What’s New in D365 Marketing

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This recent update from Microsoft summarises some of the key areas of What’s New in D365 Marketing for early access features, preview features, general availability enhancements, monthly updates, and bug fixes for Dynamics 365 Marketing.

What’s New in D365 Marketing – June 2023 update

General availability features include improved copilot assistance for the query assist segmentation builder, enhancements to the asset and templates libraries, and business unit domain support for emails.

Public preview features include tailoring communications to improve customer engagement.

Version number

App	GA release
Marketing	1.95.2014.0

General availability

Create better targeted segments using everyday language that include behavioural interactions with query assist, a copilot feature

Marketers are now able to quickly build targeted segments using conversational everyday language that includes customer interactions with your marketing messages, websites, events, and other channels. With these updates, you can create complex segments that not only focus on demographic or firmographic data but also marketing behavioural data without requiring deep knowledge of the back-end data model.

Easily tag and update assets with an enhanced experience

Swiftly manage and customize your assets. Need to rename, tag, or update assets? Now, it’s just a matter of a few clicks. Our enhanced design ensures a visually appealing workspace, while the right-side pane provides quick previews of your files. Take control with editable property panes, allowing you to customize assets effortlessly. The new tagging controls simplifies file organization, enabling efficient categorization and effortless searching.

Assign specific business units to your authenticated domains

When modernized business units are turned on, and business unit scoping is enabled, the domain authentication wizard allows users to specify what business unit they want their domain to be authenticated. When a business unit is selected for a domain, this domain is solely available for that business unit unless you want to make it shareable across your organization.

Public preview

Tailor communications to the topics customers want to receive

Improve customer engagement and reduce un-subscriptions by giving customers granular control over the real-time marketing messages they receive. Target your messages to the audience that wants to engage with your content the most by capturing detailed consent. Allow customers to subscribe to the topics that matter to them while capturing the consent you need to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements.
Avoid embarrassing and costly configuration mistakes by leveraging real-time marketing topic support, preventing the complications of maintaining and enforcing lists of subscribed customers, all while taking advantage of enhanced real-time marketing preference centres that better represent your brand.

Monthly enhancements

Achieve more accurate results in your A/B tests by specifying a control group

With the new control group features, marketers can now specify how many people to test a message on before releasing the remaining audience to the winning version. This update gives you more control over the testing process and helps ensure accurate results.

What’s New in D365 Marketing – May 2023 update

The May 2023 release general availability features include the availability of interaction data in the segment builder, the ability to move custom triggers between environments, journey reminders, lead insights, and the ability to surface the next best action for leads with your sales team.

Public preview features include AI-powered milestone attribution analysis, multi-brand consent and customizable preference centres. We also continue to improve the content ideas and query assist Copilot features.

Version number

App	GA release
Marketing	1.94.2009.0

General availability

Use interaction data to improve targeting in the redesigned segment builder

Segments are critical for targeting the right customers and personalizing their experience. The redesigned real-time marketing segment builder allows you to create segments based on customer interactions and engagement with your marketing messages, websites, events, or other channels. Combined with the demographic and firmographic attributes already available for segmentation, the segment builder enables you to reach the right customers at the right time. You can then use these segments for targeting, journey branching or content variants to personalize the experience for each customer.

Save time by easily moving triggers between environments

With Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can create custom triggers in development or pre-production environments to securely test the intended behaviour before you use them in production for live marketing journeys and campaigns. You can then move the triggers to a production environment using Power Platform Solutions in any state. The ability to move published triggers enables you to align your testing workflow with your application lifecycle management process. Dynamics 365 Marketing automatically takes care of packaging the triggers and any related metadata when you export and import the solutions.

Boost your productivity with enhanced journey reminders

You can now create journeys that nudge and remind a customer to take a required action, such as completing an application/survey, filling a health check, checking out their cart, and more. You can remind customers until they complete the call to action or until a certain date or time. Additionally, you can bypass certain journey steps when a customer action makes them irrelevant. For instance, if you’re welcoming/onboarding the customer to a product or service through daily messages, but they complete the onboarding before all the messages have been sent – you can skip the remaining messages by exiting the customer from that block.
This simplifies not only the journey logic required to capture the whole scenario in a single journey, but also makes a single block of journey actions (such as a series of reminders) easy to analyse and optimise.

Customise marketing strategies based on Lead insights

Access Lead-specific insights in real-time marketing and tailor your marketing experiences according to your Leads’ behaviour. Lead insights provide a holistic view of each Lead’s interactions with your marketing activities. This includes access to journey engagement history, encompassing past email sends, opens, clicks, form submissions, and other relevant data.

Surface the next best action to your sales team when a Lead engages with Marketing

As you nurture Leads and opportunities with real-time journeys, the Leads’ signals might indicate an urgency to engage with your sales teams. With Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can now create sales activities such as tasks and phone calls directly from journeys so that Leads get individualized attention when they’re most likely to engage. You can also activate a sales sequence to accelerate a deal, ensuring that sellers receive automated recommendations based on the sales playbook associated with the campaign.

Public preview

Easily discover and use content ideas Copilot to create highly engaging emails

With this enhancement you can easily start using Copilot to generate email content thanks to prefilled key points matching your selected topic, and by accessing it directly within your email flow.

Understand how marketing activities contribute to defined milestones using AI

Dynamics 365 Marketing enables you to create highly personalized experiences to nudge customers toward important milestones in the buyer’s journey such as completing a purchase, becoming a loyalty program member, or becoming a qualified sales opportunity. Now, you can define such milestones and measure them over time. You can then optimize your marketing mix using AI or rules-based attribution which quantifies the contribution of your real-time marketing journeys, channels, and messages in driving customers to complete those milestones.

Note

This feature will be gradually rolled out during the month and may have delayed availability compared to the other May releases.

Match your business needs with multi-brand consent and customizable preference centres

In real-time marketing, marketers can now fully customize out-of-the-box preference centres to better represent their brands and meet their business needs. Create separate preference centres per brand, allowing you to independently capture and manage consent for multiple lines of business. Keep your customers engaged by giving them control over the channels they want to connect to while ensuring that you capture the consent you need to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements.

Monthly enhancements

Attribute branch supports complex conditions that can span multiple entity relationships

Access attributes of entities related to a Contact or Lead, even if those entities are several hops away. For example, you can hop from the contact to the name of the account associated with that contact, making it easier to create more powerful and complex conditions.

Expanded audience insights: view text messages and push notifications engagement

Now, in addition to email and form interactions, you can also access comprehensive insights for text messages, push notifications, and custom channels in real-time marketing contact and lead insights. Get a holistic view of how your audience engages with all your marketing channels, make data-driven decisions, and optimize your strategies for even better results.

Clearly communicate dates and times in formats that match expectations of your audience

Different parts of the world use different formats for date and time, so it is critical to use the right format your audience expects to avoid confusion. We are expanding available time formats to add 12-hour formats in certain languages/countries where they officially follow 24-hour format but in practice also use 12-hour format (for example, English (UK)). We also added recently used formats at the top. Not only does this save time, it also makes it easy to pick a single consistent format across the message.

Create segments effortlessly using everyday language with the improved query assist experience

The new query assist experience is designed to help marketers seamlessly switch between query assist and manual mode giving you more control over the segment creation process. We’ve also improved the feature ensures a more intuitive experience. With these updates, you can build segments using everyday language to target the right audience without requiring deep knowledge on the back-end data model.

Create segments using Marketing Lists and other entities that are related to Contacts/Leads with many:many relationships

You can now create segments with data tables, such as Marketing Lists, that have N:N relationships with target entities like Leads and Contacts.

What’s New in D365 Marketing – April 2023 update

The April release marks the availability of many 2023 release wave 1 features. General availability features include a simplified email editor, new email templates, send now email functionality, modernized forms for real-time marketing, extending recipient lists with carbon copies, message frequency limits, UTM tagging, contact insights for real-time marketing, one-to-many relationships for personalisation, sample audience data for email previews, business units for real-time marketing, and the ability to change your organization URL in the Power Platform Admin Centre.

Monthly enhancements include tracking of unique opens and clicks, attachment support for custom channels, and extended regional availability for query assist.

Important

An earlier version of this article incorrectly announced the availability of the enhanced journey reminders preview in the April release. Enhanced journey reminders are not included in the April release.

Version number

App	GA release
Marketing	1.93.2021.0

General availability

Create beautiful and engaging emails with ease

The simplified email editor allows you to create engaging content within minutes, whether you are an experienced marketer or create emails occasionally to engage with your customers. Now, you can make basic content modifications and even add new elements and sections directly on canvas, and thus enjoy easy, delightful, and focused experience.

Easily find and select one of many new templates to create beautiful emails in minutes

The new template gallery now features over 20 attractive templates for the most typical email types, such as: abandoned cart, event invitation, product launch, newsletter, and more. It is now possible to mark selected templates as favourites and all templates are grouped into relevant categories, making it easier than ever to find just the right template for your next email.

Send emails quickly without building a journey

Enable anyone to easily send branded, personalized emails with interaction analytics and link tracking. This simplified sending workflow allows you to select from a new template library, make changes easily with simplifications to the email editor, and send emails to the segment members you need to reach within minutes without being a marketing technology expert.

Easily create modern forms using the new intuitive form experience

Lead capture forms are crucial for gathering marketing information, turning visitors into leads, and turning leads into valuable customers. With the new intuitive forms experience in real-time marketing, you can easily create modern forms with advanced capabilities without depending on developers. Effortlessly create smart forms to place on your websites and capture your customers’ attention while allowing them to input their details.

Keep stakeholders in the loop by seamlessly copying them on email campaigns

Improve your customer experience by keeping your sales, customer service, and finance teams in the loop by copying key recipients on email campaigns. Enable other teams to follow up on hot leads or rapidly answer customers’ inquiries, speeding up your pipeline and increasing customer satisfaction.

Prevent message fatigue by limiting the messages sent to a customer in a specific period

Ensure that your customers receive the right message at the right moment and at the right frequency while preventing fatigue, minimizing unsubscribes, and facilitating optimal engagement with your key messages. Some customers qualify for multiple journeys and campaigns that run simultaneously, which may result in customers receiving multiple messages through one channel in a short period of time.
Customers may perceive these messages as spam, which lowers their engagement. With the frequency cap feature, you can optimize engagement by controlling how many messages are sent across multiple channels over a period.

Measure marketing activity, web traffic, and conversion goals using automatic UTM tagging

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes help you track sources of traffic for your websites and landing pages, enabling you to attribute conversions to the right source. Marketing messages can be a significant contributor to this traffic, but it is hard to track them without UTM parameters. They’re often left out entirely from the links in messages due to the time-consuming process of manually adding the tags to each link.
In addition to automatically tagging all your messages with UTM parameters, you now can choose to customize your parameters so that it matches an existing UTM naming convention that your business already uses in google analytics reports. For example, you can choose UTM campaign to point to a campaign ID instead of the journey name.

Review engagement history and tailor marketing efforts using contact insights

Use contact insights in real-time marketing to gain a better understanding of your audience’s behaviour and interests, make informed decisions based on past engagement, and tailor your marketing efforts to their specific needs and preferences.

Drive engagement with personalised content using data with one-to-many relationships

Unlock even more data for personalization with ability to define dynamic text using data that requires traversing one-to-many relations. Consider a university alumni donation campaign where you would want to include the name of the college attended by each alum for driving maximum engagement. However, an alum might have attended multiple colleges in that university, resulting in a “one-to-many” relationship between student and college records. You can now define dynamic text for such data.

Confidently send emails after quickly previewing emails using sample audience data

Personalising content is an effective strategy for boosting engagement. However, ensuring that the personalized content is accurate for a variety of recipients can be a challenging task. Fortunately, real-time marketing makes this easy – simply select a sample audience member record to preview the exact content that will be delivered to that recipient.

Scale your business effortlessly and define access to marketing assets

Improve productivity by defining marketing asset access and visibility to match your business structure. As businesses create vast amounts of assets, organizing data according to organizational structure becomes critical. Well-organized assets are important to remaining compliant and productive. Now in real-time marketing, you can effortlessly organize your digital assets, content, and journeys to match your organizational structure by separating business and customer data across organizational boundaries.
Separating data enables you to gain comprehensive insights into a specific brand’s marketing performance without losing sight of the bigger picture. Compliance risk is reduced by using out-of-the-box campaigns and data segregation capabilities across your organization.

Dynamics 365 Marketing now supports changing the organization URL in Power Platform Admin Centre

People often want to change the URL of the Marketing application to a branded name which is easy to remember. This has been supported for some time in the Power Platform Admin Centre, but was not previously supported by the Dynamics 365 Marketing application. With this release, you can now change the organization URL in Power Platform Admin Centre and the Marketing application continues to work without side effects.

Monthly enhancements

Optimise your marketing strategy with unique opens and clicks

Gain insight into the unique individuals who are engaging with your journeys, rather than simply counting the number of times an email or link has been opened or clicked. Tracking unique opens and clicks provides a more accurate picture of your campaign’s reach and engagement by eliminating duplicate interactions from the same customer.

Support attachments in custom channel messages

You can now personalize your communications even more by attaching images or other types of files to your custom channel messages. Build new channels like MMS and include images with your WhatsApp or Viber messages, making your customer interactions even more engaging.

Expanded regional availability for Query Assist

Query Assist, a copilot capability powered by generative AI that enables you to build segments using everyday words, is now available in Europe.

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