One way to look at the transition is as an opportunity to do a bit of Spring cleaning. There are probably a good few no longer relevant segments, journeys, and emails and their related templates. As you are planning your transition, you can eliminate some of the clutter that may be filling your views.  

All segments created in Outbound Marketing will still function normally in Real-Time Journeys. However, there have been improvements made to segments in Real-Time that improve the performance and refresh rate, particularly for larger segments. Outbound marketing segments should also continue to exist in Real-Time even beyond the removal of the Outbound module. Because of this, segments can probably remain lower on the list of things to transition, and you can slowly recreate them as you have time. Cleaning up the excess is still probably a good idea though. 

In Outbound, compliance and consent were handled through the use of a subscription center form and page, subscription lists, and some toggles on the contact record. Real-time journeys, rather, uses a contact point consent-based strategy. This means it deals with opt-in/out at the email address or phone number level, rather than at the contact record level. If two contacts have the same email address and opt-out from an email sent to that address, it will cover both contacts.

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There are quite a few other little settings that can be configured to tailor the app more to your specific business needs. You may not need all of them, so don’t worry about going through every individual menu. The Feature Switches section does have quite a few useful items in it. At the very least, a perusal through that page will likely be quite beneficial. 

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Emails, their templates, and content blocks all have easy-to-use import tools. If you’ve planned out which emails, templates, and content blocks you need to bring over in advance, you can just select those to quickly bring into the new area.

After importing, you will see a new list view in each of these areas called “Imported from outbound.” Each imported email, template, and block will include [outbound] in the title and has been reverted to a ‘draft’ status. This is the time to review every imported item and make sure each element is working as you need. Chances are that, because of the functional differences between Outbound and Real-time, you will need to adjust portions of these content items.

Pay attention to dynamic content. There has been a change to how the markers for dynamic content are denoted between Outbound and Real-time. We’ve seen that the import tool may not properly update those pieces of dynamic content to the new format. 

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As mentioned previously, all your Outbound marketing segments will still exist. In theory, the only setup that may be required for your segments is recreating any segments in Real-time for the improved performance they offer.

Without any direct import tool, journeys will need to be recreated from scratch in Real-time. For the most part, you should be able to translate everything from Outbound pretty easily, despite the changes to journeys you will notice as you enter the designer canvas.

Should you struggle to directly recreate any journey, there may be a different way to accomplish that same journey goal in Real-time.

But, this may be a good time to consider if some of your journeys would be better suited to using triggers as a kickoff rather than segment membership. For example, most long-term lead nurture campaigns could probably be trigger-based rather than utilize a dynamic segment.

Also, you’ll want to consider how you can incorporate exit triggers to pull audience members out of a journey at certain times, based on audience actions. This is a new feature in Real-time that can be very helpful to pull unengaged members from the journey, or end a journey if a contact fulfills the journey goal before the actual journey ends. 

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Forms also do not have a direct import tool. The underlying architecture for them was just a bit too different to effectively have one. Fortunately, they’re a fair bit easier to deal with on most fronts. It’s the same sort of designer, but the key difference lies in the consent setup. Rather than the subscription lists and unsubscribe check boxes from Outbound, we have Purposes and Topics from our Compliance Profile. These are functionally the same as the subscription lists and unsubscribe buttons, but just molded within this new consent and compliance model. It’s also very important to note that form captures do not as of writing have the built-in UI for field mappings. They will require assistance from someone with developer experience. It does link to Microsoft’s documentation page on the topic and the process itself isn’t particularly complex as it’s largely just filling in field name, but if you’re not used to looking at HTML or JavaScript code, it may appear more daunting.  

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Events are largely the same as they are in Outbound. There’s not really much that needs to be done in terms of migration unless you have events already created for after the transition deadline. Before all that, you’ll definitely want to go into Feature Switches and toggle the session-level registration and event creation in Real-Time Journeys switches. Real-Time also offers a much better method of handling your emailing for events through conditional and dynamic content in emails coupled with trigger-based journeys. You can create just one email as a sort of template for event registrations and, when used in a journey triggered by the Event Registration trigger, have all the content automatically generated and sent. One email, one journey to cover all of your events. Real-Time is also absorbing the marketing portal, so event web pages are hosted by the app and will no longer require Power Pages. They can also be embedded on external sites. On the docket for the 2024 Release Wave 2 with a general availability of February 2025 is a customizable event portal with its own designer for much easier set up compared to Outbound.

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The transition from Outbound Marketing to Real-Time Journeys may seem to be a little more daunting than it is in reality. There’s still a good amount of time to complete the transition and much of it can be broken into smaller pieces over that time frame. At the end of the end of the day, the app is going to offer a lot more flexibility once you’ve gotten up and running in Real-time. It’s going to be a little bit of extra work over the next few months, but you’ll likely be much more satisfied afterward. 

We’ve created a handy downloadable and printable checklist to help you cross of the to-do items in this blog!

We know this is quite the change, so we created an entire course in our on-demand learning platform, Syvantis Learn, to help you transition to Real-time! The great part? We’ve made it free for anyone to access.