Your CRM data can be clean, complete, and technically accurate and still be difficult for marketing to use.  That’s because data quality is only part of the equation.  The way your CRM organizes contacts, accounts, opportunities, products, interests, activities, and other information determines what marketers can actually do with that data. If those relationships weren’t designed with marketing in mind, seemingly simple requests can become surprisingly difficult.  If those requests routinely require exports, spreadsheets, complicated workarounds, or help from a CRM administrator, the problem may not be the data itself.  […]

Marketing teams expect automation to make them more independent.  A marketer should be able to identify an audience, build a campaign, create a customer journey, make changes, launch it, and understand the results without opening a support ticket every time something changes.  For some organizations using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, the reality can be more complicated.  The issue isn’t that marketers can’t use Dynamics 365 marketing tools. Microsoft has built extensive functionality for segmentation, journeys, personalization, consent management, analytics, and more.  The question is how much technical […]

Getting someone to opt in to SMS is a win. But the opt-in itself isn’t the strategy.  Someone has just given you permission to communicate through one of their most immediate, personal and protected channels. What happens next can determine whether SMS becomes a useful part of the customer relationship or another stream of promotional messages they quickly tune out.  The first few interactions matter. You need to confirm the subscription, deliver whatever value you promised, establish expectations, and decide how SMS should fit into the broader customer journey.  And that […]

Your lead nurture campaign is running. Emails are going out. People are opening them. Some are even clicking.  But leads aren’t moving forward.  When that happens, it’s tempting to start tweaking subject lines, rewriting emails, or changing the send cadence. Those things can matter, but a nurture campaign that isn’t converting often has a bigger problem.  The audience may be wrong. The content may not match where leads are in the buying process. The workflow may ignore signs of changing intent. Or you may be measuring email engagement without looking at whether the nurture is actually doing what it […]

Every field you add to a form gives you another piece of information about a prospect. It also gives that prospect one more reason not to complete it.  That creates a familiar problem for marketers. Make a form too long and conversion rates can suffer. Make it too short and you may end up with contacts you know very little about. Remove too many safeguards and an apparent increase in conversions could actually be an increase in spam and bot submissions.  Good form optimization is about finding the right balance.  The goal isn’t simply to generate the highest possible number of form submissions. It’s to remove […]