Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys is a top-tier choice when it comes to marketing applications. In this app, each step of the customer journey is optimized, allowing you to enhance your customer interactions, utilize multi-channel capabilities, and lean on automated lead scoring models to weed out leads with minimal interest. But that’s just the beginning of what Customer Insights - Journeys has to offer.

While every business will approach the move from Outbound to Real-time in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys a little differently, we've compiled two example timelines to help you conceptualize what key tasks we recommend completing during each phase of either a gradual or rapid transition.

As you’re likely aware, Microsoft will be removing the Outbound Marketing Module from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys app on June 30th, 2025. To prevent the interruption of your marketing efforts, you’ll want to work on getting your organization transitioned over to the Real-Time Journeys module within the next few months. This checklist can help to organize your thoughts and plan for the transition. There’s a simplified version with just the checklist items at the bottom. 

This checklist can help to organize and plans for the transition. It includes required initial configuration, migrating content, and considerations for the new functionality available in Real-time.

Depending on your business, you may choose to create a content strategy, which can be a completely separate document or can be housed inside this bigger marketing strategy. But what should you include in an effective content strategy, and how should you approach building one?

Check out this infographic that talks about exactly those questions and includes a few additional resources to delve into further questions you may have. View this infographic online and download it to reference in future or share with colleagues!

Creating marketing emails is a core part of any digital strategy, and a marketing platform like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys (formerly known as “Marketing”) makes real-time email campaign creation and management a breeze. If you’re a current Outbound Marketing customer, you may be wondering what the transition to Real-Time means for you and the things that you currently do in the Outbound area of the application. Namely, all the time and energy you’ve spent building and sending marketing emails in your Customer Journeys. But good news: you can very quickly and easily import your existing emails to use in Real-Time Marketing!

As a marketer, your analytics count. When it comes to sending emails, did you know that you might not be getting all your campaign insights, particularly when your email is sent along to other people outside your initial audience? But not to worry. It's easy to set up and use a "Forward to a friend" link to make sure you're capturing those analytics. Plus, you can make sure your new recipients have the same excellent inbox experience with your marketing efforts as your original audience.

Both Gmail and Yahoo have recently implemented measures to ensure that bulk email senders provide an easy, visible one-click option to unsubscribe within all promotional emails. For businesses using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys (formerly Dynamics 365 Marketing), ensuring compliance is super simple. In addition to the normal subscription center links with which you are probably familiar, Microsoft has added a new one-click unsubscribe feature.

If you’ve done any A/B testing in the Outbound Marketing module, you’ll know that the system is primarily based around setting the tests up at the email-level since that is the primary focus of Outbound Marketing. Real-Time Marketing has a couple additional channel options, such as texting, outside of just sending emails. As such, it pulls the A/B testing back to the Journey-level. Rather than setting up an A/B test on an email and then adding the element to the customer journey, we instead will simply add an action to our journey and select “Test which variation performs better.”

Depending on where you’re located and where your clients or contacts are located, there are data protection laws you must adhere to. You may have heard of GDPR (or General Data Protection Regulation) that went into effect in 2018 within the EU. Other data protection laws include CAN-SPAM for email marketing in the US, and CASL in Canada. The details of these regulations are readily available online, so if you haven’t already, be sure to familiarize yourself and your marketing team with the laws you must follow depending on your and your clients’ locations. Consent management in D365 will help you adhere to whichever laws you must follow.

The general best practice is that all contacts must opt-in to receive marketing communications from you, but that they also have the ability to easily opt-out and revoke this consent at any time. So, how is marketing consent established, and how does Dynamics store it?

Microsoft has announced that on September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will be combined into a single product offering called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. The new unified application will help users continue to deliver excellent customer experiences and harness customer data in ways that further brand loyalty and growth.

Although this sounds like a major change, there’s no need to panic. We’ve broken down everything you need to know about the unified app and how you can benefit from it.

To put it broadly, bounced emails are ones that were unable to be properly delivered to a recipient’s mailbox. There are a variety of reasons that an email may have bounced and they fall into two main types: hard and soft.

Receiving a canned or boilerplate email message is not nearly as impactful as opening your inbox and seeing an email that seems to be written just for you. Personalization drives engagement, heightened engagement improves the impact of your sales and marketing pursuits. That’s the whole theory behind Dynamic content as a method of making your sales and marketing messages more impactful without spending an abundance of time personalizing emails for each user. And you don’t even need to know how to code to create Dynamic content in your emails.

Responsive design is the design and development approach where creators consider and adjust their web-based content (like emails and websites) to consider the size and layout of the device it will be viewed on and adapt accordingly. The goal is for your web content to render to provide an optimal experience—usability, navigation, visual appeal—no matter the size of a user’s screen size.

In today’s outbound marketing, we must consider mobile-friendly design when planning our email campaigns, but we also cannot forget the desktop experience. Dynamics 365 Marketing has recently added further responsive design options to help your emails flux based on the device it’s being viewed on.

Whether it be a new product rollout, lead re-engagement, subscription upgrades, or any other sales and marketing endeavor, every business needs a strategy to get their message to their target audience in a structured, automated way. That’s just what customer journeys do, by providing highly customizable and personalizable options to build your own outbound and real-time marketing campaigns. Building a customer journey is a straightforward and intuitive process that uses tiles to establish elements of the journey – from who is sent along the journey to every step that occurs along the pipeline. There are quite a few tile options that allow for a huge variety of journey objectives to serve the needs of any business.

Ever heard the proverb “out of sight, out of mind”? Well, the things we measure are in our sight, on our minds, and therefore more likely to be the target of change. We live in an increasingly data-driven world, where gathering data, making sense of it, and garnering actionable insight from it is as easy as it has ever been. The data begs to be used.

Welcome to the second instillation of the series “Habits of highly effective marketers,” where we explore some of the fundamental actions that marketers take to do their job and do it stunningly. In our last blog, we went deep into why and how to document your marketing strategies and processes. Next up are two similar components of marketing strategy and content development: cross linking and cross posting. Fostered from a desire to use content to its fullest extent and the wish to provide viewers valuable content at their fingertips, these two strategies can improve social media reach and SEO (when used carefully and judiciously). Let’s dig in.

Adding a CRM solution to your manufacturing business’ tech stack helps you better understand customer needs and gives you the tools and insight you need to reach them in the best way possible at every touchpoint, whether they’re at the very top of your sales funnel or about to place a repeat order. Dynamics 365 Marketing is a flexible CRM solution that helps businesses in any industry create, manage, and analyze the results of a wide variety of materials to help even marketing beginners create high-quality, engaging content that speaks to your prospects, leads, and longstanding clients. Here are some ways manufacturers can benefit from using Dynamics 365 Marketing to engage prospects and drive revenue.

In marketing, “effective” can mean different things based on the company, team, and even individual. But the core of marketing is intrigue—to get potential customers or clients interested in what you do. The products you sell, the services you provide, your unique brand. That’s a very general, high-level goal, but each company will also have their more specific desired marketing outcomes, as well as their own ways to achieve it.

A cohesive brand is one that is consistent no matter what or where it is. Visually, your brand can be differentiated by the colors, logo, fonts, and other defining characteristics unique to you. Keeping your brand identifiable across all touchpoints your customers encounter boosts brand recognition, which increases reach and effectiveness of your marketing content.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of cloud-based business applications of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. Data-driven and inter-connected, these apps sport modern and aligned interfaces, robust built-in capabilities, and highly customizable development. Whether you use one or many of these apps, there are many build-in features that allow you to create brand-specific content.

Design principles fill entire textbooks and four-year college degrees. Safe to say the subject is ripe with intrigue and value, yet it is fraught with trouble spots. Strong design for all content is a key requirement for marketing content, such as website pages, blog images, and social media posts.

Because blogs and social media are often created in-house, it’s necessary to nurture the skills needed to build professional visuals for your marketing content, whether it be an infographic, a blog image, a thumbnail image, a social media visual, a header for email campaigns, or anything. But if you or your team is not trained in graphic design, how do you achieve this? Sticking to design best practices is a good first step, and below we will share a handful to start you on the right path.

Social media is a hotbed for marketing these days: everyone is on it, every business needs to take advantage of it, and there are many strategies to engage your audience across various platforms. Marketers work hard to create strong content for their business’ social media accounts—from witty, thoughtful, or research-backed posts, to content from their own website (like blogs, infographics, and whitepapers), to engaging advertisements.

So, when most of the hard work is done, how do you ensure that those efforts are as effective as possible and return as much on your investment as it can? Believe it or not, it’s often simple steps that lead to immense shifts in social media likes, clicks, website visits, and leads.

Things like real-time customer journeys, recommended actions, SMS messaging, and using natural language to create targeted segments are exciting (and relatively new) features that can help you connect with customers in the ways that matter most. Now, AI has been harnessed in Dynamics 365 Marketing for a new, imaginative feature called Content ideas.

Here’s how to use Content ideas to quickly generate on-message content to create personalized customer experiences:

A cornerstone of achieving web conversions is strategically placing landing pages as the first point of contact with your website. Landing pages are a bit different from your normal web page—having a smaller scope and narrowed down objective—although still an extension of your overall web presence. When done right, both you and your visitor gain something from this initial point of contact, and it can generate even more web engagement and repeat visitors in the future.

In Dynamics 365 Marketing, customer journeys are orchestrated to guide a prospect through a predetermined, flexible path toward a preset end goal. Whether this goal is buying a product, scheduling a discover call, or closing a loan, a customer journey is easy to create and personalize to the needs of a segment, which may be thought of as a demographic, or group, of people who share similar characteristic.

When creating a customer journey, you want the most value for your efforts. Here are six practices that can lead to more effective customer journeys.

Business to business (or B2B) marketing is tricky and made even more so if you are a B2B marketer in an industry that might be considered, for lack of better words, “boring” in the social media space. But B2B companies can no longer afford to coast with weak or absent social media. A whopping 60-84% of people consider mobile devices essential to their work, and mobile devices are the main vehicle by which social media is consumed. With their devices out, it’s more likely they will check in on social, and no matter the platform they are surfing, their personal and professional wires are likely to cross on social media. With that in mind, a company is remiss if they don’t leverage that.

The search is always on for how businesses can achieve more with the effort they put in. To achieve the goal of more results with less effort, the Dynamics 365 Marketing 2021 Release Wave 2 focuses on engaging customers across all touchpoints when that contact will have the most impact, personalizing customer interactions using their own data for a heightened sense of connectivity, and making the strong and speedy business decisions that are afforded to Microsoft customers through AI-driven analytics.

Get the most out of your team’s various marketing endeavors by using smart insights and analytics from Dynamics 365 Marketing. Using analytics is a simple, yet effective way to measure the successes and pain points of marketing efforts to clearly see what’s working well and determine how to fill in the gaps.

Know that you want to measure marketing analytics, but aren’t sure where to start? Here’s a brief look at a few of the things you can track using Dynamics 365 Marketing insights and how to use the data to make better, more informed decisions.

Microsoft continues to expand the functionality of the Dynamics 365 Marketing to provide better tools for businesses to connect with their audiences. New to the armory of features is SMS messaging and push notifications for mobile apps. This gives new ways to take control of communication efforts all within the same system. Currently, these features are only in public preview, so they don’t quite have their full functionality. However, they can still be utilized to get a taste of their full potential and help to brainstorm ways a company could benefits from them.

CRMs are powerful tools for automation and record keeping, but did you know that they can also take on a bulk of digital marketing activities too? Finding an all-in-one CRM solution can drive success and help teams exceed expectations, all within a single workspace.

Effective marketing strategies and tactics are designed to cultivate enough interest to make sure each sales-focused interaction has a stable foundation. Creating lead scoring models in Dynamics 365 Marketing autogenerates a score to indicate each contact or account’s likelihood of closing a deal based on interactions with websites, emails, events, and more. Scoring leads allows users to focus on the most quality prospects by cutting through cluttered sales pipelines and highlighting each lead’s progress towards becoming sales ready.

New real-time marketing features in Dynamics 365 Marketing provide users with tools to engage customers in the moments that matter using a variety of customizable dimensions like branching paths and triggers. Insights can be harnessed by AI capabilities to automatically generate recommendations for actions when it comes to content, channels, and analytics.

Segments (marketing lists) and integrations also allow organizations to seamlessly leverage customer profile information to ensure each customer engagement utilizes the full range of tools available for an overall personalized experience.

Good digital strategy has the potential to transform business operations by driving revenue, building broad brand awareness, uncovering new and untapped audiences, boosting online engagement, and increasing customer retention and loyalty.

Email marketing is a powerful tool that shouldn't be tossed to the side. Emails grant the ability to tailor the exact information going out to recipients, customize visual elements, track analytics, and require minimal effort for a sound return on investment.

These simple tactics can be used to make sure every email packs a punch to get the most out of marketing efforts.

Engaging a customer at the opportune times is a tricky, time-consuming business; yet, this is a necessary act for many businesses to build and retain a loyal and satisfied customer base. Gathering touchpoint data, analyzing customer actions, anticipating customer desires, and sending proper emails or other communication at the right moment—what if all this effort and toil could happen automatically based on the customer’s actions? Fortunately, automation for a broad range of purposes, even across several Microsoft applications, can be easily established.

This blog will demonstrate just one example of Microsoft applications—such as Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft Bookings, and Power Automate—interacting seamlessly to provide optimal, efficient business solutions for you, and a cohesive, satisfying end-to-end experience for your customers.

Event management is a complex feat from start to finish, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. Event planning and management tools within Dynamics 365 Marketing help guide users through every step of the process from preliminary budgeting, registration, session planning, webinar broadcasting, post-event analytics, and beyond. Users can utilize two helpful features within the event work area to manage event sponsors and vendors.

Digital marketing strategies became more crucial than ever this past year, especially when many businesses realized an effective digital presence was a key factor in maintaining successful operations. Dynamics 365 Marketing takes the guesswork out of campaigns and makes it easy to put together polished digital marketing content while managing it all in one cohesive interface. Check out some of the key functionalities of Dynamics 365 Marketing that allow for a high degree of customization to branded marketing content.

Gathering customer feedback is one of the most effective means to improving your company’s products and services. Successful companies—those who wish to build resilience, foster a growth-mindset, and earn and maintain customer loyalty—listen to and deliver on what their customers desire.

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is an online survey platform that can be used with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing that can help any business create and manage simple, effective surveys as part of their journey toward resilience, growth, and customer loyalty.

Digital marketing platforms typically focus on email marketing or social media marketing, while avoiding other important digital marketing aspects like landing pages, forms, and event management, Dynamics 365 Marketing differentiates itself by housing all of the features above in one place and integrating with the powerful contact and account management capabilities of Dynamics 365 Sales.

For marketing forms specifically, the true benefit lies in embedding marketing forms on external websites and collecting contact information that can be used in email campaigns or tracked as leads in Dynamics 365 Sales.

Dynamics 365 Marketing comes out-of-the-box with a wide range of functionality. Customer journeys provide everything from quick, single-email blasts to much larger, dynamic, multi-step marketing automation processes. Content tiles within Customer Journeys allow users to drag and drop different marketing activities like emails, phone calls, appointments, workflows, and much more within a campaign.

In addition to these tiles, Custom Channels can be created to expand upon the base tool set. Custom channels can be things like social media platforms or SMS marketing that can be used within a customer journey just like the default tiles.

Any company that offers a product or service, collects data related to residents, or otherwise operates within the European Union must be sure it complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It can be a bit confusing to navigate at first, particularly for organizations in the U.S. or otherwise outside of the EU. Dynamics 365 Marketing is fully equipped and ready to easy the process of ensuring data collection procedures meet the requirements of the EU.

When it comes to creating consistent, high-quality digital marketing content, templates are key. Content templates ensure that brand standards are met by including default colors and logos that are consistent with the brand. Templates also provide management with a way to approve design elements without needed to approve each piece of content.

Dynamics 365 Marketing provides out-of-the-box templates for landing pages, forms, marketing emails, and more while giving managers the tools to create customized templates for digital marketers to use in day-to-day work.

As part of Dynamics 365 2021 Release Wave 1, Dynamics 365 Marketing received an overhaul of its email designer last month. The new designer gives a more modern look and feel in addition to new features. With the changes, users may find it a bit jarring when opening an email record for the first time. However the new layout should feel overall more streamlined after getting better acquainted.