that this attachment will go out with the emails when the salespeople send emails to the new contacts. So I’ve got that set up. I’m going to put a subject in for the new email that salespeople will send out, and I’ve got that here. So now all I need to do is add contacts. It’s easy to do; I’ll hit ‘Add Contacts.’ It brings up this dialog box. In this dialog box, there are a lot of filters that I can select the contacts or the customers that I want in the group. I want in this segment.

Contact Segmentation

So first of all, I’m going to specify the salesperson, Robin Bettencourt. And I have another filter I want to use; all the contacts that I just imported into Business Central were tagged with a specific number series. So I’m going to look that up. Here’s the field right here. And the value is ‘lead.’ So let’s select that. These are the filters I’m going to apply just for this segment. Now it fills in all the contact information. Here we can scroll over. We can see that it’s going to be an email. That’s what I want them to first send out. And you can see the subject. So I’ve got this segment done, so I can close out of that. And what I want to do is add a segment for each salesperson I want involved in this campaign with the associated contacts. So I’m going to do that offline. I’ll be right back. And now I have three segments assigned to this particular campaign.

Campaign Management

Again, this segment is a group of contacts. In this case, I’ve assigned them to specific salespeople. A campaign is really set up to organize information, specifically organize contacts and customers that you want to use for your marketing. The real activity takes place at the contact level, and what I’ve decided to do in this campaign is take these contacts, distribute them to each of these three salespeople, and they’ll do the activity for me.

Discount Management

Part of this campaign involves not only the segments or groups of contacts but also the discount I want to offer to these new contacts. I can set that up here by navigating to price and discounts. Here’s the item; I’m going to offer a 10% discount on it. The normal price is $191, so it’s going down to $171. I’ll use this pricing, which has been activated. Now, what does this little trigger mean here? If a sales quote is generated for any of these contacts in this campaign, they will automatically receive that discounted price on their sales quote.

Salesperson Interaction

Now, let’s return to the segments to focus on a specific salesperson, Benjamin. This is a segment I’ve set up for him, and I’ve now distributed it to Benjamin. I informed him, “Benjamin, these are new contacts. I would like you to reach out to each one of them. You can do so via email; it’s easy to do. I’ve already set everything up for you. I’ve provided the attachment and a template that you can use.” Benjamin agrees and proceeds to work with this list. These are the five contacts I want him to reach out to via email. He can select the contact and access the log, which brings up a dialog. I set this up to handle one email at a time so that the salesperson can review the email and gather more information about the contact. If Benjamin wants to use a Word template, I have one previously created. He selects the appropriate template for new contacts and sends out the email, which includes the attachment. This email was successfully sent out to the new contact, along with the attachment.

Contacts

It also added an interaction to the contact, so I can see that in the history of that particular contact. Let’s set up a new Word template to see if we might use that as well. I can say “use Word template,” bring up this dialog box, and what I want to do is create a new one. I want to create a new one for a contact, so I’ll do that. I’m going to download the blank template.

Let’s take a look at it in File Explorer. Here’s a zip file that was downloaded from Business Central. What I want to do is expand that. Here’s a file extracted. It also includes a data source, which is basically a list of fields that are in the contact record that I can use in the contact template. So let’s open this up in Word. I’m in Word here. So what I can do here is I can add the text that I want in the template. I can add fields as well from the contact record. So let’s say I have a quick opening. Go to mailings, and I’ve got the fields right here that I want to use, and what I want to use is the first name. Select that, and I’ll type in a little text here.

So I’ve got a nice little note here, but what I want to do is I want to have Copilot take a look at the text to maybe make it a little better. It’s easy to do. Let’s go up here. You can see Copilot right here. I’ll rewrite with Copilot. Copilot comes up with three options. I like this one. This one’s all right. I like the first one, so I’m going to go back to the first one. I’m going to replace it. I like that. And I’m going to save this now as my new template. I can use that going forward. So creating a template is really.