Understanding Real-Time Marketing

Real-time marketing focuses on the who, what, and when of customer engagement. The who is your target audience. Real-time marketing provides a logic-based segment builder that makes it easier to define audiences without requiring extensive knowledge of complex data structures or logical operators. The what is the content and channel you use to communicate. In addition to email, real-time marketing supports channels such as text messages and push notifications. The when can be a scheduled time or a response to a customer action or other trigger. This allows you to engage customers when a particular interaction makes communication relevant.

Explore the Engagement Area

The Engagement area includes several important tools for real-time marketing:

• Journeys
• Triggers
• Analytics

Together, these tools allow you to design customer experiences, react to customer activity, and analyze the results of your marketing efforts.

Create Real-Time Customer Journeys

The real-time journey builder shares many similarities with the journey functionality in Outbound Marketing. When creating a new journey, you can choose between two primary types:

• Segment-based journeys, which begin with an audience segment
• Trigger-based journeys, which begin when a particular customer action or condition occurs

For segment-based journeys, you can select existing segments and configure the frequency and time zone of the journey. Frequency options include:

• A one-time journey with a static audience
• A one-time journey where newly added audience members can start at any time
• A repeating journey where audience members repeat at specified intervals

Repeating journeys can be useful for recurring scenarios such as annual subscription renewals.

Build Trigger-Based Journeys

Trigger-based journeys begin when a customer action or attribute activates a particular trigger. An abandoned cart is one example. If someone places products in a cart but leaves the website without completing the purchase, that behavior can trigger an abandoned cart journey. From there, you can add different actions and conditions to determine what happens next. You can:

• Send an email
• Send a text message
• Send a push notification
• Send another custom type of message
• Create an If/Then branch based on customer behavior
• Branch based on customer or segment attributes
• Perform A/B testing
• Use a customer's preferred communication channel
• Wait for a specified time, date, or customer action
• Activate a custom trigger or Power Automate flow

This gives you flexibility to create journeys that react to what customers actually do.

Personalize Journey Paths

Real-time journeys can use customer attributes to determine which path someone takes. For example, an abandoned cart journey could identify whether someone has purchased from you before. New and returning customers could then receive different messages based on that information. You can also experiment with different communication approaches. Instead of testing only two versions of an email, you could evaluate whether an email or text message is the more effective channel for a particular interaction. If you've identified a preferred communication channel for a contact, you can use that information to communicate in the way that is most appropriate for them.

Control Journey Timing

Journey steps don't always need to happen immediately. You can configure a journey to pause until:

• A specific amount of time has passed
• A particular date arrives
• The customer activates a trigger representing the next step

This lets you control the timing of your communications while still responding dynamically to customer behaviors.

Set Journey Criteria, Exits, and Goals

Additional journey settings give you more control over who participates and how the journey operates. Criteria can help narrow the audience or exclude certain segments. Repetition rules determine how often someone can enter or move through the journey. For example, you could limit an abandoned cart message so a contact receives it only once per week, even if they abandon several carts during that period. You can also define journey exits. A contact might leave the journey after activating another trigger, joining a particular segment, or simply completing all of the journey steps. Goals help define what you're trying to accomplish, such as:

• Driving purchases
• Increasing engagement
• Improving customer loyalty

Custom goals can also be created.

Use Frequency Caps

Frequency caps can help prevent customers from receiving too many marketing communications within a short period. This is especially important when several journeys are running simultaneously. Overcommunicating with your audience can lead to frustration and disengagement. Using frequency caps gives you another way to coordinate outreach across your marketing activities.

Prepare Content Before Going Live

Your email, text message, push notification, and other journey content should be ready before the journey goes live. Once a journey has started, you cannot edit or add journey steps. Push notifications also require an application to be linked to your Dynamics 365 Marketing account.

Understand Real-Time Triggers

Dynamics 365 Marketing includes several prebuilt triggers that you can use within real-time marketing. The three primary trigger types are:

• Custom triggers
• Interaction triggers
• Business triggers

Custom triggers are created to support the specific requirements of your organization. Interaction triggers relate to customer interactions with marketing elements such as emails, text messages, and push notifications. These are used within journeys rather than as the initial trigger that starts the journey. Business triggers relate to changes occurring within your Dynamics 365 environment, including Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service. Examples can include creating a contact, lead, or opportunity, updating a phone number, checking into an event, or submitting a marketing form.

Use Common Marketing Triggers

Several triggers can be particularly helpful when creating responsive customer journeys.

Abandoned Cart

An abandoned cart trigger can respond when someone adds a product to a cart but doesn't complete the purchase. It can then initiate marketing activity designed to reconnect with that customer.

Email Opened

The Email opened trigger can move someone to another journey step after they open an email. This can help you create different approaches for people who engage with an email and those who don't.

Marketing Form Submitted

This trigger responds when someone submits a real-time marketing form. A journey could branch based on whether someone submitted the form or viewed it without completing it.

Text Message Bounced

This trigger can respond when a text message isn't successfully delivered. A bounce might indicate an inactive phone number or incorrect information on a contact record, giving you an opportunity to review and clean up your audience data.

Create Custom Triggers

If the available triggers don't meet your needs, you can create custom triggers. A custom trigger can respond when a customer-related record is created or updated, or when a customer interacts with a connected website or application. Some custom trigger scenarios are more technically involved. Website- or application-based triggers may require developer assistance to make sure the necessary code is integrated correctly.

Review Real-Time Marketing Analytics

The Analytics area provides dashboards with summarized journey and channel performance information. These dashboards use Power BI and refresh periodically. You can explore individual dashboard elements using filters and focused views. The Journeys area provides aggregated information across multiple real-time customer journeys. The Channels area provides information across your connected communication channels and can include metrics related to:

• Email
• Text messages
• Push notifications
• Delivery success
• Delivery issues
• Unsubscribes

These insights can help you evaluate results and make more data-informed marketing decisions.

Manage Your Audience

The Audience area includes tools for working with contacts, segments, and consent information. Existing contacts from Outbound Marketing remain available because the contact information is connected to your CRM database rather than being unique to the real-time marketing area. Real-time journey audiences can be based on contacts, leads, and customer profiles, allowing you to communicate through the channels that make sense for each audience.

Build Real-Time Segments

Existing Outbound Marketing segments can also be used in your real-time marketing activities. When creating a new segment, choose the type of audience you want to target and then define the conditions that determine membership. The segment builder lets you work with attributes and records to identify your audience. You can also use Query Assist to enter a plain-language description of the audience you want to create. Segment settings determine how often the segment refreshes and pulls in new records, allowing you to control whether your audience behaves more dynamically or remains static.

Use Attributes to Narrow Your Audience

Attributes provide detailed criteria for defining a segment. For example, you could create a segment of leads generated through an external referral during a particular date range. You can combine conditions and subgroups to narrow the audience further. You can also use inclusion and exclusion groups to add or remove particular records from your segment. Once your segment is complete, select Ready to use to publish it so it can be used in a journey.

Manage Consent

Real-time marketing includes a Consent Center for managing whether contacts have given permission to receive marketing communications. When real-time marketing is initially installed, existing consent records from Outbound Marketing don't automatically appear in the Consent Center. Consent information can be brought into real-time marketing in several ways.

Add Consent Manually

You can manually create email or phone consent records. These records can include information such as:

• Email address or phone number
• Consent status
• Permission for communications
• Permission for tracking
• Reason consent was granted or revoked
• Who requested the change, if applicable

Custom consent records can also be created.

Import Consent Records

Consent information can be imported using an Excel file. CSV and XML imports are also supported.

Load Consent from Existing Contacts

You can also load applicable consent information from contact records already stored in Dynamics 365 Marketing. For these existing Outbound Marketing contacts, one email address per contact is brought into real-time marketing, and the Allow bulk email field is used as the relevant consent indicator.

Understand How Consent Is Stored

Consent in real-time marketing is associated with an email address or phone number rather than being tied exclusively to a single contact record. Contacts must opt in before receiving applicable marketing communications through real-time marketing. Transactional emails are handled differently because they communicate essential information that customers need to receive, such as purchase receipts.

Continue Exploring Real-Time Marketing

Engagement and Audience represent two major areas of Real-time Marketing and provide the foundation for creating responsive, targeted customer experiences. By combining customer journeys, behavioral triggers, segments, analytics, and consent management, you can create marketing experiences that respond more closely to each customer's actions, attributes, preferences, and communication needs.