Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing has proven itself a powerful catalyst for creating and maintaining strong customer relationships. Microsoft’s update release wave 2 further enhances Dynamics 365 Marketing by giving users better tools for, and better control over, the processes they already do so well. There are big quality of life and UI enhancements coming to Customer Journeys, increased functionality and performance monitoring for social post, and integration with Microsoft Teams for easy webinar and event management.

Customer journeys

The Customer Journeys entity within Dynamics 365 Marketing enables users to track leads from their initial impressions all the way to purchase. The most basic of customer journeys will involve a segment of the audience and a marketing email. This can be helpful for sending just a single update or announcement email to a marketing list. However, it can go much more in depth with branching paths based on behavior and even automatically create new lead records. The updates to customer journeys focus on improving the user experience and overall creating a more intuitive interface.

When creating a new customer journey, there are a few templates to get started with, or they can be created from scratch. Upon opening a new journey, the canvas will be blank with a box asking for the segment, a start point, and an end point. With this update, new tiles can be added via the small blue plus icon in between start and end. There is no extra menu required to add new tiles. The tiles include anything from send an email, create an appointment, run a workflow, and more. There are even split functions for A/B testing, if/then statements, and wait commands.

Much of the update revolves around making the user experience much easier. The options users need to access are easier to find and require fewer clicks. With tile additions now on the canvas, there is no need to switch between a toolbox and properties pane. Microsoft has also made the tile options themselves easier to use and understand. Navigation in general is easier with enhanced panning and the ability to not only fit the whole journey into the canvas, but also change between vertical and horizontal view. Analytics and reports on the journey’s performance have been made easier to read and include better insights on the journey’s performance.

Social posts

Social posts will also be receiving an upgrade as part of wave 2. New visuals and an improved user interface are being added to make previewing posts easier. Images and links within posts will be more accurate to their true appearance and emojis are being included as well. The calendar itself is also seeing updates to the color scheme and overall visual appeal. Users will also be able to make posts directly on the calendar screen. Most importantly for social posts, Microsoft has announced that users will be able to view the performance and interactions with their social posts to better adapt for future posts. Updates to social posts are slated for an October release, so they should be available for users soon.

Dynamics 365 Marketing has long had the ability to host webinars with approved webinar providers, but with release wave 2, Microsoft has added an integration with Microsoft Teams to host webinars and live events. Teams meetings can be created through the events tab within the left navigation panel. To make use of this integration, users will need to have an active Microsoft 365 license with Microsoft Teams. Learn more about Microsoft 365 packages here.

When users create a new event with the integration active, there will be an option to stream the event online using Microsoft Teams. With Teams Live Events, there are a few extra settings able to make recordings available, produce attendee engagement reports, and even enable question and answer sessions for the event. For a more in-depth look at Teams webinar production, check out Microsoft’s documentation.

Other updates

Other functions within Dynamics 365 Marketing will be receive updates with wave 2. Emails will soon get support for background images in Outlook, better compatibility for Outlook mobile and Windows, and an overall easier creation process with better load times and interactions. Emails, along with pages and forms, will also be able to be created and edited directly within the customer journeys screen. Similarly marketing forms for events can be created within the event page. Information gathered from forms will have additional entity-storing options. Information from forms can be stored in a separate entity, rather than requiring a tie with an existing contact lead.

Get Started

Dynamics 365 Marketing is seeing some great updates as part of release wave 2. Major improvements to the user experience and better tracking of customer and overall audience engagement will make creating lasting relationships with customers that much easier. To get started, fill out the form below to schedule a call with our Dynamics 365 team.