Become a Dynamics 365 expert with Syvantis Learn
Provide additional details about the offer you're running.
As a marketer, connecting with your audience efficiently matters. You want to make the best use of your time and move quickly, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice design that keeps audiences engaged.
Many marketers end up wasting time recreating the same emails from scratch each time, but did you know that you can create reusable content in fast, repeatable steps? Brand profile themes, templates, and content blocks help you avoid rebuilding designs for content you’ll reuse.
What we cover:
Brand profile
Brand profiles allow you to quickly apply consistent branding across your marketing assets. Pull in standardized brand guidelines, social links, and configure sender settings, and apply them to your content with a click, saving you from having to memorize your style guide or recreate the same themes in every new design. This fosters brand continuity and can be especially helpful when multiple team members are creating content.
Any brand profile you’ve created can be accessed in the designer interface, and once a profile is selected, all elements in your email or form will update to match the preset scheme.
Image: The brand profile section in your Customer Insights – Journeys email builder
It is important to note that if you adjust any profile settings, once you return to your email, the changes will be reflected in your content —except for items that have already been published and sent—so be sure to double-check your content before sending it out!
System administrators can set up brand profiles in a few simple steps:
- Select settings in the bottom left corner of your system
- Select Customer engagement
- Select the Brand profiles option
- Create a new brand profile
Image: Brand profiles page in Customer Insights - Journeys
There will be four tabs at the top: general, senders, social links, and theme. The General tab is where you can name your brand profile, assign an owner, add a description, and choose whether to make this your default brand profile to start with when creating content. Once the general tab is set, let’s talk about each tab in your brand profile and how to set up each element.
Image: Brand profile tabs, including General, Senders, Social links, and Theme
Set your senders
The “Senders” section configures pre-set senders with a from email, from name, and reply-to email. Once set, every time you open an email builder and set a brand profile, whether you’re working from a template or creating from scratch, you will not need to manually enter this information before sending your email. Set it once, and it’s done. Small details like this can make a world of difference in simplifying your processes.
And if an email ever needs different sender information, you can delete and replace the default.
Image: The sender's page within your brand profile of Customer Insights - Journeys.
Let’s say you have an email marketing campaign and want the email to be sent by an overarching company email address, like Marketing@company.com.—You can set that in the “from email” section.
But perhaps you’d rather have recipients see your actual company name or a customer engagement representative as the face of this campaign. You can easily change the “from name” to your desired sender. It’s like changing your social media display name without shifting your handle.
If someone responds directly to a marketing email, where will the replies go? You have control over that with the “reply-to email” field! This lets you know exactly which inbox to monitor, so no incoming emails are missed.
Link your socials
Define your brand's social links directly in your brand profile by adding your LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube URLs, which you will then pull into your assets through dynamic content. These are editable in the themes settings if you ever adjust your social URLs. No more copy-pasting your socials into your emails!
Image: The social links page within the brand profile of Customer Insights – Journeys
Determine your design theme
The themes tab lets you set up a color palette, background, text styles, buttons and links, and custom fonts to match your company's guidelines, allowing you to apply preset company branding when adding buttons, borders, links, or other design elements to your marketing assets.
Your theme colors can be established in the color palette section, where you can enter your brand colors to select from. You can also adjust the background color and border styles if you select the “Background” drop-down.
Image: Brand profile, Theme color palette, and background dropdown menu
In the text styles dropdown, set your specific heading and paragraph styles, such as font, color, and size.
Image: Brand profile, Text style dropdown options
When setting your font, you can also specify backup fonts for your content to use if a recipient’s email client doesn't have the first option you choose. This way, you still have control over the email design options, even for audiences with limited viewing capabilities. Be aware that you risk increased load times and some emails being flagged as spam when using custom fonts, as they may be unrecognized. It may be best to use the custom fonts sparingly.
Templates
So, brand profiles help standardize marketing assets by setting guardrails as you build them, but let’s take this concept a step further. You’re probably already aware that you can create templates for emails, forms, and journeys to give your team reliable starting points rather than requiring everyone to build from scratch time and time again.
In Customer Insights – Journeys, under the Assets section in the left menu bar, you will see the “Templates” section. Selecting that option takes you to a page where you can choose email, form, or journey, which opens a list view of your templates for that content type.
Image: The templates section in Customer Insights – Journeys
You can click new to create one from scratch and begin constructing your template, or, if you are already in the midst of creating an email or journey and realize it would make a great starting point for the next time, you can save it as a template right from the builder.
Image: In your email builder, click the drop-down caret to see the option to save as a template. This is useful for live-in-the-moment realization rather than a pre-plan to create a specific template.
These steps work when creating email and journey templates.
Form templates, however, must be built from scratch—there's no option to save a draft form as a template. However, we have one suggestion to speed this process along using the HTML function in your form builder. The HTML code workaround is simple. Once you have created a form you would like to save as a template, you’ll simply access the form HTML and copy the contents (be careful to copy it in full!). Once copied, you can create a new form, open the HTML file, and clear its contents. Once empty, paste what you copied.
Image: The HTML code button in the Customer Insights – Journeys email builder
Content blocks
Last but certainly not least, let’s take template building to a microcosm. Content blocks are similar to templates, but with this feature, you can control the individual sections and elements that make up your emails. Content blocks are located in the Assets section of the left menu bar in Customer Insights – Journeys.
Image: Content blocks section in Customer Insights - Journeys
Content blocks are most useful when you are creating content where you don’t need an entire template but instead want to incorporate specific, preconfigured sections, eliminating the need to rebuild them for each use case. Anyone in the Customer Insights – Journey system can build and save content blocks, like templates; this is not specific to being a system admin.
Imagine building with Legos: you can take the Batman Lego head, put it on a Superman Lego body, and finish it off with Flash Lego legs and create a completely new Lego from these different pieces. That is essentially what you are doing with content blocks—dragging and dropping a header, paired with multiple body sections and a footer, to create a complete piece of content in just a few steps.
When creating a piece of content, such as an email, to use content blocks, click the 2nd panel option to the right of your email builder; it opens a list of your available blocks. From there, you can just drag and drop blocks to build your email the way you envision.
Image: The content blocks panel in the Customer Insights – Journeys email builder
If you know you have created content blocks, but they are not showing up, this is most likely because they are not yet live. Be sure to select “Ready to send” in your content blocks to publish them and use them in your content builders. You can do this one by one or in bulk, via the activation/deactivation button if you want to set multiple live at once.
Content blocks are not yet dynamic, meaning any changes you make to your content blocks will not automatically apply to all the blocks currently in use. However, Microsoft is rolling out a new update in Release Wave 1 that lets you choose whether your content blocks are dynamic or static, adding an extra layer of customization and editability. To find out more about this feature, be sure to check out our new 2026 Customer Insights - Journeys Release Wave 1 blog. Until the update has been officially applied to your system, any edited blocks will need to be deleted and re-added to your emails and email templates for your adjustments to take effect.
To learn more about content blocks, be sure to check out Microsoft's documentation discussing this feature in more detail.
Customer Insights – Journeys is a tool, and when used to its full capabilities, it can help save time on your design work and the configuration of your marketing materials. There are still many features and tools to explore in the Dynamics 365 marketing system, so be sure to dive into our Marketing catalog, where we discuss all things Customer Insights – Journeys!
