What’s new with Dynamics 365 Marketing?

Dynamics 365 2021 Release Wave 2 is here, and it brings new innovations that provide significant capabilities to transform your business. The release contains hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications including Marketing, Sales, Service, Finance, Operations, Human Resources, Commerce, Fraud Protection, Customer Insights, Customer Voice and Business Central. You can read more about it here.

Microsoft will start rolling out these new features starting October 1st, 2021 with preview availability for selected features as early as August 2nd, 2021. Deployment will be based on region.

What’s new with Dynamics Marketing?

Microsoft is planning to release new features for Dynamics Marketing in Analytics and AI, Marketing Moments, and Personalization. With  Analytics and AI, users will be able to create email content more easily with AI-based content ideas. These ideas will automatically generate a set of snippets which you may choose to incorporate into marketing email content. The snippets can be custom tailored to suit your business needs.

There are several updates included that will enrich your Marketing Moments and Customer Journeys. B2B customers will be able to leverage Account-based profile data from Customer Insights in your Customer Journeys. In addition, Customer Journeys can be personalized using Account-based profile data from Customer Insights. You will soon be able to store Customer Insights data in Azure Data Lake Storage in addition to the Microsoft Dataverse storage already supported. Data stored in the Azure Data Lake Storage can be used in real-time event triggered Customer Journeys.

The Dynamics Marketing mobile channel will soon support SMS messaging. Text messaging will be supported in both Dynamics Marketing Campaigns as well as Customer Service communication. This will be possible by integrating with either Twilio or TeleSign. Please note that these integrations are available through a common Omnichannel service shared with Dynamics 365 Customer Service and require an SMS account.

When you use Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights together, you will be able to view Customer Journey interactions on the Customer Insights timeline. Interactions recorded in Customer Journeys will also be available to add to Customer Cards or Power BI dashboards.

Webinar and participant registrations in Microsoft Teams will also integrate with Dynamics 365 Marketing. This will allow you to send personalized messages or automated emails to webinar participants based on registration and attendance triggers. You can also create branded registration pages or trigger Customer Journeys based on user behavior in Microsoft Teams.

At any point in a Customer Journey, you will now be able to trigger a Power Automate flow. This means that you can invoke Marketing interactions with customers based on hundreds of events that occur in other applications besides Dynamics. For example, after an order is fulfilled, a trigger can send a survey to a customer requesting feedback on their latest purchase. On the flip side, you will also be able to trigger a Customer Journey from a Power Automate flow. An example of this would be to trigger a Customer Journey for addons or product upgrades after a customer places an order for a base product.

We are also looking forward to the new Segmentation Builder due out in preview mode later this year. The Segmentation Builder will allow you to build segments for Contacts, Leads and custom entities using an intuitive query builder or natural query language, whichever you are more comfortable using.

Dynamics 365 Marketing is already a great product, and these new features are going to elevate Marketing Teams’ capabilities to a whole new level.