What’s new? Dynamics 365 Marketing features wave 1 2022

The release notes for Dynamics 365 Wave 1 2022 have arrived! Me and the wonderful Megan V Walker talk through the new proposed features coming to Dynamics 365 Marketing. What do we think? What does it really mean? And what we really want instead? Plus a few examples of how we think the new features can help fellow users and customers alike.

If you aren’t much of a video person (like me) I have written down a short summary of what each feature means, according to my own interpretations/hopes/dreams/despairs. Plus some suggestions on how they could be useful or what excites me most about it.

Collaborative apps

This section is all about unlocking the power of the Power Platform and getting all the components to talk to each other better

Feature	What is it?
Take action with your customers in more ways by raising triggers from a journey to run another journey or Power Automate flow	1) Trigger Power Automate flows from within a journey 2) Chain journeys 3) Use marketing trigger during a journey, rather than just for exit
Trigger journeys based on data changes in any Dynamics 365 app to engage customers at the right time without writing any code	Create triggers based on data updates in Dataverse, without having to create a Power Automate flow using an unbound action. WARNING: table must be directly related to the audience (contact/lead)
Personalize interactions using a unified view of customer activity across Dynamics 365 Marketing Sales and Customer Service	You can actually see marketing activities e.g. 'Email Sent' in the Activity timeline for a contact (finally!)
Collaborate across your organization to create the best marketing campaigns possible using the built-in Microsoft Teams chat	Teams embedded in a side panel so you can link a chat specific things marketing collateral as a Marketing Email. How does that look in Teams? Excited? No. Curious? Yes.

Data and AI

Personally I struggle to get ‘excited’ about AI in general whether its a Microsoft product or not, so take my views with a pinch of salt here.

Feature	What is it?
Delight your customers with hyper-personalized next-best content selection and boost your marketing ROI by optimizing with AI	Seems to tie in really nicely with use cases where Customer Insights is also used. Nice idea in theory but in practice I have found AI features to be a little bit lack-lustre, there is a reason Marketing is a profession after all.
Connect Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with customer journey orchestration when using your own data lake	Giving you the power to turn your insight data into information and therefore actionable items. Your data will no longer be stuck inside a glass cabinet for pretty things.
Increase engagement using AI-powered optimization to reach each customer on the best channel based on their customer attributes	The magical AI machine will know what communication method is best for your customer apparently. It is extra set up for the marketer to provide multiple media options to communicate the same thing - would need to have a reasonable volume of customers to make this ‘worth’ the effort.
Quickly personalize emails using predefined dynamic text, without the need to know the underlying data structure	Pre-define dynamics content for Marketing Emails, so a smart data brain person can set them up once so the talented marketer can get on with creating content, without doing any data gymnastics (Megan Walker does a wonderful job of explaining this one here)
Quickly create emails with enhanced reusable content fragments	It’s ‘content blocks’ - enhanced & improved. Oh and renamed.
Win customer attention by creating conditional dynamic content with easy-to-use no-code experiences	Change the content of the email, based on what you know about the contact, without a single line of that funky/painful liquid code used previously. Plus the visuals are beautiful!

Moments-based

All about adding more abilities to truly personalise things, in bulk - the marketing dream! This is the best section for me.

Feature	What is it?
Create individualized journeys by adding conditions based on attributes captured as part of the event trigger	THIS. IS. AWESOME. The ability (as a ‘developer’ or technical resource) to create a generic trigger which passes back useful information that allows the marketer to decide the exact audience on a per journey basis. e.g. Trigger = customer signs up for a trial. Conditions = customer country, trial product type, trial length, customer type. One trigger - can satisfy many different journeys and scenarios which is less trigger trash and more power to the marketer!
Continue the conversation with your customers by taking action on their SMS replies	Automate SMS responses based on chosen keywords e.g. I can send this message to the customer (automated by a trigger of course) "‘Reply with YES to confirm your appointment for tomorrow, or reply NO to have one our team contact you”, then I can automatically reply with a 'booking confirmation/thank you (if YES) or I can create a task for someone in the team to follow up with the contact the customer (if NO). Initially I was not excited about this. Then Megan Walker explained it here.
Easily create journeys to send reminders encouraging customers to respond to a call to action	At the bare bones its a ‘do while loop‘ or a ‘do this until I tell you not to’ kind of function so during a customer journey you can define a section which repeats until something happens. e.g. Customer payment fails. You want to remind them to make the payment until it either paid or wavered. Some customers will pay after one reminder (you do not want to ask them again), others may take much more reminders (you really want them to pay).
Target the right contacts and leads using the reimagined, easy-to-use segmentation builder	I love the idea of making segment building easier, but in reality data is complicated and can be hard. Simplifying such things down can sometimes reduce it’s power or effectiveness, opinion on ‘easy-to-use’ pending (i.e. ‘leaky abstractions’) Ps. I’m super excited to the the Lead segment side of this!

Watch it 😘