Create consistent designs with brand profile themes

Brand profile themes are especially valuable when multiple people create marketing materials in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys. Themes let you establish design standards that can be applied consistently across your emails. Brand profiles are available in the Settings area under Customer engagement. Within each brand profile, the Theme tab lets you configure default email design settings. You can establish standards for:

• Color palettes
• Inner and outer background colors
• Borders
• Heading and paragraph styles
• Fonts, sizes, bolding, and italics
• Buttons
• Hyperlinks
• Custom fonts

Setting these options at the brand profile level means your team doesn't have to recreate the same design decisions every time they build an email.

Choose fonts carefully

Within your text styles, you can specify a primary font along with fallback fonts. Fallback fonts are important because an email client may not support the primary font you've selected. In that situation, the email can fall back to a more widely supported alternative. You should also review font settings across different elements of your theme. For example, if your paragraph text uses one font but your hyperlinks use another, links within paragraphs may appear inconsistent. Custom fonts can also be added to a brand profile by selecting a font from your library, uploading a font file, or using a font URL. However, custom fonts should be used carefully. They won't necessarily be available in every email client and may introduce rendering differences, increased load times, or other issues. If a custom font is an important part of your brand, make sure your email still looks good when a fallback font is used.

Use different brand profiles for different needs

You can configure multiple brand profiles for different companies, brands, or products. When you're creating an email, select the appropriate brand profile and its theme can provide the starting styles for your design. If you later update the brand profile's theme, you can refresh an email you're working on to reflect those changes. This makes it much easier to update your design standards without manually changing every element. Changes to a brand profile won't alter emails that have already been sent. Once an email is delivered to a recipient's inbox, it remains as it was when it was sent.

Save time with reusable templates

Templates take design consistency a step further. In Customer Insights – Journeys, templates can be created for:

• Emails
• Forms
• Journeys
• Tasks

Templates are useful for marketing materials that follow a standardized design, structure, or process but still need to be adjusted for individual campaigns. For example, if you send a monthly newsletter to the same dynamic audience, you might create both an email template and a journey template. You can reuse the established structure each month and focus your time on updating the content that actually changes. Forms can also benefit from templates when you need similar fields and functionality across several websites but want to customize the design or language for different audiences.

Create email templates with important settings already configured

Email templates can include much more than the visual design of an email. Depending on your needs, you can establish settings such as:

• Brand profile
• Sender
• Subject
• Compliance profile
• Purpose
• Topic
• Theme customizations
• Standard content and design elements

Purpose and topic settings are particularly important. Depending on your compliance enforcement model, these settings can affect whether an email is delivered to the intended audience and what recipients unsubscribe from when using one-click unsubscribe. Templates are also useful for content you want to include consistently. For example, you could add a standard View in Browser link to a template instead of rebuilding it for every email. If you make theme customizations within a particular email template, those changes will carry forward to emails created from that template without changing the original brand profile.

Build reusable journey templates

Journey templates can save considerable setup time when you regularly build journeys with similar structures. Depending on the journey, your template can establish settings such as:

• Whether the journey is trigger-based or segment-based
• Audience or trigger
• Frequency
• Exclusion segments
• Schedule and preferred sending time
• Rate limits
• Exit segments and triggers
• Journey goals
• Frequency cap settings

You can also establish the journey tiles themselves. For example, a template could already include your email, text message, or push notification steps along with wait periods, audience splits, and attribute branches. Instead of recreating the journey from scratch, you can begin with a carefully designed structure and make the changes required for a specific campaign.

Configure reusable form templates

Form templates can establish both functional settings and design elements. You can configure items such as:

• General form settings
• Prefill
• Website tracking
• Contact and lead audiences
• Duplicate handling and matching rules
• Submission responses
• Redirects
• Error and thank-you notifications
• Themes
• Fields and other form elements
• Consent collection

One setting to consider is Ignore empty values. If this setting isn't enabled and someone leaves a non-required field blank when submitting a form, that empty value can be submitted to your system. Enabling Ignore empty values can help prevent a blank response from affecting existing data.

Use a workaround to create a form template from an existing form

Emails and journeys can be saved as templates directly from the items you're working on, but forms work differently. If you've created a form and later decide it would make a useful template, you can use the form's HTML as a workaround. Copy the HTML from the completed form, create a new form template from the Templates area, open the template's HTML, and replace it with the HTML from your existing form. This gives you a way to turn the work you've already done into a reusable starting point for future forms.

Reduce errors by standardizing your setup

Templates aren't simply a way to save clicks. When creating a template, you have an opportunity to carefully consider settings such as compliance, audiences, matching rules, consent, frequency limits, and submission behavior once. Future marketing assets created from that template then benefit from those decisions. Standardizing repetitive configuration can help reduce the number of variables that could otherwise lead to problems when creating new emails, journeys, and forms.

Reuse common email sections with content blocks

Content blocks are individual reusable sections for your emails. They're particularly useful for content that appears repeatedly across communications, such as:

• Email headers
• Footers
• Calls to action
• Standard text and buttons
• Campaign-specific sections

Content blocks use a drag-and-drop design canvas similar to the email designer. There are two types of content blocks: element content blocks and section content blocks.

Element content blocks

An element content block carries over the content of the block without applying a preset layout. These can be helpful for text-only content or a combination of text and a button. Because the content is placed within the layout that already exists in the destination email, its appearance can change depending on factors such as the email's column widths.

Section content blocks

A section content block maintains its established layout when it's added to an email. This makes section blocks useful when you need both the content and its layout to stay consistent.

Add content blocks to an email

Content blocks can be accessed from within the email designer and dragged directly into an email. Before a content block becomes available for use, make sure its status is Ready to send. If a content block you expect to see isn't appearing in the email designer, check its status first. You can activate content blocks individually or update multiple blocks when necessary.

Remember that content blocks aren't dynamic

Changes to a content block don't automatically update instances that have already been added to existing emails. If you edit a content block after using it in an email, you'll need to:

1. Edit and save the content block.
2. Make the updated content block live.
3. Return to the email that uses the old version.
4. Delete the existing block.
5. Add the updated content block to the email.

Keeping this behavior in mind is particularly important when content blocks contain information you update regularly.

Protect content blocks that shouldn't be edited

Content blocks can also be protected. When a content block is protected, users can't modify it after adding it to an email. This is useful for content that should remain consistent every time it's used, such as a standardized footer. Leave a content block unprotected when users need the flexibility to edit its text, buttons, images, or other elements for individual emails. Using the appropriate combination of protected and editable content blocks lets you standardize the elements that matter while still giving your team flexibility where customization is needed.

Build consistency into your marketing process

Brand profile themes, templates, and content blocks address different levels of your marketing design process. Brand profile themes establish your broad visual standards. Templates create reusable starting points for emails, journeys, forms, and tasks. Content blocks provide reusable pieces that can be dropped into individual emails. Used together, these features can reduce repetitive work, help teammates follow the same standards, and make it easier to create consistent marketing materials in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys.