Real-time Marketing review

Customer Journey Orchestration is a new set of features for D365 Marketing, called Real-time Marketing. Enabling you to drive real-time experiences across all your customer touchpoints based on real-time events.

With this review, I will take you through my first impressions using Real-time Marketing and creating my first live journey in my environment where I've been working for a while on outbound marketing.

Let's get started!

When I first enabled the preview functionality, I wanted to jump right in there and orchestrate some customer journeys!

I navigated straight into "Journeys" and created a new one! To get started you first decide to either go with an event-based or segment-based journey.

The segment-based journey would be more similar to the existing customer journeys, with some additional features. Set the audience, recurrence or not, and start/end date. In a segment-based journey, you can use events and actions.

I wanted to test out a journey starting with a custom event trigger. For this journey I wanted to start with a membership card is being scanned.

Event triggers

So I started creating an event trigger for when someone scans their membership card at The Garden. With adding attribute you can collect properties through your event triggers, which again can be used in the personalization or as values later in the journey.

My initial thoughts on event triggers? I would have loved to extend using Power Automate, or bringing in my entities from Dataverse I'd like to react and trigger a journey on. (Less Code, More Power!)

Back to my journey

Custom event trigger created and selected! I can decide on a goal for my journey. Goals can be selected from a list of predefined goals or even create custom goals.

So what did I want to happen to my members of The Garden Club when scanned their membership card?

I didn't want to just add an email message and call it a day. I decided to test a branch with channel optimization through AI. This is where AI will select the best channel for my customers.

Without an app published through an app store, my options were with the remaining two channels, text and email. This feature requires a minimum of two channels. Perfect!

To complete configuring the Channel optimization, the next steps are to select an email and text message. First I thought I could use templates already created for outbound marketing, but those are not available in real-time marketing. Bummer.

Emails

I started creating an email from the popup within the Journey editor. I had a few issues with some minor things, such as getting sections formatted the same in the width throughout the email.

The email editor had been updated (again) for this preview and the small changes caught me by surprise. As I ended up discarding my initial draft, I then started from the email editor directly to understand the recent changes.

Plan, Create, Orchestrate! This the mantra that I go by in D365 Marketing for "Outbound Marketing". Simply put; plan out and then create your marketing campaign and all creative content (emails, landing pages, blog posts, images). Then create the journey, orchestrate the branches and actions. Then place content inside and do the finishing touches.

There are a few changes to the layout here compared to the Outbound Marketing area. One of these is the new personalize tab on the right-hand side. Allowing you to access all fields which have been "personalized" with dynamic/lookup variables and their source and an easy way to update or change the source or the default value.

The syntax in the personalized feature has changed a little from what we would use used to from D365 and dynamic values. The handlebar does not reference the data source as it used to with {{contact.firstname}}.

To personalize; click on the personalization button. A data source selector through "point and click". You can also search for fields in your data sources. Within the personalization editor, you set a label and define a default value. Once your email is live you won't be able to modify or delete the dynamic/personalized content. Only the static content will be editable within the email.

My first impression; I still really enjoy creating marketing emails in D365 Marketing! Even here in the new Real-time marketing editor. There are a few features I wish would have been in the preview such as a "fullscreen" switch and no-code dynamic variants of images.

Adding images - I needed to upload new media to use in this preview. The assets can only be; jpg/jpeg, gif and png formats. The new asset library is not synced with the existing media library in the Outbound Marketing area. I don't know if these two libraries will merge at some point, but I sure hope so.

The new AI feature will add tags to your images. A few of my plant photos were tagged by the AI as coffee, as the soil could resemble it I guess. It is not possible to change/remove tags from the AI, only your own. This AI feature will also recommend images to place in your emails, based on the written content.

Text messages

My text message was quicker to set up. I was prompted to set up a sender number, might be the easiest configuration of all times. For text messages, it is only the message content and title you need to add. You can also add personalized content to the message.

The text messages do not have the personalize "tab" such as the email editor. Once the message was live, I was only allowed to change the static content.

And then my simple journey was ready to be published. The right-hand side of the editor display settings and/or previews for the channels and the branches. Easy and consistent user interface.

I also created a few tests with very long branch sequence. This ended up being a bit clumsy to navigate and keep track of. I hope similar features as in the Customer Journey in Outbound Marketing will come here too, both the "Fit to screen", "horizontal/vertical" and "fullscreen" switches.

And there! My first journey is live and kicking! ???? My beautiful emails have been sent and with that, I can see how the journey analytics look. A few features are "missing" compared to Customer Journey Analytics in Outbound Marketing, such as selecting results and creating new segments. I've not been able to send myself text messages to my Norwegian phone number, so that is something I will continue trying to make work!

The analytics dashboard based on Power BI gets refreshed every few hours. With having just one journey so far, I don't have enough data to review the advanced analytics capabilities just yet.

Overall

I have done this review with the fact that it is in preview in mind, but there are a few surprising elements! I've been following a while now and tried to stay up to date regularly with a private preview, but it has still been great getting to finally try it out in my environment.

These features and capabilities within D365 Marketing will be a great way to expand journeys, bring in new channels and create great real-time experiences!

I aim to bring you some more examples soon with some web pages and other ways of using the event triggers to build strong and relevant journeys for my pretend customers and members at The Garden!