Microsoft announced that the company is retiring Dynamics 365 Marketing and will rebrand most of its current features as part of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
Currently, Customer Insights is a customer data platform that helps deliver personalized customer experiences and provides a holistic view of who your customers are and how they engage with your platform.
However, the new combined offering changes the standalone Customer Insights and Marketing into a single offering.
What will the new product be called?
The merged product will simply be called Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Within this product, two separate apps will be included:
While the name is unchanged, the new Customer Insights offering is expanded to include both the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data.
How is Dynamics 365 Marketing impacted by this announcement?
Dynamics 365 Marketing is becoming Customer Insights – Journeys. This is a change in a name, not a merge between or within apps. The current Marketing app functionality remains the same. It will continue to have outbound and real-time modules. While Microsoft continues to support outbound marketing, the focus is shifting toward real-time marketing due to its superior functionality and effectiveness. The company plans to transition all customers to real-time marketing within the coming year, in light of the numerous advantages.
Transition to real-time marketing
Real-time marketing introduces new ways of marketing by integrating the latest AI technologies while covering and enhancing traditional outbound scenarios. It offers a wealth of benefits to deliver engaging B2C and B2B experiences.
For new Customer Insights – Journeys customers, the focus will solely be on real-time marketing, ensuring a modernized and efficient approach to customer engagement. The focus of the shift is on providing businesses with tools to personalize experiences and enhance customer connections for growth. The combination of the two products certainly makes sense – it brings together the customer data platform and Real-Time Marketing. The matchup enables the full scope of data clients need to optimally engage their customers around the events, behaviors, and actions that both reflect their interests and the way each prefers to interact with the client’s business.
Done well, this approach can create a more connected customer experience, leveraging interactions from any system at any point during the customer’s lifecycle.
Updated Microsoft Customer Insights license
Similar to previous solutions, updated solution will also follow a prepaid capacity model where capacity is shared at the tenant level.
The new product will have the following two capacity units:
On September 1, 2023, the new combined offering will become available to all customers. After that date, new customers will only be able to purchase the combined offering. If you are an existing standalone Dynamics 365 Marketing and/or Customer Insights customer, you can renew your existing licensing for one contractual cycle before transitioning to the new Customer Insights combined licensing. It’s important to note that this renewal must be contracted before September 1, 2024.
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