customer journey d365 marketing

Customer Journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing

In Dynamics 365 Marketing, a Customer Journey is a curated, end-to-end customer purchase process, including all contact and decision-making points. With multifaceted campaign automation, it identifies leads and guides the target audience to move toward purchasing as they interact with your company.

One of its core elements is communication automation, triggered by both specific audience actions and their machine-generated scores based on customizable criteria. For example, our clients have been able to set up branching and responsive event communications based on customers’ behavior, including open and click rates, event sign ups, attendance, and more.

Table of Contents

Parts of a Customer Journey in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Video walkthrough of customer journeys.

• Benefits of Customer Journeys 
• Use Cases of Customer Journeys 
• Strategic Considerations for Customer Journeys

Limitations of Customer Journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Further resources, customer journey: definition.

In general terms, a customer journey describes a prospect’s or a customer’s complete series of interactions with your company across all channels. For instance, a prospect might interact with your social post, browse your website, and sign up for your newsletter before ever talking to a salesperson or making a purchase.

A Customer Journey is essentially a complex marketing campaign in Dynamics 365 with functionality that creates branching maps of possible paths. It includes a drag-and-drop journey designer which contains a dynamic pipeline consisting of steps to send personalized email or text messages, schedule follow up activities for sales team members, trigger workflows, and execute campaign-related activities. As each member of the target segment progresses down the path, their reactions and interactions are tracked in the system, providing insight into the true reach and effectiveness of the marketing initiative.

Core Customer Journey Tiles

Customer Journey tiles are the building blocks of all Customer Journeys. They include smart segmentation, automatic actions and scheduling sales activities, as well as if/then and split logic with wait and delay times.

• Wait For vs Wait Until
• If/Then Branches
• Communications
• Custom Channels (talk to your Dynamics 365 partners about development for unique needs)

Real-time Customer Journey Tiles

Real-time Customer Journey tiles are additional tiles that enable “moment-based” marketing, which provides the audience with immediate, personalized interactions based on their unique profile, changing needs, and journey frequency.

• Custom Branching
• Journey Repetition Frequency
• Custom Journey Exit Points
• A/B Testing and Reporting
• Text and Push Notifications
• AI-based Channel Engagement
• Custom Triggers

How to Create a Customer Journey in Dynamics 365 Marketing

• Go to Marketing > Marketing Execution > Customer Journeys.
• Click on “+ New” in the Command Bar.
• To start creating a completely new Customer Journey, click on “Skip” in the template selection dialog box.
• In the Customer Journey designer, click on the “+” or “Set Audience” link.
• Select the target “Segment” that is the audience of the Customer Journey.
• Click on the “+” in the canvas and select “Send an Email” from the menu.
• Select the email tile and then add the specific Marketing Email that you want to add to the Customer Journey.
• For emails that contain a link to secondary location like a Landing Page, go to the “Send an email” tile Properties to add the correct Page.
• On the Customer Journey canvas, add an “If/then” tile to the right of the “Send an Email” tile.
• Set the Source to the name of the Marketing Page in the “Send an email” tile and set the Condition to “have registration”.
• Set the “Wait up to” to the length of time you want the system to wait before executing the action based on no interaction (the “NO” path). This is the longest time the system will wait to execute an action since you will set the wait criteria of the positive (“the “YES” path) interaction in the next step.
• To the right of the “If/then” tile, add two “Send an Email” tiles. Place the one for the positive path at the top and the one for the negative path underneath it.
• Save the Customer Journey.
• Go to the “General” tab to name and schedule it.
• Click on “Check for Errors” for the system to generate any error notifications. If errors are found, click on the drop down next to the error notification to find and fix the errors.
• Click on the “Go Live” button on the Command Bar to publish the Customer Journey.

Benefits of Customer Journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Customer Journeys automate the myriad of manual activities that marketers must create, execute, and maintain as Marketing and Sales teams interact with their audience. Marketers can see the specific effects of every executed action including click maps and behavior statistics so they can make informed edits in real-time.

For speedier set up, marketers can leverage basic templates as a foundation for their own journeys. Custom templates can also be created and reused for recurring marketing efforts such as annual events or similarly structured campaigns to ensure both accuracy and speed in the set-up process.

When the marketing team is ready to allow the Customer Journey to run without supervision, AI optimization watches past responses and path changes to predictively guide the right audience members through the right branches. (The journey can still be paused or edited whenever necessary.) This allows a smaller workforce to accomplish the tasks of large department, freeing them up to focus on campaign strategy.

Use Cases of Customer Journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Customer Journeys are very helpful for companies that need to increase their marketing efficacy and increase both Marketing Qualified Lead (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) without increasing head count. These companies are interested in participating more strategically in the customer lifecycle to provide better overall service and create a faster path through the sales pipeline.

Likewise, companies who want to track digital marketing activities against actual revenue and understand which are the most effective at bringing in new customers will benefit from Customer Journeys.

Strategic Considerations for Customer Journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Before you set up Customer Journeys, you should consider how your customers interact with your company and how you would prefer your teams interact. Understanding the variety of paths that a prospect or customer can take to assess and complete a purchase is important to design journeys that provide the proper reactions and next steps for the audience.

After you set up Customer Journeys, you should monitor changes in your lead qualification and opportunity win/loss rates. Then marketers can work backward through published Customer Journeys to find the exact points that are successful.

Ask an experienced Dynamics Partner to help you map the appropriate actions along your customer paths as well as create the tracking dashboards and notification mechanisms that allow your Marketing team to make critical decisions.

It’s important to be aware that Customer Journeys can’t create a map of your customer’s interactions for you, nor can it create optimal paths from scratch. Customer Journeys require understanding your prospects’ and your customers’ existing processes and designing paths that are right for each group.

Customer Journeys also do not create system workflows, but they can connect existing Power Automate workflows with the journey to add more complexity.

For broader context, read our Intro to Marketing Automation in Dynamics 365 . And for more foundational information on Dynamics 365 Marketing, read our What is Dynamics 365 for Marketing or Microsoft’s overview .

For help understanding how Customer Journeys can work for your company’s specific needs and processes, reach out to a skilled Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Partner like Encore .

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Andrea Oklobdzija

Andrea is a Microsoft Certified Dynamics 365 Customer Service Functional Consultant, Dynamics 365 Sales Functional Consultant, and Power Platform Functional Consultant. She has experience in multiple industries, including information technology, energy and utilities, and environmental services. Andrea is skilled in business and system requirement gathering, analysis/design, development, and implementation.

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How To Create a Customer Journey in Dynamics 365 Marketing ?

If you are new to Dynamics 365 Marketing, and even otherwise, creating a customer journey in the platform could sound like a new buzzword to you. So, how do you create it?

Before I go into the details, I will like to brush up the basics. Let’s see what the customer journey in Dynamics Marketing 365 is.

Dynamics Marketing 365 Customer Journey, What Is It?

I will start with the customer journey first.

What Is A Customer Journey?

It is a story that sums up the buying pattern, behavior, and understanding of your users. It is a journey of your customer describing how they land on your website, what their goals are, and what you can do to improve their journey, so they keep coming back. In short, a customer journey is a variety of touchpoints through which the customer moves from the awareness stage to engagement and finally makes a purchase.

Forrester rightly describes the customer journey as a variety of touchpoints through which the customer moves from the awareness stage to engagement and finally makes a purchase.

So, Next Up, What Is Customer Journey In Dynamics Marketing 365?

In my view, Dynamics Marketing 365 simplifies the entire process of tracking the customer journey by providing a WYSIWYG platform. It streamlines the entire process by which customers discover your product and evaluate it for their needs before making a purchase. All the information gathered is tracked and folllows throughout the rest of the Dynamics 365 suite, providing a seamless experience for your team.

Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey makes it easier for your employees to map out the various touchpoints that your customer go through, using automated messaging, interactive decision points, activity generation, and so on. Additionally, many actions can now be automated , which relieves your team of some redundant tasks.

What Are The Benefits Of Doing Campaigns And Quick Campaigns With Dynamics 365 Marketing?

The core advantage of using Microsoft Dynamics 365 is campaign management. For starters, the platform allows you to manage two different kinds of campaigns – Campaign and quick Campaign.

While Quick Campaign allows you to target a single list of contacts or customers, you can target multiple marketing lists with Campaign and make the best use of available templates and metrics.

That is to say, running Campaign and Quick Campaign in Microsoft Dynamics comes with a range of benefits, including:

• Understand your leads better
• Create graphical content to support marketing initiatives
• Make the most out of your LinkedIn business prospects
• Facilitate easy knowledge sharing between the teams
• Prioritize leads for more conversions
• Derive actionable outputs from surveys
• Easily track campaigns and evaluate results to build profitable long-term relationships

Dynamics 365 Marketing Customer Journey: References And Explanation Tiles

• Email: The email tile automatically sends an email to each contact that enters the customer journey.

Branches tiles help you exercise control over your pipeline, depending on your leads’ interaction record.

• If/Then: If/then tile holds contacts until a certain condition is made, or until a pre-set amount of time expires.
• Split: Splitter tiles provide a pathway to a random selection of contacts.
• Wait for: This tile holds comtact for a certain period of time before passing them to the next tile in their journey. This tile could be used to introduce a delay between sending an initial marketing message and then sending a reminder.
• Wait until: This tile holds contact until a certain date is reached, say Dec 20.

Actions tiles trigger a new action or launch a workflow within Microsoft 365. These tiles, essentially, help you to follow up on crucial touchpoints during a customer journey.

• Create Lead: This tile, quite predictably, builds a new lead for each contact that enters this tile. However, this tile will not cross-check if the lead is already existing, and will always create a new one.
• LinkedIn Campaign: This tile passes each contact which comes in contact with it to a specific LinkedIn campaign, thus making it easier for the next tile to get triggered if any of the lead gen forms belong to the concerned campaign on LinkedIn.
• Launch Workflow: A launch-workflow tile is used to invoke a custom workflow, irrespective of the position of a customer in their customer journey. You can use these workflows to create alerts, and more, according to the needs of your marketing campaign and strategy.

Sales Activities

These tiles record the completed or planned real-world activities. For instance, when a contact enters a Task, a Phone Call, or an Appointment task, the tile generates a new actvitity respective to that contact.

Custom Tiles

Custom content tiles, essentially, provide you with the same set of features as the other tiles mentioned above. The difference, however, is that these tiles are created by partners and third-party developers.

Legacy Tiles

• More often than not, an event tile is positioned under email tiles, where they contain a link to the website being talked about in the email content.
• Marketing-Form
• A marketing-form tile is an embedded form generally hosted on a third-party website. You can append this form towards the end of your email and place it at the start of the journey to activate an inbound campaign.
• Marketing-Page
• This tile represents a native page designed in Dynamics 365 and running on a Dynamics 365 platform.

How To Create A Customer Journey In Dynamics 365 Marketing

In this section, I will teach you how to create a customer journey in Dynamics 365 Marketing. But before I start, I recommend you have these two things:

• A segment that contains the contacts you will send the email to.
• A marketing email that is live and valid.

Next, here are the steps you need to follow for creating Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey:

• Head on to Marketing > Marketing Execution . Next, click Customer Journeys > New .
• This will open the New Customer Journey page with a dialog box that says Select a Customer Journey Template . You can use this template to design a customer journey. If you want to start from scratch, click Skip .
• You will be taken to the customer journey Designer . Here, can create a pipeline representing each step of the journey.
• Select Set Audience , or click Select + . You will find Audience properties pane on the right side of the page. Leave the default settings as it is.
• From the segment lookup field, select the segment you want to target with your campaign.
• As you select the segment, the segment name will be populated in the first tab, and the Audience pane will display the corresponding segment properties.
• Next, click Select+ , and select Send an Email .
• Select the email tile and the message that you want to send on the canvas.
• This will populate the Send an Email tile with the email name. Segment preview and properties will be displayed in the Send an Email properties pane.
• Switch to the General tab from the Designer tab and enter the name, start date time, end date time, time zone, and define the content settings.
• Now, save the work you have done so far.
• To ensure that everything is in line with your requirements, click Check for Errors in the command bar. Fix any errors if indicated. If not, your journey is ready to go.

Generating Activities From A Dynamics 365 Marketing Customer Journey

Yes, you can also generate activities from a customer journey. Activities can be used to record customer interactions, such as appointments, phone calls, and tasks. You can get these activities from your customer journey the same way you created a customer journey with signups. Follow the same procedure and then append an Activity tile to the trigger that triggers the phone-call task associated with each contact who submits the registration form.

Automate Your Campaigns in Dynamics 365 Marketing With Customer Journeys

Dynamics 365 Marketing is a storehouse of customer journeys. You can generate as many as you want by visualizing and automating the paths that your customers will adopt to make a purchase.

A customer journey could be extremely simple, like the one only involving a short interaction, like a single email campaign. On the other hand, a more complex journey could include a complete process from discovery to getting converted to a lead.

How To Design Your Journey

You can view and create your customer journeys by going to Marketing > Marketing Execution and clicking on Customer Journeys. A marketing-form and marketing-page tile can be nested under an email tile to activate triggering. You can also place it at the beginning of the journey to create an inbound campaign. Event tiles are nested below the emails to trigger a set of events.

I understand that creating a Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey could be overwhelming, especially when you have tons of other tasks to take care of. This is when GestiOnTheGo helps you create awesome customer journeys that track each step of your customer through various touchpoints and provides you with the required data and insights.

Got any queries or stuck anywhere? Contact us today .

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December 09, 2020 by Frédéric Charest by Frédéric Charest VP of Marketing

Data-driven Growth Marketer with a Passion for SEO - Driving Results through Analytics and Optimization

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[ 1 ] Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, Rick LaFond, Jeffrey L. Cohen, Matt Wakeman, Jeff Goldberg, Alan Antin, 20 September 2023.

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[ 2 ] Unified People refers to a uniquely identified individual that is created through a collection of defined data source sets from multiple systems, represented by a profile.

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Building a Custom(er) Journey in D365 Marketing

Dynamics 365 Marketing offers a rich set of available features to create very dynamic and advanced customer journeys that provide marketers multiple channels to reach out to their customers or potential customers.  With the introduction of event-based and real-time marketing enhancements the D365 Marketing has never been more useful.  Even with all this functionality available there may still be a need for custom segments built around the use of custom tables in the DataVerse as well as building your own custom events in D365 Marketing.

Adding Custom Tables to Marketing Segments in D365 Marketing

One of the most basic customizations or configuration changes you may want to make to your D365 Marketing is to allow your Marketing team to build customer journey segments based on data from your own custom tables.  This is straightforward, but it does need to be setup in Marketing for the journey builders to take advantage of the custom tables data.

Create the custom table as you would any other new table in the D365 DataVerse.

Add the custom table to the Dataset in D365 Marketing.

Build your customer segment using the newly added custom table.

Custom Realtime Marketing Events in D365 Marketing

There may be an instance where a marketer may have the need to use some custom customer event or action to use in their customer journey like abandoning a shopping cart on the company website.  This may be an example where your marketing department may want to send the contact more information on some items, they had in their shopping cart that was abandoned on the ecommerce website.  This would be a custom event that could be used in D365 Marketing customer journeys. [1]

Creating a new Event

New event triggers can be created under the Real-time marketing area in D365 Marketing.

Then the new event trigger step-by-step process will be initiated.  This will guide you through creating your event trigger so it’s ready to use in your Marketing customer journeys. 

D365 Marketing Insights

You can add attributes of the data being targeted to use in your customer journey.  Real-time Marketing allows marketers to reach customers through many different channels (mobile, chat, etc.), so the need to create custom events based on actions taken by the potential customers also needs to be created and developed.

Ex.   Perhaps your Salesperson reaches out to a potential new customer in a Teams chat session to explain your new product and you would like to engage that customer in a customer journey and send them follow-up materials.  This could be an example of an event “Sales Chat with Customer” that would trigger some action in a customer journey.

Now that a custom event has been developed in D365 Realtime Marketing, as a marketer, you will be able to use this new event to:

• Make decisions on what “path” to send the customer on the journey.
• Send the customer to another customer journey.
• Ex.  Customer Sales Has Chatted With (Segment)
• Assign a follow-up task to the Salesperson “who” chatted with the customer.

Knowing what actions or events your customers have participated in is a very powerful tool in the marketing toolkit.  It allows a marketer to narrow the focus of their marketing efforts even more and present the customer with timely marketing materials based on what they are doing in Realtime not receive an outdated email weeks after they have engaged with your companies’ website or a Salesperson.

Check out a related blog:

Dynamics 365 Marketing: All About the [Customer] Journey

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/real-time-marketing-custom-events

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Digital Customer Journeys & Predictive Lead Scoring (D365 Marketing)

Creating an effective digital customer journey or knowing how to use predictive lead scoring can give your sales or marketing team the competitive edge but staying on top of best practices with these tools is almost its own full-time job. In our post today we will cover some of the top tools in Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing — and exactly how you could be using them to optimize operative tasks, increase efficiency, and grow your business.

Let’s look at four of the top features for D365 Sales + Marketing:

• Market Profiling and Market Segmentation (Save time and money in marketing outreach when you find the best prospects for your company.)
• Digital Customer Journeys (Increase sales conversions and customer retention when you create and refine the user experience and messaging touchpoints.)
• Artificial Intelligence Marketing (Reduce human error, save time by automating certain tasks, and find business intelligence and customer insights with this bleeding edge technology.)
• Predictive Lead Scoring (Increase sales conversions when your team is focusing their best energy on the best prospects in your sales pipeline.)

Let’s take a look at these features in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales + Marketing and see how your marketing professionals can utilize them to maximize business outreach, opportunities, and the growth of your company.

Market Profiling and Segmentation Creation in Dynamics 365 Sales + Marketing

What is market profiling.

Market profiling is a process used by businesses to utilize collected information of their customers to be able to identify their target customers. This is one place that customer satisfaction surveys or brand tracking surveys are especially useful, because a big portion of market profiling is categorizing the target customers into groups. Once you have identified and created those groups, then  market segmentation comes into play.

What is Market Segmentation?

A market segmentation is a type of marketing strategy where specific groups of consumers are identified so that a company can strategically market and cater its products and services to that specific group. Ideally, each market segmentation would have its own customized messaging, buyer personas, content and sales assets, etc.

For example, Cobalt is a CRM solutions company.  Since there are many kinds of organizations across hundreds of industries that need a CRM — and not everyone needs the same feature set or functionality in a CRM — we have created sophisticated market segments for the clients we partner with most often. The needs of a professional association organization are likely different than a company with a small-to-medium sized sales and marketing team, and our market segmentations reflect those different needs.

Market Profiling and Market Segmentation Example

Dynamics 365 Sales + Marketing allows users to create Segments for their Contacts (customer records) that could be based on demographics, organization relationships, behaviors, and more. Let’s keep using Cobalt as a working example to illustrate what this looks like.

If we were attending a CRM convention in Washington DC, a demographic segment could be created that will target customers who attended the event or work in the DC area. A behavioral segment could also be created that targets customers who showed interest in our services in the past and who also registered for our Cobalt Insights newsletter emails.

In both cases, we would be able to quickly group these unique customer segments and follow-up in an efficient way. It’s easy to create these segment records in Dynamics 365 and use them with customer journey implementations.

Key Benefits of Market Profiling and Market Segmentation

There are a handful of benefits from market profiling and market segmentation, but the main ones include:

• the ability to focus on the valuable customers
• easily creating new product and service development opportunities
• being able to utilize marketing resources more efficiently

By profiling and segmenting your target customers, you will be able to pinpoint the most valuable  sales prospects rather than wasting precious outreach efforts in the general market.  

Our team has also seen this lead to opportunities for new product development and innovation, as profiling and segmenting your customers surfaces the needs and pain points in each market segmentation.

I also want to point out that market profiling and market segmentation have really helped our team maximize the efficiency of our marketing resources. That’s valuable no matter what the size of your marketing team or budget are. Here’s just one quick example of that efficiency and the money it saves our team.

Most of the pricing for marketing software is dependent on the number of marketing contacts or emails that get sent out. Effective market segmentation helps you spend that money where it counts the most. Dynamics 365 also allows segments to be dynamic, so it can automatically filter the best prospects in your pipeline in or out using the real-time data it collects.

Digital Customer Journeys Creation and Design

What are digital customer journeys.

Digital customer journeys are a generic way to refer to all of the interactions that a customer has with your brand from start to finish. In Dynamics 365 Sales + Marketing, digital customer journeys can be created to map out and model the interactions that your segmented customers will proceed through and engage in. These digital customer journeys can be utilized for a wide range of marketing processes, from a simple single-email campaign to a more complex and highly interactive lead generation process.

Depending on how your customers interact with each touchpoint, they will have a tailored customer experience that will ultimately lead to higher sales. Below is an example of what a simple digital customer journey looks like in Dynamics 365 Sales + Marketing. It targets Contacts who have showed interest by submitting a Newsletter form and an email has been sent out to that segment.

By creating and designing these digital customer journeys, you are able to visualize and automate the entire process that your customers will experience. Through these customer journeys, you will have a better understanding of every customer touchpoint. This allos you to refine and modify each of these touchpoints in future campaigns, improving the overall customer experience.

It’s the automation aspect of the digital customer journeys that really increases operational efficiencies and savings. When you take the time to refine digital customer journeys, it can lead to increased customer loyalty. Customers tend to return to businesses that provide an excellent customer experience.

The intelligent analytics and insights that Dynamics 365 Sales collects from customer journeys are strong. That information has been huge for Cobalt’s team as we keep track of how our audience is interacting with the journey paths — and discovering where we need to improve to maximize contact interactions in the future.

Artificial Intelligence Marketing Tools and Capabilities

As artificial intelligence (AI) technology grows ever more sophisticated, Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 marketing boast standout implementation of this powerful tech. That’s part of what you get when your company spends billions of dollars on research and development for the software — instead of marketing campaigns to sell a quickly designed product (I’m looking at you, brand new CRM platforms!).

Some of the AI marketing tools in Dynamics 365 include Content Ideas, Spam Checker, and Automated Scheduler. Let’s take a closer look at these AI capabilities and how they can benefit your business.

Content Ideas is an AI marketing tool that assists your marketing agents by providing new ways to express their thoughts and speed up the email concept process to completion. It works by providing key points and initial thoughts, and the artificial intelligence generates a variety of longer content suggestions that your agents can build upon. Agents can then add these suggestions to the draft, only use them as inspiration, or try a different route altogether.

The Spam Checker uses some really clever AI to analyze your email messages and generate a predictive score of how likely the email will be flagged as spam. This powerful tool allows you to revise your email messages as needed to minimize the possibility of your messages being flagged as spam. You can use this tool during or after email content creation.

And lastly, the Automated Scheduler marketing tool is powered by AI that shows which days and times have the highest possibility of your customers actively reading your email messages. The AI continues to  learn by analyzing historical data of when your customers have opened and interacted with your email messages in the past. It will then generate the ideal day and time to send future messages to increase successful communication efforts.

Predictive Lead Scoring

What is predictive lead scoring.

Predictive lead scoring is the process of ranking the leads in your sales pipeline with a customized formula or algorithm designed to estimate each prospects likelihood of conversion into successful sales opportunities. Predictive lead scoring often leverages some amount of artificial intelligence and evolving insights gained from data collection and analysis inside an organization’s CRM.

Within Dynamics 365 Sales, the predictive lead scoring functionality is called Sales Insights and it uses historical customer behaviors and other key attributes to prioritize leads. In Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can design a lead scoring model that will calculate a score based details that include demographics, firmographics, and specific interactions.

Every lead scoring model will include a sales-ready threshold. When a lead surpasses that threshold, it can trigger new business processes allowing your sales agents to quickly pick up the sales-ready opportunities with those leads.

Both Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing give you the ability to easily design these lead scoring models yourself. You will have intuitive control over customizing how the lead is measured, so you can identify the hottest leads in your pipeline according to your evolving business priorities, quarterly sales goals, and unique organizational needs.

Here is an example of a lead scoring model we built where if a Contact has attended the CRM Convention and/or registered for the Newsletter email, corresponding points are added to the lead score. Notice that I have set the sales-ready threshold score to 160.

What are some other ways that predictive lead scoring can help your sales team?

Predictive lead scoring in Dynamics 365 Sales + Marketing minimizes human error in the lead evaluation process, saves everyone time, and gives you a machine that is continuously learning and improving the lead predictions as more historical data is collected. Once again, the automation factor with Dynamics 365 Sales + Marketing will save time and effort for your team in the predictive lead scoring process. The time it will save your team will help them win back time for actually converting those prospects into sales.

Explore Digital Customer Journeys, Predictive Lead Scoring and More with Cobalt

I hope the glimpses of the interface and bottom-line value for your team help you see how Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing are a powerful CRM solution for sales and marketing teams. Let’s take a deeper dive on what digital customer journeys and predictive lead scoring could look like for your team. Let’s explore exactly how the AI tools, market segmentation, and more could save your team time and money this year.

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Customer Insights - Journeys tile reference

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This article describes the various journey capabilities available in Customer Insights - Journeys. For complete examples of creating customer journeys, see Create a trigger-based journey and Create a segment-based journey .

Journey start

The journey start configuration lets you define how customers can start the journey.

Trigger-based journey

• Trigger to start the journey : Customers start the journey as soon as the selected trigger occurs.
• Repeating the journey : Lets you configure how soon customers can repeat the journey if the trigger to start the journey occurs again. You can allow customers to repeat the journey immediately, or only allow them to repeat the journey after a delay interval.
• Exclude this segment : Members of this segment won't be allowed to start the journey. This is an easy way to filter out certain segments of customers from starting the journey, even if they performed the trigger to start the journey.
• Journey Timing : Lets you specify the time window in which customers can start the journey. Customers must perform the journey start trigger after the start time to enter the journey. No new customers will be allowed to start the journey after the end time. The end time only affects when customers can start the journey. If a customer is already in the journey, they'll be allowed to continue the journey even after the end time.
• Handling unresolved profile : This option is only available for trigger-based journeys that target Customer Insights - Data profiles. It takes time to create a full Customer Insights - Data profile. If the full profile isn’t available at the time the person triggers the journey, they can either start the journey immediately using defaults for any missing profile data or wait for the full profile to be available before starting the journey. To successfully communicate with someone without a profile, the trigger must specify email (contactpoint_email) or phone (contactpoint_phone) attributes. See Create a custom trigger . For journeys such as sending purchase order confirmations, both new customers and existing customers can trigger the journey. A new customer may not have a full profile when they make the purchase. By selecting the option to start the journey immediately even if the full profile isn't available, you can ensure new users get the order confirmation immediately without having to wait. All profile attributes for these new users will be treated as empty, so it's important to always include default fallbacks in personalized content as well as attribute branches.

Segment-based journey

• Audience : The audience property lets you specify the segment of people that start the journey. Segment-based journeys support segments from outbound marketing as well as segments created in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data . The journey uses audience data based upon the segment selected. For example, if the journey is started with an outbound marketing segment that contains a segment of Contacts , the journey uses Contacts as its Audience data. Similarly, if the journey is started using a Customer Insights - Data segment that is a segment of Customer Profiles , the journey uses Customer Profile as its Audience data. Once an audience segment has been selected, all other segments used in the journey must be of the same type (segment from outbound marketing or Customer Insights - Data segment).
• Exclude this segment : Members of this segment won't be allowed to start the journey. Specifying an exclusion segment lets you remove anyone from the Audience that starts the journey.
• One time : One time journeys run only once with a static audience segment. This is useful for scenarios like one-time email blasts that are sent on a specific date to a fixed set of customers.
• Ongoing : Ongoing journeys run only once with a dynamic audience segment. This is useful for scenarios like nurture campaigns where anyone who gets added to the audience segment can start the journey as soon as they're added to the segment.
• Repeating : These journeys repeat based on the time interval specified. Every time the journey repeats, all the members of the audience segment go through the journey. If any new members get added to the segment between the repeat interval, those new members will only go through the journey the next time the journey repeats. This type of journey is useful for scenarios like renewal reminders, where you might want to send people through the journey every time they're up for a renewal.

Journey end

By default, customers end the journey when they complete all the steps. You can set additional ways for customers to exit the journey by using triggers or segments.

• Exit when an event occurs : Customers who perform this trigger will immediately exit the journey no matter where they are in the journey. This provides an easy way to remove customers who perform the trigger from the journey, ensuring that customers don't receive irrelevant messages from your customer journey.
• Exit by segment : Customers who are part of this segment will immediately exit the journey. This capability is often referred to as a suppression segment and helps you ensure that members of this segment are suppressed from the customer journey. Exit by segment removes members of that segment from wherever they are in the customer journey. This is notably different from the exclude by segment property in journey start, which will only exclude members of the exclusion segment from starting the journey.

Journey goal

Journey goals let you track and analyze the performance of the journey . You can use a trigger as the journey goal and measure the success of the journey based on the customers who perform the trigger as they're going through the journey.

Journey goals can also help you determine the winner of A/B tests and find the best channel for channel optimization. For more information about using A/B tests, see A/B tests in Customer Insights - Journeys .

Messaging customers

Customer Insights - Journeys customer journeys let you reach customers through various channels including:

• Send an email
• Send a text message
• Send a push notification

A/B tests allow you to measure which channel or content messaging strategy leads to higher success. For more information about using A/B tests, see A/B tests in Customer Insights - Journeys .

Channel optimization

Channel optimization uses AI to find the best channel to reach each individual customer and improve your engagement. To learn more about channel optimization, see Use AI-driven run-time channel optimization .

Branching the customer journey

If/then branch.

The if/then branch lets you branch the customer journey based on customer actions like opening an email or completing a purchase. The if/then branch waits for the customer to perform the trigger within the time limit specified. If the customer performs the trigger, they'll immediately proceed down the yes branch. If the customer doesn't perform the trigger within the time limit specified, they'll proceed down the no branch after the time limit has passed.

For example, you can configure the if/then branch to wait for the Email opened event on a previously sent email. If the time limit is set to 1 day , the if/then branch waits for the customer to open the email within that day. If the customer opens the email within that day, they'll immediately proceed down the yes branch. If the customer doesn't open the email within that day, they'll proceed down the no branch after one day.

Attribute branch

The attribute branch lets you branch the journey based on various attributes including:

• Customer's attributes : You can branch the journey based on the customer's attributes like address or age. The journey's audience defines which attributes will be shown. For example, if the journey is for Contacts, only attributes for Contacts will be shown.
• Customer's segment membership : You can branch the journey based on whether the customer is part of a segment. The journey's audience defines which segments will be shown. For example, only Contacts-based segments will be shown for journeys that are meant for Contacts.
• Attributes in triggers : You can branch the journey based on attribute values in triggers. For attribute values to be shown, the trigger must have previously occurred in the journey. Thus, you can only check the attribute values for a trigger that starts a trigger-based journey, or triggers being used in an if/then branch.

The attribute branch checks for attribute values the moment a customer enters this step. For example, when a customer enters the attribute branch step, the segment membership condition will check whether the customer is part of the specified segment at that instant.

Preview: Activate a custom trigger

A preview feature is a feature that is not complete, but is made available before it’s officially in a release so customers can get early access and provide feedback. Preview features aren’t meant for production use and may have limited or restricted functionality.

Microsoft doesn't provide support for this preview feature. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Technical Support won’t be able to help you with issues or questions. Preview features aren’t meant for production use, especially to process personal data or other data that are subject to legal or regulatory compliance requirements.

Triggering a custom event allows you to use activate a custom event at any point in the customer journey. Additional journeys or Power Automate flows connected to the custom event will be triggered immediately when a customer reaches the tile. This includes custom triggers used in exit criteria, goals, and if/then branches for journeys.

When using a custom trigger, you can choose which data to send as part of the trigger. You can choose customer profile data (for instance, attributes of the target audience such as contacts, leads, etc.) and data from other triggers used in the journey (for instance, attributes of the trigger that starts the journey).

For example, a loan application journey could have various steps that require a human agent’s approval. By creating a separate customer journey or Power Automate Flow for loan exception approval, you can trigger it from various points in the loan application journeys where exceptions can occur. The data you send with the trigger can be used to populate dynamic content or as inputs to other Flow actions.

To learn more about triggering a custom event, see Preview: Trigger an action outside of a journey .

The wait step holds the customer in the journey for the specified wait period.

The maximum time a wait tile can wait for is 90 days or 12 weeks. The maximum time limitation applies whether selecting an amount of time or setting a fixed date.

You can configure the wait step using the following parameters:

• A set amount of time : Customers wait for the specified amount of time (for example, one hour or one day). The time period starts as soon as customers enter the wait step.
• Until a specific date and time : Customers wait until the specified date and time. If the date and time are already in the past, customers will immediately proceed to the next step.
• Until a time specified by a trigger : Customers wait for the date and time that are specified by a trigger attribute. This configuration is useful for scenarios like appointment reminders, where you can choose to wait one day before the appointment to send a reminder. The date and time information must be included in a trigger that has previously occurred in the journey.

Additional resources

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3 new ways to build customer relationships using Dynamics 365 Marketing

• By Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience
• Content type

What a world we are living in today. There is a lot that is different—how we live, how we work, and how we interact. It has never been more important in business to be able to reach out to customers in a personal and relevant way. We are doing everything in our power to help you build relationships and interact with your customers at scale in this new world. This is the goal of the current Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing release.

The Dynamics 365 Marketing 2020 release wave 2 plan— where you can build customer journeys faster using reimagined editing, in-place previews, and improved journey insights —is now rolling out and we expect it to be available to all regions by the last week of October. We would like to highlight the top three features of this release. We are looking forward to it, and hope that you will be, too.

1. Build amazing customer journeys faster

To interact with customers at scale, we design customer journeys. We took the opportunity in this release to redesign the customer journey canvas making it easier, faster, and more productive for you to automate your customer experience.

A key design point was to reduce the amount of context switching, clicking, and scrolling to reduce the level of effort to complete tasks and make things more intuitive. We also focused on improving performance and rendering, as they are fundamental to the experience as you use the product. Here are the top enhancements:

• Fast and fluid experience . Load time, zoom, and panning are faster and more fluid than ever.
• In-place journey menu . You no longer need to repetitively switch between the toolbox and the properties pane. You can now click to add the next step in the journey directly on the canvas, saving you time and effort.
• Simplified tiles to help you avoid mistakes. Tiles that enable specific actions make it clear and easy for you to build the journey the right way from the start, with options to wait for, wait until, or enable if/then.
• Enhanced journey insights . Analyze journey performance using our new, easier-to-read charts and overlays.
• Customized canvas view . One-click to fit the entire journey into the canvas, fluid zoom, drag to pan, and choose between horizontal and vertical canvas layouts.

2. Webinars and meetings directly integrated with Microsoft Teams

In-person events feel like a distant memory now. We have all pivoted to online and digital channels. In order to help you better run virtual events, we worked with the Microsoft Teams organization to integrate Dynamics 365 Marketing Event Management features with Teams Live Events (webinars) and Meetings (online group meetings with audio and visual), so you can run your team’s webinars and meetings using direct integration with Teams .

The event registration functionality in Dynamics 365 Marketing has been updated so you can continue to use your existing event registration process and, with the press of a button, switch the event or session to online streaming. For your customers, accessing the virtual event could not be easier. Your registrants can use the one-click check in from the event registration confirmation email that is designed and sent through Dynamics 365 Marketing.

We’ve made it seamless to track who attended the event. You can trigger customer journeys based on their registration, sign in, and you can nurture customers through their event experience, for example, sending post-event surveys through Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice and then branching to deliver different experiences based on the results of that survey.

3. Create and manage social media posts and easily monitor performance

We have also made it easier for you to connect with your customers over social media. With this release, we have made some big improvements to our social features across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter .

We completely reworked the user interface to improve the usability of post authoring, images, and links, and added support for emojis and the option to delete posts. The planning calendar is refreshed with improved visuals, colors, and icons, and you can now post directly from the calendar.

For LinkedIn, we addressed the top request we heard from you—supporting both personal and company pages. That functionality pairs well with the integration we already had with LinkedIn Lead Gen and LinkedIn Matched Audiences. From your feedback, we also heard that customers wanted post performance and social network-specific KPIs. So, we are announcing that KPIs will be provided, such as reactions, comments, impressions, and more.

We look forward to hearing from you about this release and we have a lot more coming—stay tuned!

Let us know what you think and additional features or capabilities you would like to see in future releases for Dynamics 365 Marketing through our Dynamics 365 Marketing Community site .

Learn more about the 2020 release wave 2 plan

For ongoing information about recently released and planned new features, keep an eye on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2020 release wave 2 plan . Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Marketing .

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Blog Our Thoughts

From d365 marketing to d365 customer insights journeys – whats new.

Why Dynamics 365 Marketing is on the move!

Microsoft have recently announced changes to its Marketing automation Solutions and where they have integrated the D365 Marketing into D365 Customer Insights.  

Starting from the 1st of September 2023, Microsoft has renamed Dynamics 365 Marketing to become Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys.  This post is a quick guide to help you get a better understanding of why Dynnamics 365 Marketing is on the move! and how to get from D365 Marketing to D365 Customer Insights Journeys – What’s New?

The biggest change to come from this is that any new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Journeys licenses will only contain real-time marketing features and won’t feature outbound marketing.

This new Customer Insights module will now contain all the real-time marketing features from the Dynamics 365 Marketing module and will also feature powerful AI-powered Copilot integration.

Microsoft have now bundled Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Data and Customer Journeys into the one product – which will make it easier for you to now access the benefits of both solutions within the one module.

Note: The new D365 Customer Insights will not feature the outbound marketing features.   If you are an existing user of D365 Marketing you will still be able to access outbound marketing – however,  Microsoft is encouraging all D365 Marketing users to plan for a seamless migration of their existing customer journeys to the real-time marketing platform – Customer Insights.

Why is D365 Marketing on the move?  

The move from D365 Marketing to Customer Insights Data and Journeys will enable Marketing Departments to leverage AI-driven data consumption for the creation of more meaningful customer journeys and scenarios.  This move is designed to offer users the opportunity to create powerful personalised marketing engagement.

The following is an outline on what this move will mean for your business, and how your marketing team/s can take full advantage of the features available.   The good news for existing customers is that you can plan your move gradually, so take your time to familiarise yourself with your options for a seamless transition experience.

Microsoft Customer Insights – Data and Journeys

Microsoft will keep the brand name of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights but have split it out into two D365 Apps as follows:

• Customer Insights – Data which is currently branded as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. This solution enables users to build a unified, real time 360-degree view of customers.
• Customer Insights – Journeys was formerly known as Dynamics 365 Marketing.

What’s Changed with D365 Marketing ?

Outbound Marketing to Real-time Marketing: Marketing will transition to focus on real-time marketing features only.   For new customers, this means they will be installing the D365 Customer Insights Journeys app that only contains real-time marketing features.  The current outbound marketing features will continue to be supported for existing users; however, the outbound marketing features will receive no future updates.  Check out this blog from Microsoft for more details on the Move from outbound to real-time marketing

Real-time marketing offers far more than the traditional outbound marketing by way of powerful real-time marketing functionality – Check it out here Real-time marketing transition FAQs

New Customer Insights – Journeys: Customers receive real-time journeys features only. For more information, please refer to the Default real-time journeys installation . Please note that many of the documentation pages currently refer to outbound features that may not be available or may work differently in real-time journeys. Microsoft is working on updating  this documentation content to note whether it applies to real-time journeys or outbound marketing.

Pricing for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights:

Existing customers have the following two options:

• Customers can choose to remain and renew on the standalone licensing model for another contractual cycle. This renewal must be made during the transitional offer time-frame that will run through to September 1, 2024, with a final contract maturity date that can’t extend beyond September 1, 2027. At the end of the renewed contractual period, customers will then need to transition to the new Customer Insights licensing.
• Existing customers can choose to “true-down” existing contracts on the old standalone licensing model and “step-up” to the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights pricing model on their contractual anniversary and renewal date.

Note: Microsoft Pricing & Licensing may change and please refer to the latest update on Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Pricing & Licensing from Microsoft  

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys has moved beyond the Marketing teams – with AI and natural language input assistance, non marketing specific business users can now build trigger-based journeys that reach customers across multiple touch-points, growing relationships from lead generation to prospects, through to sales and post-sales service and support.

Below is a deep dive into some of the key functionality offered by D365 Customer Insights Journeys:

Engage customers in real time – With trigger-based customer journeys using email,  text message , or push notification channels, organisations can trigger customer journeys in real time, pick the right channel for each individual, and react to customer-led actions in the moments that matter.

Win customers and earn loyalty faster – Working across all customer touchpoints, real-time customer journeys are truly an end-to-end experience.

Personalise the customer experiences with AI – Turn insights into relevant action with AI-driven recommendations for content, channels, and analytics.  Customer Insights – Data segment and profile integration allow organisations to seamlessly leverage the deep customer understanding in Customer Insights – Data.

Grow with a unified, adaptable platform – Easily customize and connect with tools you already use and efficiently manage compliance requirements and accessibility guidelines.

How to engage with customers in Customer Insights – Journeys

When reaching out to your customers with Customer Insights – Journeys, there are three important things to consider:  who ,  what , and  when .

The  who  is your audience – who is this communication for? In Customer Insights – Journeys, your audience is defined by a segment and where segments enable you to breakout your contacts into targeted segment groups that meet certain criteria specifics.  Examples include contact segment targeting based on contact role/functions, geographical locations/s, company size, industry types, and much more.

The  what  is the content and form of your communication – what are you sending? In Customer Insights – Journeys, this can be emails, text messages or push notifications.   These multi communications channels can be used separately or together in one campaign.

The  when  can be simply the proposed actions such as a planned time when you want to send the communication/s.  With Customer Insights – Journeys, it can also be an event that triggers the communication as part of a customer journey.  You can combine multiple forms of communication channels such as emails and/or text messages into journeys that can operate either with an association of a particular segment of contacts at a planned time or that can respond to a “trigger” action to reach out to customer/s at the right time and with the right messaging and interaction.

How to move to the Real-time Marketing Platform with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Journeys?  

The good news is that making the transition is quite easy and there are a number of useful resources to help you with your move – along with reaching out to the Simply Dynamics D365 Solution Experts Now – we’re here to help.

Useful Resources:

Everything you need to know about Real-time Marketing with D365 Customer Insights Journeys – Check it out HERE

Making the Move – Check out the real-time marketing transition resources HERE

Real-time marketing User Guide HERE

Check out the Microsoft Blog explaining the transition to real-time marketing with D365 Customer Insights Journey HERE

If you need any assistance, our D365 Team are here to help! 

Book your Free 30 minute D365 Consultation , or Contact Us Now

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Megan V. Walker

Tips, tricks and ideas for non developer geeks

Customer Insights Journeys or D365 Marketing? All Change

*** note: all information is accurate at date of publishing ***, disclosure : this post may contain affiliate links. full details here.

Last week was a bit of a mind bend. Changes all over the place, and I’ve taken a bit of time to let things marinate, and put together my thoughts on an announcement from Microsoft that changes things for their marketing offering. I don’t have all the answers, but I think it’s important to share my thoughts on exactly what is going on with a change from D365 Marketing to Customer Insights Journeys. That’s a big deal! So what does it actually mean? Below is my interpretation based on what Microsoft has published to date. If info changes or is expanded upon, I will update the post to reflect that. For now, read on for what these changes might mean for you.

NAME CHANGE

We know Microsoft loves a good name change, and this is the first thing to be aware of.  Their recent announcement explained that Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing are coming together. The name of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will be kept, but it will be split in to two apps:

• Customer Insights – Data (currently known as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights) that empowers you to effectively build a unified, real time 360-degree profile of your customers
• Customer Insights – Journeys (currently known as Dynamics 365 Marketing)

More on this change can be found here:  Transition to real-time marketing and transform your Customer Experience

NO MORE OUTBOUND MARKETING

So, this part isn’t entirely true, and I don’t want you to panic, but I do want you to reconsider the urgency and timeline at which you move over to using Realtime Marketing only. From the link below from Microsoft – on September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing will transition to focus on real-time marketing features only. 

New customers will install an app that only contains real-time marketing features. Although outbound marketing features will continue to be supported for existing users, outbound marketing features will receive no future updates.

Move from outbound to real-time marketing

From an FAQ page, Microsoft have stated the following: Over the next year, we invite all customers to fully transition from outbound to real-time marketing. Real-time marketing has already surpassed traditional outbound marketing in functionality, effectiveness, usability testing results, satisfaction surveys, and our innovations and upcoming AI features are exclusively focused on real-time marketing.

Real-time marketing transition FAQs

PRICING CHANGES

Guessing the next question you have is what about pricing? I don’t sell licenses to you so can’t comment on what your exact changes and cost impact would be, but the link below refers directly to how the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will be licensed. I would strongly suggest planning ahead and contacting the partner you purchase your licenses from. From that article, a key part that you fall in to is that existing, standalone Dynamics 365 Marketing and/or Customers Insights customers will have an opportunity to renew their existing licensing for one contractual cycle before transitioning to the new Customer Insights combined licensing. This renewal, however, must be contracted before September 1, 2024. 

After GA on September 1, 2023, existing customers will have two options:

• They can choose to remain and renew on the standalone licensing model for another contractual cycle. This renewal must be made during the transitional offer window that will run through September 1, 2024, with a final contract maturity date that can’t extend beyond September 1, 2027. At the end of the renewed contractual period, customers will then need to transition to the new Customer Insights licensing.
• Existing customers can choose to true down their existing contract on the old standalone licensing model and step-up to the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights pricing model on their contractual anniversary and renewal date.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights FAQs

HOW DO YOU PLAN TO MOVE TO REALTIME?

For me, this is the easiest part about the whole thing! It’s not that difficult to make the move, you just need to make sure a few things are in place before you get going. Compliance is one of the biggest parts of this as it’s handled differently in Realtime Marketing compared with Outbound Marketing. I’ve already written these three blogs to help you get started with this:

• Step One – Compliance Profiles In Realtime Marketing – For Leads and Contacts
• Step Two – Real-time Marketing Subscription Forms
• Step Three – Moving Consent From Subscription Lists To Real-time Marketing Topics

I’ve shared information about Realtime Marketing for some time including creating Emails, Segments, Journeys and Forms. I will continue to blog about Realtime Marketing… and also will still likely call it D365 Marketing for a long time to come.

Bottom line, don’t panic. Just start planning your move gradually to Realtime. It’s going to be fine.

10 thoughts on “ Customer Insights Journeys or D365 Marketing? All Change ”

Recently found your blog and really appreciate the valuable resources you provide. We are new to D365 Marketing and have built most of our emails on the Outbound app because of the ability for time-based triggers. My organization is a B2B financial institution, and we need the ability to send emails at a scheduled time (when certain investment rates are available/posted). Do you know if this feature is planned for Realtime or if there is a workaround?

Hi Orianna, I am a bit puzzled by the comment where you say you have built your emails in Outbound because of time-based triggers. Triggers do not exist in Outbound, only in Realtime. Is that what you meant? I would have thought Realtime would have been perfect to allow for sending out emails at a time when something happens. I guess it depends what you have being updated in D365 in terms of when the investment rates are available and posted. Is that done with a record being created or updated? If so, that would indeed be the perfect way to trigger a Journey with your emails.

I am truly wondering when Microsoft plans to resolve the issue of double opt-in in Real-Time Marketing. It is a basic need and requirement for GDPR compliance, especially now, as Outbound Marketing is being extinguished and replaced by RTM.

Hi Agnieszka, someone else asked the exact same question, please read through the comments for my response which includes a screenshot of a proposed solution. Blog will be out in a few weeks. Not ideal but it gives you an idea of how you could achieve something close to double opt in.

Hi Megan, thanks for your wonderful update – I would have overlooked the news if it wasn’t for your newsletter 😀 Did you find any infos regarding double opt in in RTM? Because for many clients this is essential and as far as I know it can’t be accomplished without OBM (if I missed something, please give me a hint). Best regards, Nina

Hi Nina, there is nothing that I have seen as of yet. I have a blog post coming in a few weeks about creating a Journey that triggers when someone fills out a form to opt in to your purpose and various topics, that informs them of what they subscribed to. That way you could send something that looks like this:

You can provide a link to then opt out should they choose. Not exactly the same as Double Opt In but all I can suggest at this time until Microsoft provide the specific functionality.

Have you heard anything about the future of Marketing Websites that is currently only in OBM? We want to track links and clicks on the website but in all the documentation, I can’t find the future of that. It’s especially frustrating, because Marketing Websites has a section for Form Visits and Form Submissions, but that only applies to OBM forms, and we’re using RTM forms, so we get clicks and link analytics in one place and Form submissions in another, but no real easy way to track form visits vs form submissions. Thank you!

Hi Catrina, there is nothing that I know of yet. One thing to keep in mind, it will still be potentially a year or more before some people end up using an app that does not have any of the Outbound Marketing components in it. So still time for this to be made available as functionality. Also, it is even possible that this piece just gets moved in to the Realtime Marketing tab in the Marketing App and doesn’t ever go away.

Do you have any information on when we will see the new app containing Customer insights and Real-time Marketing in a trial?

Hi Carrie, I am guessing September 1st… that’s the date showing in the FAQ’s my article links to. I know nothing more than anyone else at this point and just as eager to see as you! 🙂

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