Omni-channel real-time personalization with Dynamics 365 Customer

The world is getting noisier, which makes it harder to earn customer attention. We’ve previously described the importance of hyper-personalization to break through the noise and enable customers to explore brands and products on their own terms. Regardless of whether they are consumers or business-to-business (B2B) buyers.

At Ignite 2023, we announced a unique Copilot-powered real-time web personalization solution in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in partnership with Optimizely*. Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of this solution in preview to customers worldwide. Current Customer Insights customers can sign up now to access the public preview.

_{*To use Optimizely with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights you need to acquire a license for Optimizely Web Experimentation}

The state of web personalization today 

According to recent research from Econsultancy, 93% of businesses see an uplift in conversion rates because of personalization. Yet only 6% of businesses believe they are doing it well. They face three main challenges.

First, traditional tools for personalization have limited data about your customers. It’s no longer sufficient to show content based on a customer’s browsing history, location, and other derived signals alone. The shift away from 3^rd party cookies further exacerbates this problem.

Second, even the companies that have collected a wealth of data through their Customer Data Platform (CDP) often struggle to synchronize the customer identity and data between their CDP and personalization tools. This synchronization is essential for real-time personalization. It enables companies to use comprehensive customer understanding from all data sources unified in CDP to tailor experiences based on both current behavior and predicted actions.

Third, personalization is disconnected across channels due to the fragmentation of marketing and web technologies and the data silos within each tool. A customer might see one offer option on the web but get a different message in an email or through an ad on social media. With companies expanding the channels through which they engage with users, it becomes increasingly challenging to connect the dots of a customer’s journey.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to the rescue

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Optimizely* enable organizations to deliver hyper-personalized omni-channel experiences across web, social, email and offline channels without writing custom code. Marketers and web admins can seamlessly collaborate to create personalized campaigns using unified data from Customer Insights. This enables companies to:

1. Go beyond browsing history by using comprehensive data from Customer Insights to personalize experiences. For example, leverage the predicted lifetime value of a customer to create targeted experiences.
2. No-Code Personalization using segments from Customer Insights in Optimizely. For instance, create a segment for high-churn customers in Customer Insights and use it in Optimizely to increase engagement when they visit the website next.
3. Ensure uniform personalization across all channels with bi-directional integration between Customer Insights and Optimizely. For example, an audience in Optimizely can be created using the predicted lifetime value from Customer Insights and repeat browsing history from Optimizely. This audience can then receive targeted monetary offers. Marketers can also show the same offer in messages sent via a customer journey in Customer Insights, using Optimizely’s signal (activity) on which treatment they received earlier. This can be done through segments refined based on customer activities or real-time triggers based on specific customer actions.

4. Activate audience across channels in journeys to further target the original visitors with the same offer if the prior web and message touchpoints failed to convert them and export the segments into advertising and social platforms for re-targeting.

There are even more possibilities for customer experience teams. They can, for example, use defined audiences to create ‘lookalike’ segments on social media platforms. This strategy helps them identify and engage new potential customers who share characteristics with their existing audience, expanding their reach and intensifying customer engagement efforts.

“Copilot in Customer Insights and Optimizely not only enable hyper-personalization but democratize it-any marketing or Customer experience team can now deliver such a campaign quickly and without requiring specialized skills – creating segments, journeys and content with the help of Copilot and then setting up the experiments with Optimizely’s market-leading capabilities.”

Kevin Li, VP of Product Strategy at Optimizely.

Leveraging website personalization to accelerate B2B sales

Web personalization can boost B2B sales by showing the right product to the right customer at the right time. CommScope, a leading telecommunication and wireless network company, uses web personalization to increase purchase intent for web visitors and then routes them to a seller based on their cross-channel engagement. This way, CommScope can generate higher quality leads and revenue from its website.

“Customer Insights and Optimizely enable us to personalize each customer’s experience in real-time with consistency across website and email marketing, enabling self-exploration and demand generation, while also accelerating our sales pipeline by empowering our reps to identify the highest intent leads at the right moment.“

Bob Vonderheide, Director of Customer Experience Technologies at CommScope.

What’s next 

This is just the beginning, and there’s much more to come. Working with early adopters, we know that our customers often rely on their marketers and developers collaborating to add scripts to their websites and mobile apps. We will facilitate this collaboration with a developer portal that gives developers tools to test and verify that the script has successfully been added and functioning as the marketer intended. To enable bespoke scenarios such as personalized e-commerce product pages, we will enable collection of custom events including data such as product details, category, and price. Finally, we will reduce noise from unwanted events through filtering based on pages, location, and other attributes. You can follow the release plans to stay updated on when these features become available.

Meanwhile, we will continue to work with customers as part of the preview to measure and optimize real-world latency and performance. We estimate general availability beyond 2024 wave 2 with the enhancements outlined above.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

• To learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights explore Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Watch the video to discover how Optimizely enable web personalization with our Contoso scenario.
• Leverage all our new AI innovations for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys by transitioning to real-time marketing.
• Get a full view of what is coming in 2024 release wave 1 release plan for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Get Optimizely Optimizely is a third-party app which requires a subscription.

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