This month marked the beginning of Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 2021 Release Wave 1 plans. Dynamics 365 Marketing will certainly be receiving its fair share of updates, new features, and bug fixes. To see some highlights of Marketing’s overall release plans, check out our other blog here! This April update Includes new features for emails, pages, social posting in addition to enhancements for some other systems in the app.

Like other Dynamics 365 apps, all marketing updates are pushed to customer automatically. Dynamics 365 Marketing utilizes a phased deployment schedule so if you haven’t noticed an update, keep an eye open for it in the near future. Administrators can also manually apply and test updates on a sandbox instance before applying them to the production instance. To learn more about how this works, check out Microsoft’s documentation.

Marketing emails

The email designer has been refreshed to provide a faster, easier-to-use experience with a more modern look. New layout design options give users increased flexibility in email structure. This new email editor has better image customization tools and can even provide recommendations related to images using AI. Footer fields for important information like the business address and a link to the subscription center have been implemented with the update as well.

In addition to these updates to the design-related aspects, marketing emails will also be easier to test and send. New options to set a default “from” name and address help to make sure emails are being sent from recognizable addresses. The preview feature is now more accurate and reliable in how it displays content relative to device type and size. The error checker can now apply automatically to resolve issues as they pop-up throughout the creation process. Emails should now experience far few issues with how they render in Outlook and on iOS devices.

Social posts and marketing pages

To give business better control of their social media presence, the social posts module is now able to create and post content to Instagram. This designer will be familiar to the one used for other social media posts and will have the same scheduling ability as well. Insights for Instagram KPIs can be viewed to reflect on post effectiveness. Currently, posts will be limited to one photo, but video posting will be coming with a future update.

Marketing pages have a new API to modify cookies on pages. This extends the range of user tracking and compliance options. This will apply on hosted and captured forms along with marketing pages through the Power Apps Portal.

Additional enhancements

The April update includes many other more minor enhancements and bug fixes. Customer journeys are now able to detect duplicate contacts within the journey, an event management error that prevented existing sessions from being added to the session track has been resolved, unclickable email buttons in Outlook should be fixed, the page designer should no longer break sometimes when modified videos are included, and much more.

Getting started

If you’re interested in learning more about the new features, or Dynamics 365 Marketing as a whole, be sure to fill out the contact form below to speak with one of our consultants!  We can help set up a customized demo to get you into Marketing and check out the features for yourself.