Manage Email Bounces on Lead or Contact Views & Forms in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys

Manage Email Bounces on Lead or Contact Views & Forms in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys

How can we manage email bounces in Customer Insights - Joruneys? How about a last bounce date and reason on each Lead/Contact with email delivery issues? Oh and a way to track if remedial email address update action has been taken or not since the last bounce. Sure!

A simple two step Power Automate flow, some new fields and a classic workflow will get you up and running in no time. But it means no more excuses on poor delivery rates!

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Time Zone Labels in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys Events

Time Zone Labels in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys Events

There is a magical The ‘Event time zone’ field in Dynamics 365 which is used for Events in Customer Insights - Journeys. Technically speaking in the background it all works great, the time is correctly converted to UTC and shows as expected for calendar invite timings etc BUT the actual name of the GMT offset time zone e.g. ’(GMT+10:00) Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney’ is hellishly wordy and it’s only correct for half the year in any region that uses daylight savings… doh!

Why do I care?

When you include this in your email to show the event time zone of the event, it doesn’t look too smart! This post will show you how to create a simple Power Automate flow to generate a correct and neater time zone label for all your events that can be used in event communications, with style.

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Make Forms in Customer Insights Journeys a little bit more beautiful
Dynamics 365 Marketing Amey Holden Dynamics 365 Marketing Amey Holden

Make Forms in Customer Insights Journeys a little bit more beautiful

A little collection of tips and HTML/CSS tweaks you can easily do on a Form in Customer Insights Journeys to make it look a little bit more dapper and professional. It’s all easy CopyPasta™ so no coding knowledge is required! Including:

  • How to view the latest version of the form instantly.

  • Using the themes and why they sometimes don’t seem to work

  • Navigating & Searching in the Form HTML

  • Update the web page tab name

  • Customise the post form submit image

  • Change checkbox and radio button colours

  • Wrangle the field & label spacing

  • Make fields read-only

  • Update the Favicon on the ‘Preference center’ of Compliance Profiles

  • Add tooltips

  • Customise the ‘Please match the format requested’ description to explain the requested format

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Retrieve Member Data from Customer Insights - Journeys Segments in Power Automate

Retrieve Member Data from Customer Insights - Journeys Segments in Power Automate

Technical Summary: How to query Dataverse with an array of GUIDs!

Summary with Customer Insights - Journeys context: How to turn a list of GUIDs from a Customer Insights - Journeys segment into actual data from the contact/lead, which can then be used in lots of other useful ways such as building a beautiful custom page to browse and search segment members or exporting segment members.

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Browse and Search Segment Membership in Customer Insights - Journeys

Browse and Search Segment Membership in Customer Insights - Journeys

A really cool custom page to browse and search segments in Customer Insights - Journeys real-time marketing!

This post will show you how to build the essential pieces to retrieve the segment member details into a custom page in Dynamics 365, and also how to create the browse and search experience.

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List Segment Members from Customer Insights - Journeys in Power Automate

List Segment Members from Customer Insights - Journeys in Power Automate

You can create seriously impressive and complex data queries for Leads or Contacts using the new ‘real-time marketing’ segment builder for in Dynamics 365 Marketing (Customer Insights - Journeys). Then use the segment data to provide you with the data set of Contacts or Leads you want to automate with in Power Automate!

For example: the interaction data for email delivery is super valuable in helping to clean up your data. A hard bounced email is a clear indicator for an invalid email address. You can identify Contacts or Leads to unsubscribe, deleted or modify to protect the sender reputation of your domain and give marketers a clearer view on conversion rates.

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Segments in Customer Insights - Journeys: Activities (Email, Appointment, Phone Call etc.)
Dynamics 365 Marketing Amey Holden Dynamics 365 Marketing Amey Holden

Segments in Customer Insights - Journeys: Activities (Email, Appointment, Phone Call etc.)

How to build real-time marketing segments using Dataverse activities such as Emails, Appointments, Tasks and Phone Calls which are great for using as exclusion segments in nurture journeys and promotional communications.

Why? If the customer (or potential customer) has already reached out and is already having direct personalised communications with a member of the business this kind of content usually comes across as desperate, oblivious and pushy - which is not a great brand reputation to aim for!

Includes step by step instruction to create the segments ‘All leads who have an appointment scheduled in the next 7 days’ and ‘All contacts who have been involved with (To/From/CC/BCC) an email in the last 30 days’.

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Segments in Customer Insights - Journeys: multi-hop, custom tables, N:N and 1:N relationships
Dynamics 365 Marketing Amey Holden Dynamics 365 Marketing Amey Holden

Segments in Customer Insights - Journeys: multi-hop, custom tables, N:N and 1:N relationships

You can use segments created in outbound marketing for your real-time journeys but there are limitations that mean you have to use the real-time segment builder instead.

Segments which include multi-hop data queries, custom tables, N:N and 1:N relationships are particularly troublesome. This blog will outline some common issues I have faced and how to get around them when creating real-time segments, including:

Can’t get to the thing you want to filter on; ‘Select a path’ not showing the pathway you want; Segment is stuck ‘Getting Ready’; The table is unavailable to be added because it ‘may be more than five hops away from the target audience.’

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Include specific row (entity) references and all the data in Real-time marketing custom triggers

Include specific row (entity) references and all the data in Real-time marketing custom triggers

Custom triggers in Dynamics 365 Marketing (Customer Insights - Journeys) have recently became 1000 times better with the ability to include ‘Entity references’ - a way of making an entire record and all its associated records (up to 5 levels ‘deep’) available through a single trigger attribute. It works exactly the same as the ‘Contact‘ or ‘Lead’ in a trigger works, but for any table/row you choose.

This make all the data available in the trigger journeys for branching and emails for conditional content and personalisation. And you can have lots of these!

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Restrict Access to Publish Journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing
Dynamics 365 Marketing Amey Holden Dynamics 365 Marketing Amey Holden

Restrict Access to Publish Journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Publishing a journey sends emails out and starts all sorts of magical automations in Dynamics 365 Marketing. technical checks are built into the system but business checks are not. This post will show you how to restrict who can or cannot publish a journey without review and approval from authorised user.

Why? To give users confidence usinf Dynamics 365 Marketing and other vested parties (technical support teams, marketing & business relationship managers, leadership personnel etc.) reassurance that things are less likely to go wrong.

Hopefully this can help more customers success with Dynamics 365 Marketing!

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