Dynamics 365 Marketing comes out-of-the-box with a wide range of functionality. Customer journeys provide everything from quick, single-email blasts to much larger, dynamic, multi-step marketing automation processes. Content tiles within Customer Journeys allow users to drag and drop different marketing activities like emails, phone calls, appointments, workflows, and much more within a campaign. In addition to these tiles, Custom Channels can be created to expand upon the base tool set. Custom channels can be things like social media platforms or SMS marketing that can be used within a customer journey just like the default tiles.

What are Custom Channels?

As previously stated, custom channels help to extend the already wide functionality of D365 Marketing. They are created by partners or internal development teams and contain customized entities, and/or workflows or plug-ins for custom logic. These component parts are fused together to create this end solution that can then be added into a Marketing environment.

Custom channels are great for bringing a business’ common communications into D365 Marketing for easy tracking and automation. As an example, a custom channel can help with sending messages on social media platforms and external chat apps. A channel can be created for Facebook messaging or for use within WhatsApp. If set up properly, these channel tiles can also open new options for logic tiles further along in a customer journey like branching paths based on whether someone responded to a message.

Add custom channel tiles to customer journeys just like any other tile. After the tile is added, click on it to bring up the configuration pane on the right side. The channel can be selected from this pane. After being added to the canvas, new triggers for logic tiles will be available further down the swimlane. These options will depend on the set up of the channel itself.

SMS messaging has previously not been a feature within D365 Marketing, but is available on preview as part of 2021 Release Wave 1. Before this, or if not using the feature preview, SMS messages could still be included through the use of the custom channel tiles. Workflows may also be added to custom channels to run automatically with the rest of the tile. Custom channel interactions are tracked just like normal tiles so they can help to expand the insights that can be pulled from customer journeys.

Custom channels can be found through Microsoft AppSource. AppSource is a Dynamics 365 marketplace for applications, extensions, and services from independent software vendors (ISVs). The solutions are sorted into different categories based on the product the solution is used with and what it offers. Solutions can be purchased directly through AppSource and many have demo environments to test out the features. After purchasing a solution, the confirmation page and email will both have a link to configure it for your environment.