Northrop & Johnson, a global luxury yacht company hosts numerous events globally each year. Unfortunately, there was no automated process in place to arrange, execute, and follow up on each event, from initial planning to promotion to attendee registration to final analytics, and ultimately lead generation/sales. The marketing team desired to implement an event marketing tool through which they can efficiently and effectively manage the event processes from start to finish.

Challenge

Coffee + Dunn was engaged to support Northrop & Johnson in the development of their event management process using Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing. N&J was seeking a more efficient and automated process to send invitations, capture registrations, record attendees, and monitor the process and results.

Solution

Northrop & Johnson and Coffee + Dunn developed an automated process to effectively manage and execute the company’s exclusive events. Leveraging Dynamics 365 for Marketing and its powerful segmentation capability, Coffee + Dunn developed the process for importing and segmenting invitees and building marketing emails, RSVP forms and pages (Attending vs. Not Attending).  In addition, the team developed a customer journey to achieve the trigger-base automated communication throughout the event. This ultimately allowed Northrop & Johnson to send timely emails to segmented invitees, track registrants  RSVP status, and oversee each contact’s journey through the entire event process.

Results

Northrop & Johnson successfully launched the customer journey for its first exclusive event. With the triggered customer journey based on the RSVP status, 20% of the initial invitees registered. N&J was also able to track non-attendees through a separate RSVP form that indicated any contacts not attending. However, N&J was still able to track the invitee’s interest in their company, but remove them from future reminder invitations for this particular event. Furthermore, for those invitees who did not respond to the initial invitationl, they automatically received a second invite after a few days. Northrop & Johnson received an additional 10% more registrants from this second invite. In total, Northrop & Johnson received a 60% response rate (RSVP’d yes and no) with their first automated event communication/registration journey in Dynamics 365 for Marketing representing a significant increase over previous manual efforts.

Northrop & Johnson has continued to expand their use of Dynamics 365 for Marketing for event marketing.  In addition to its inherent integration with Dynamics 365 for Sales (CRM), the marketing solution leveragesMicrosoft’s Power Platform to develop custom PowerBI event reports to get even more insight from their efforts.

For more information regarding Dynamics 365 for Marketing or Coffee + Dunn services, please contact us at info@coffee-dunn.com or visit www.coffee-dunn.com.