Understanding Dynamics 365 release waves

Microsoft releases updates to Dynamics 365 applications twice each year. These release waves introduce new features, improvements, and fixes over several months rather than all at once. The Release Wave Planner can help you preview upcoming functionality across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. You can search update plans by application and filter them by criteria such as status, availability date, and whether a feature is intended for users or administrators. This makes it easier to identify features your organization may want to test and eventually use in production. The features covered in this Fast Class apply to the real-time area of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys.

Orchestrate journeys using marketing interactions

New marketing interaction triggers provide more ways to respond to customer behavior within a journey. These interactions can be used either to begin a journey or to create branching paths within an existing journey. For example, interactions such as an email link being clicked or an email being blocked can determine which steps a customer encounters next. This provides more flexibility for creating detailed and personalized journeys and can help address scenarios that might otherwise require Power Automate flows.

Create reusable journey templates

If your organization frequently creates journeys with similar structures, you can save existing journeys as reusable templates. This is especially useful for journeys with specialized, multi-step objectives or other repeatable processes. Instead of rebuilding the entire journey each time, you can start with your saved template and then modify it as needed. You can move journey elements, add or remove tiles, and make other changes before publishing the new journey. This allows you to standardize commonly used structures without sacrificing flexibility. The journey template capability also demonstrates how user feedback can influence Dynamics 365 development. The feature originated from a suggestion submitted through the Dynamics 365 Application Ideas forum, where users can propose improvements they would like to see in Microsoft applications.

Edit email content in a running journey

Another useful enhancement is the ability to refine email content after a journey has gone live. Within the journey builder, select the email tile, open its properties, and select Edit. After making your changes, select Finish Editing. Importantly, these edits do not change messages that have already been sent or are already in the process of being sent. The changes apply to messages sent after the updated content is published. You can make changes such as:

• Editing text content, fonts, sizes, colors, alignment, and formatting
• Updating the subject and preheader content
• Editing image sources, alt text, sizing, alignment, and links
• Updating compliance profiles and consent settings
• Adding or editing personalization and rules
• Editing existing conditional content

This provides greater flexibility when content needs to be corrected or adjusted while a journey is already running.

Split an audience to create different experiences

The Audience Split tile allows you to build a single journey while still providing different groups of recipients with unique experiences. You can split an audience by percentage when you need randomized groups, such as when sending a survey or testing different experiences. You can also split by number when an experience should only be available to a specific number of recipients, such as a limited promotional offer. With a number-based split, participants are directed down the first branch until the specified number has been reached. After that threshold is met, subsequent participants are directed to the other branch. Each branch can contain its own journey tiles and customer experience before the paths eventually merge again into a common journey ending.

Audience splits versus attribute branches

An Audience Split is different from an attribute-based branch. Attribute branches direct recipients down different paths according to specific criteria, such as:

• Age
• Location
• Previous interactions
• Purchasing behavior

An attribute branch can create two or more paths in which the remainder of the customer experience is distinct. Audience splitting, on the other hand, is useful when you want to divide a population by percentage or a defined number of participants.

Understand customer inflows and exits throughout a journey

Improved journey analytics provide greater visibility into why audience members enter or leave a journey at specific steps. In a real-time, segment-based journey, you can include multiple segments as your audience while also excluding specific segments. Because contacts can overlap among included and excluded groups, understanding exactly how people are entering and progressing through the journey can be difficult. With the enhanced analytics, you can view data-driven lists showing segment members who were brought into or exited from the journey at individual steps. This makes it easier to investigate differences in audience numbers as customers move through the journey and understand where those changes are coming from. The result is greater visibility into how your audience moves through the customer experience