Start with Customer Journey Templates

Dynamics 365 Marketing includes premade customer journey templates that can give you a starting point for different marketing scenarios. Some templates contain only a few steps, while others include multiple actions and branching paths. When reviewing a template, you can see information such as its purpose, target, language, owner, and whether it is designed as a recurring or one-time journey. After selecting a template, you can add, remove, or modify steps to fit your needs.

Create Your Own Journey Templates

If your organization frequently uses the same journey structure, you can create reusable customer journey templates. Navigate to Marketing Templates and select Journey Templates to create one from scratch. You can also open an existing journey and use Save As Template to turn it into a reusable starting point. When saving a template, you can define information such as:

• Journey name
• Description
• Purpose
• Target
• Whether the journey is recurring

Reusable templates can save time when your organization repeatedly runs campaigns with similar structures.

Select Your Journey Audience

Before building the individual steps of your journey, determine who should enter it. You can define an audience using segments and subscription lists and combine them with inclusion or exclusion conditions. For example, you could begin with contacts in one geographic segment and use additional conditions to include another group or exclude contacts who belong to a particular segment. You can also add a plain-language description of the audience so other members of your team can quickly understand who the journey is designed to reach.

Create Different Experiences with Swim Lanes

Swim lanes allow you to create different paths for separate audiences within the same journey. You could use swim lanes to:

• Send different messages to separate groups
• Target recipients in different geographic regions
• Account for different time zones
• End the journey earlier for one group
• Create location-specific experiences

For example, you might target potential customers in New York City and Los Angeles. Because those contacts are in different time zones, separate swim lanes can help you schedule messages at appropriate times for each audience. If you operate physical locations in both cities, you could go even further by sending different emails containing each store's address, hours, and other location-specific information. Swim lanes offer considerable flexibility, but keeping your initial setup simple with one or two swim lanes can make the journey easier to manage until you have a reason for more complexity.

Send Emails Through Your Journey

The email tile sends a marketing email when a journey member reaches that step. Before adding an email to your journey, make sure the email has been reviewed, made live, and is completely ready to send. Draft emails cannot be incorporated into the journey. Within the email tile, you can preview the selected email and configure when it should be sent. You can also create an expiration date. This prevents the email from being sent to contacts who reach that step after the content is no longer relevant. Expiration settings can be especially useful for time-sensitive emails involving sales, events, promotions, or other date-dependent information.

Create Conditional Paths with If/Then Branches

If/Then branches let your journey respond to customer behavior. When contacts reach an If/Then branch, the journey evaluates a condition. Contacts who meet that condition follow one path, while contacts who do not meet it follow another. For example, you might create a branch based on whether someone opened an email. If the recipient opens the email, the contact can continue down the Yes path. If the recipient doesn't open it within the designated period, the contact moves down the No path. You can continue adding steps to either branch and end either path whenever appropriate.

Understand Wait Times in If/Then Branches

Wait periods associated with an If/Then branch apply to contacts individually. For example, if you give recipients up to five days to open an email, that five-day timer begins when each individual contact reaches the condition. It is not one universal five-day period applied to the entire audience. This is important because contacts may reach the same step at different times depending on how they progress through the journey.

Divide Your Audience with Split Branches

Split branches divide your journey audience into separate groups and send those groups down different paths. By default, the audience can be divided 50/50, but you can adjust the distribution. You can split the audience using:

• A percentage
• A specific number of contacts

For example, you could send 25% of the audience down one path and the remaining 75% down another. As with If/Then branches, each split path can contain additional journey steps and can end independently.

Add Wait and Wait Until Steps

Sometimes you need everyone to pause before continuing through a journey. A Wait or Delay tile pauses each contact for a specified amount of time. For example, you could wait one week before sending a follow-up email. A Wait Until tile works differently. Instead of pausing contacts for a relative amount of time, it holds them until a particular date and time. Everyone waiting at that step can then continue at the designated time. These options can work particularly well with email expiration settings when your marketing content is time-sensitive.

Rearrange Your Journey

Journey steps don't have to remain exactly where you initially create them. You can drag and drop tiles when you need to reorganize the flow. You can also use a tile's menu to:

• Cut
• Copy
• Paste
• Delete

This makes it easier to revise a journey as your campaign develops without rebuilding large portions of your workflow.

Use Action Tiles

Action tiles expand what your journey can do beyond sending messages. Available actions covered in this class include:

• Create Lead
• LinkedIn Campaign
• Run Workflow

A Create Lead tile automatically creates a lead when a qualifying contact or account reaches that step. One important consideration is that Outbound journeys operate around contact and account records rather than lead records. Because the journey can't determine whether the contact is already associated with an existing open lead, the tile creates a new lead when activated.

Connect Journeys with LinkedIn Campaigns

The LinkedIn Campaign action provides another way to connect marketing activity with lead generation. With an integrated LinkedIn account, the LinkedIn Campaign tile can connect CRM contact records with contacts who submit a LinkedIn lead-generation form. As with marketing emails, the LinkedIn campaign needs to be created and made live before it can be used within the customer journey.

Run Internal Workflows

Customer journeys can automate internal activity as well as external customer communications. A Run Workflow tile can trigger a custom Dynamics 365 workflow when someone reaches that part of the journey. The workflow must be made live before it can be incorporated into your journey. Creating workflows also requires appropriate administrator permissions. This provides another way to connect customer interactions with the work your internal teams need to perform.

Connect Marketing and Sales

Customer journeys can support your sales process in addition to traditional marketing activities. Segments can target customers using information related to leads and opportunities, helping you create more focused audiences. You might target contacts based on information such as:

• Organization size
• Whether the contact is a decision-maker
• Previous email interactions
• Event attendance
• Other relevant contact or sales data

This can help keep new leads engaged and nurture opportunities throughout the sales cycle.

Add Sales Activities to Your Journey

Sales Activity tiles let you generate activities as contacts progress through a customer journey. These include:

• Appointments
• Phone calls
• Tasks

When someone reaches one of these tiles, the journey can generate an activity linked to the appropriate contact or account record. This helps bring marketing automation and real-world sales activity together. Instead of the journey existing separately from your sales team's work, customer behavior can help determine when new sales activities should occur.

Create Tasks Related to CRM Records

Tasks can also be created and managed from the My Work area of Outbound Marketing. When creating a task, you can add a subject and description and use the Regarding field to associate it with another Dynamics 365 record. Tasks can be related to records such as:

• Accounts
• Contacts
• Live customer journeys
• Events
• Event registrations

This gives your team a way to connect internal work directly to the records and marketing activities that prompted it.

Extend Journeys with Custom Tiles

Custom tiles can extend the capabilities of customer journeys beyond the standard options included with Dynamics 365 Marketing. These custom components generally work similarly to standard journey tiles but may require development or assistance from someone with deeper Dynamics 365 expertise. For example, a custom channel tile could send:

• SMS messages
• Social media messages
• Messages through another integrated third-party channel

You can then continue using conditions and branching paths after the custom channel step, incorporating it into the larger automated journey experience.

Connect Emails to Other Marketing Elements

Marketing emails can also contain dependencies on other marketing content. Within the Email Elements area, you can associate items such as:

• Marketing pages
• Events
• Forms

Multiple dependencies can be associated with an email when necessary. This can help connect the message you're sending with the next action you want the recipient to take, while keeping those connected elements incorporated into the overall journey.

Build More Strategic Customer Journeys

Customer journeys can be as simple as sending a single email or as detailed as a multi-step campaign with separate audiences, conditions, delays, activities, workflows, and custom communication channels. The key is to build each journey around the customer experience and the business outcome you want to achieve. By combining targeted audiences, swim lanes, conditional branches, scheduling, sales activities, and automation, you can create journeys that keep customers engaged while connecting marketing efforts more closely with the rest of your sales and business processes.