With Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft released a comprehensive digital marketing application within the Dynamics 365 ecosystem. Dynamics 365 Marketing handles email marketing, event marketing, landing pages and forms, and social media marketing with ease. Coming soon, the Customer Journey entity will see a revamp making it even easier to create and manage automated marketing campaigns.

These campaigns range from a simple email blast to an extended drip campaign that reacts to how the target interacts with the campaign content. Learn more about building more complex customer journeys here. Here is a glimpse at what’s coming to early release in September and general availability in October.

Since the release of Dynamics 365 Marketing, the Customer Journey entity has used a tile canvas to help users build their campaigns.

With the coming release, Microsoft is completely redesigning the customer journey canvas to make the building experience more intuitive. One common complaint with the old canvas was the need to constantly switch between the canvas and the toolbox while adding tiles. Now, there will be an in-place journey menu making it easier to add customer journey elements to the canvas. Microsoft has also added custom horizontal and vertical layout options, improved visual journey insights, and enhanced performance when working with large customer journeys.

New capabilities

Better time based actions have been a consistent request for customer journey users for a long time. With the upcoming release, these actions are simplified. Also, “Wait for” and Wait until” tiles are being added making it easier to create time based branches in the journey.

Microsoft is also adding negative journey path capabilities to customer journeys. Negative journey paths enable branches for recipients who don’t meet a certain condition. This means you can now send users down a path if they DIDN’T do something. An example of this would be creating a branch for users who received an email but didn’t open it or select a link.

Beyond customer journeys, there are many new features coming to Dynamics 365 Marketing. Marketing forms will have a new capture experience and background images, email messages are getting new templates and an updated spam checker, and more. Get all the details on what’s new and upcoming in Dynamics 365 Marketing here.

Availability

As of posting this blog, these changes are in early access. They are expected to reach general availability in October 2020.

While Dynamics 365 Marketing is very user-friendly, it can be daunting without proper training and support. Get in touch with us to learn about our Dynamics 365 training and support opportunities.