Next in my blog series on D365 Marketing I am walking through the features and functionality contained within Event Management.
Setup
The Event Management module is contained within D365 Marketing, so once Marketing has been deployed Event Planning will appear as an option in the App Navigation at the bottom left hand corner.
As with all first party apps within D365 CE we have a range of out of the box dashboards pulling information from various parts of the solution. Today I am going to focus on the management of an event, how we can track Event Registrations and manage external elements of an Event such as Speakers and Planning Activities.
The Event Management dashboard gives us a range of visuals and categorisations of our events across events, event registrations and event types. Across all visuals the traditional drilldown and additonal filtering functionality exists as you would expect.
To bring our management of an Event we firstly much create the Event parent record. From here all additional child records will linked and will ensure all information is consolidated.
The main elements of data required at this stage are the Event Name, Event Type and the Start and End Dates. You will also notice the Teams Integration appearing to the right of the form, this is used for hosting virtual events which we will cover in a later blog.
Now that our Event record is created and scheduled, we can start to build and track our agenda. The importance of this will become clearer later in the blog. But essentially this functionality allows us to break our event up into individual sessions which form the overall agenda.
So the Event is now scheduled and we have planned our agenda for the day. In order to allow us to share the event and potentially allow for registrations we need develop an Event Website/Portal.
In reality we will have already registered our company website domain within the overall Marketing solution and therefore we simply need to only develop an event registration form to publish to our site. But D365 Marketing allows us to build a website for your event from scratch, if you so wish. We can stay consistent with our brand by uploading logos and imagery from our Marketing repository, again all stored directly within the solution.
At this point I will refer back to my first post in this series where we talked about Customer Journeys. Because we now need to share our Event and the event registrations site with potential attendees or people we want to target with the Event
So we can now include this Event within a Customer Journey and direct people to the Event Registration page. And those Registrations will now come back into the solution. Once people are registered we can then create Event Passes or Name Tags to be presented to people at the actual event itself. This functionality then extends to allow “Check Ins” so that we can track not only the contacts attendance, but also the sessions they attend within the Event.
Now the Event is scheduled, we have built our agenda and socialised the event with our potential attendee base. We can look towards some of the back office or administrative side of Event Management. The first aspect of this is the ability to track some of the revenue streams and costs associated with running the Event.
These elements are available within the Additional Information tab and allow for the tracking of event costs versus the target ROI of the event itself.
In the run up to the Event there will be various planning activities and progress checks with the Marketing team. These activities can all be tracked using the Timeline. The timeline also extends to the Event Registration entity which will be created once a contact registers on the Event Website. The Registration record allows us to track an individual registration from the point of creation, through their attendance at the event, and post the event as well.
Standard information is tracked here, but we also have the ability to surface a QR that the contact can provide to act as a way of “checking in” at the event itself.
Any engagement we have with the registrant, in terms of queries they raise or communication we have with them will be tracked in the Timeline.
Now that the registrant has actually registered for the event, we can further itemise the day for them by allowing for individual session registrations as well. This links all the way back to the beginning of this post when we were building out our agenda.
Along with associated costs, and the event registrations, another aspect of the admin side of event management is the ability to manage Speakers. This is a simplistic entity, linked directly to the Event and the Contact entities in our solution and allows us to link a Contact with an Event in the role of Speaker.
Some additional admin functionality exists in terms of the speakers social media links, their speaker cost and the particular topics or subjects they speak about.
And with the ability to link Speakers to particular engagements we can then get visibility of all engagements that a particular speaker has worked on, or is scheduled to work on. This rich information makes it easier to match speakers with a particular topic at a particular event in the future.
The last element of Event Management that I want to cover in today’s blog is the actual end goal of an event and that is to generate revenue or in this case, Leads.
We are now assuming the Event has taken place and we have a number of registrants, their attendance status, the sessions they checked in to and the speakers they heard from. We can now essentially generate leads for each one of those contacts and push these leads into our sales process.
This enables our sales managers to contact the leads, with all of the event information at their finger tips and allow them to build better relationship with these contacts/leads.
There are some more elements to the Event Management module which I will cover in a later blog. Fundamentally the Event Management module gives users the ability to manage events and event registrations, socialise the event through Customer Journeys using email or website collateral, track the administrative side of events and ultimately provide a seamless pathway into a potential sales process.
Hope you all enjoyed this post on the D365 Marketing Event Management. Take Care, Speak Soon!
Comments