Your checklist for moving to Real-time Journeys
As you’re likely aware, Microsoft will be removing the Outbound Marketing Module from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys app on June 30th, 2025. To prevent the interruption of your marketing efforts, you’ll want to work on getting your organization transitioned over to the Real-Time Journeys module within the next few months. This checklist can help to organize your thoughts and plan for the transition.
At the end of this page, we have included a simplified version of this blog as a free downloadable checklist! Don’t forget to grab this resource before you go.
We also encourage you to check out our free, on-demand learning course designed to help anyone using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys make this move from Outbound to Real-time.
Planning and Configuration of Real-Time Journeys
Identify the emails and Journeys that will need to be brought over
One way to look at the transition is as an opportunity to do a bit of Spring cleaning. There are probably a good few no longer relevant segments, journeys, and emails and their related templates. As you are planning your transition, you can eliminate some of the clutter that may be filling your views.
Identify segments that would see benefits from recreation in the Real-Time Journeys
All segments created in Outbound Marketing will still function normally in Real-Time Journeys. However, there have been improvements made to segments in Real-Time that improve the performance and refresh rate, particularly for larger segments. Outbound marketing segments should also continue to exist in Real-Time even beyond the removal of the Outbound module. Because of this, segments can probably remain lower on the list of things to transition, and you can slowly recreate them as you have time. Cleaning up the excess is still probably a good idea though.
Configure compliance profile, load consent records, and optionally set up your brand profile(s)
In Outbound, compliance and consent were handled through the use of a subscription center form and page, subscription lists, and some toggles on the contact record. Real-time journeys, rather, uses a contact point consent-based strategy. This means it deals with opt-in/out at the email address or phone number level, rather than at the contact record level. If two contacts have the same email address and opt-out from an email sent to that address, it will cover both contacts.
To do
You will need to create a compliance profile in the Settings area of the app
Add in your business address
Set your consent link type:
Subscription center will use a marketing form similar to the current setup in Outbound
Preference page will create a page with customizable information and a defaulted style
Configure your consent purposes and create any required additional topics
Use the Load Consent command bar button to generate consent records from existing contacts/leads
Create Brand profiles if you need, which can be helpful if you have multiple brands with different styles or have multiple senders that may be used at any given time
Configure any additional settings, triggers, and feature switches your org will be using
There are quite a few other little settings that can be configured to tailor the app more to your specific business needs. You may not need all of them, so don’t worry about going through every individual menu. The Feature Switches section does have quite a few useful items in it. At the very least, a perusal through that page will likely be quite beneficial.
To do
Configure additional outreach channels
SMS provider
Push notifications for apps
Other custom channels
Browse through the feature switches to toggle optional extras (located in the Settings area), such as:
Email deduplication
One-click unsubscribe
Form captures
Event creation in Real-time journeys
Session-level registration in Real-time journeys
Etc.
Configure any custom triggers that you might need or edit preloaded triggers
Triggers from website or app interactions
Determine what kind of information you’d like to see passed into the trigger (may require assistance from a developer or your Microsoft partner*)
For event management, setting up webinar providers and configurations if planning to run online events
The session-level registration feature switch (mentioned above) may also be useful
Frequency caps can also help businesses running multiple campaigns at a time from spamming email addresses
Moving Content to Real-Time Journeys
Emails, Templates, and Content Blocks
Emails, their templates, and content blocks all have easy-to-use import tools. If you’ve planned out which emails, templates, and content blocks you need to bring over in advance, you can just select those to quickly bring into the new area.
After importing, you will see a new list view in each of these areas called “Imported from outbound.” Each imported email, template, and block will include [outbound] in the title and has been reverted to a ‘draft’ status. This is the time to review every imported item and make sure each element is working as you need. Chances are that, because of the functional differences between Outbound and Real-time, you will need to adjust portions of these content items.
Pay attention to dynamic content. There has been a change to how the markers for dynamic content are denoted between Outbound and Real-time. We’ve seen that the import tool may not properly update those pieces of dynamic content to the new format.
To do
Import Emails
Select desired emails and import using the import tool
Check for discrepancies in the way content is displayed
Import Email Templates
Select the desired templates and import
You may see a bunch of templates that appear to be duplicated in the picker menu. These are language duplicates, so just use the language column filter to display only the language(s) your business uses.
Check for discrepancies in the way content is displayed
Import Content Blocks
Select the desired templates and import
Check for content display discrepancies
Segments
As mentioned previously, all your Outbound marketing segments will still exist. In theory, the only setup that may be required for your segments is recreating any segments in Real-time for the improved performance they offer.
To do
Open the segments page in Real-time
Done!!
Journeys
Without any direct import tool, journeys will need to be recreated from scratch in Real-time. For the most part, you should be able to translate everything from Outbound pretty easily, despite the changes to journeys you will notice as you enter the designer canvas.
Should you struggle to directly recreate any journey, there may be a different way to accomplish that same journey goal in Real-time.
But, this may be a good time to consider if some of your journeys would be better suited to using triggers as a kickoff rather than segment membership. For example, most long-term lead nurture campaigns could probably be trigger-based rather than utilize a dynamic segment.
Also, you’ll want to consider how you can incorporate exit triggers to pull audience members out of a journey at certain times, based on audience actions. This is a new feature in Real-time that can be very helpful to pull unengaged members from the journey, or end a journey if a contact fulfills the journey goal before the actual journey ends.
To do
Create new journey/template in Real-time for each Outbound journey/template to be transitioned
Consider efficacy of triggers over segments
Consider improvements that can be made with the new or different features
Consider use cases of additional journey settings such as exit conditions
Forms
Forms also do not have a direct import tool. The underlying architecture for them was just a bit too different to effectively have one. Fortunately, they’re a fair bit easier to deal with on most fronts. It’s the same sort of designer, but the key difference lies in the consent setup. Rather than the subscription lists and unsubscribe check boxes from Outbound, we have Purposes and Topics from our Compliance Profile. These are functionally the same as the subscription lists and unsubscribe buttons, but just molded within this new consent and compliance model. It’s also very important to note that form captures do not as of writing have the built-in UI for field mappings. They will require assistance from someone with developer experience. It does link to Microsoft’s documentation page on the topic and the process itself isn’t particularly complex as it’s largely just filling in field name, but if you’re not used to looking at HTML or JavaScript code, it may appear more daunting.
To do
Recreate forms from Outbound in the Real-Time Journeys form designer
If Outbound forms were embedded on external websites, copy the embed script from the new Real-Time form and replace the old embed script
If using form captures:
Create the form in Real-Time with all the fields you want to collect from the form capture
Use the form capture Publish option to get the embed script
Pass the script over to a developer to get onto the web page with the form to be captured
Once added, run a couple test submissions to ensure data flows through properly
Events
Events are largely the same as they are in Outbound. There’s not really much that needs to be done in terms of migration unless you have events already created for after the transition deadline. Before all that, you’ll definitely want to go into Feature Switches and toggle the session-level registration and event creation in Real-Time Journeys switches. Real-Time also offers a much better method of handling your emailing for events through conditional and dynamic content in emails coupled with trigger-based journeys. You can create just one email as a sort of template for event registrations and, when used in a journey triggered by the Event Registration trigger, have all the content automatically generated and sent. One email, one journey to cover all of your events. Real-Time is also absorbing the marketing portal, so event web pages are hosted by the app and will no longer require Power Pages. They can also be embedded on external sites. On the docket for the 2024 Release Wave 2 with a general availability of February 2025 is a customizable event portal with its own designer for much easier set up compared to Outbound.
To do
Begin using the “in Real-Time Journeys” option when creating future events
Create any forms, emails, and journeys to be used in events
Consider using conditional and dynamic content for simplified handling of registration confirmation and reminder emails
That’s a wrap
The transition from Outbound Marketing to Real-Time Journeys may seem to be a little more daunting than it is in reality. There’s still a good amount of time to complete the transition and much of it can be broken into smaller pieces over that time frame. At the end of the end of the day, the app is going to offer a lot more flexibility once you’ve gotten up and running in Real-time. It’s going to be a little bit of extra work over the next few months, but you’ll likely be much more satisfied afterward.
Download our Transition Checklist
We’ve created a handy downloadable and printable checklist to help you cross of the to-do items in this blog!
Need additional help with this move?
We know this is quite the change, so we created an entire course in our on-demand learning platform, Syvantis Learn, to help you transition to Real-time! The great part? We’ve made it free for anyone to access.
