Becoming a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Functional Consultant - Malin Martnes - E-Book

Becoming a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Functional Consultant E-Book

Malin Martnes

0,0
29,99 €

-100%
Sammeln Sie Punkte in unserem Gutscheinprogramm und kaufen Sie E-Books und Hörbücher mit bis zu 100% Rabatt.
Mehr erfahren.
Beschreibung

Marketing is one of the most powerful entities in the modern world with the potential to make or break a business. The mighty Microsoft Dynamics 356 Marketing tool offers a wide range of marketing automation tools, understanding which is an essential skill for a successful marketer. This in-depth guide to the ins and outs of Dynamics 365 Marketing will help you grasp all the information you need to implement and use the system the right way. Starting with the setup and configuration of your Dynamics 365 Marketing instance, you'll explore fundamental concepts, such as leads, accounts, and contacts, and the creation and administration of segments and lists. Once you've grasped these basic concepts, you'll advance to the core of the book. From the email editor to outbound and real-time customer journeys and from the event module to Customer Voice, you'll develop a solid understanding of the fundamental topics crucial for anyone who wants to be a Dynamics 365 Marketing functional consultant.
By the end of the book, you'll be ready for Dynamics 365 Marketing end-to-end implementations.

Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:

EPUB
MOBI

Seitenzahl: 288

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Bewertungen
0,0
0
0
0
0
0
Mehr Informationen
Mehr Informationen
Legimi prüft nicht, ob Rezensionen von Nutzern stammen, die den betreffenden Titel tatsächlich gekauft oder gelesen/gehört haben. Wir entfernen aber gefälschte Rezensionen.



Becoming a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Functional Consultant

Learn to deliver enterprise marketing solutions and insights to exponentially grow your business

Malin Martnes

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Becoming a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing 
Functional Consultant

Copyright © 2022 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

Group Product Manager: Alok Dhuri

Publishing Product Manager: Akshay Dani

Senior Editor: Nithya Sadanandan

Technical Editor: Pradeep Sahu

Copy Editor: Safis Editing

Language Support Editor: Safis Editing

Project Coordinator: Manisha Singh

Proofreader: Safis Editing

Indexer: Rekha Nair

Production Designer: Alishon Mendonca

Developer Relations Marketing Executive: Deepak Kumar and Rayyan Khan

Business Development Executive: Uzma Sheerin

First published: December 2022

Production reference: 1251122

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham

B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN: 978-1-80323-460-1

www.packt.com

To my son Nicolai, for all the love in the world.

To my partner Mark, for always believing in me.

- Malin Martnes

Contributors

About the author

Malin Martnes is the CEO of MaCoTra AS, a company focusing on Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform. The Malin has been working with Microsoft technology for 10 years, but before that, she got a degree in marketing and has had this subject as an interest for many years. Microsoft awarded her with the title of Most Valuable Professional in 2019 and has re-awarded her every year since. Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) is an award for individuals who have exhibited exceptional technical expertise and a talent for sharing knowledge within their technical community.

I want to thank my son and my partner, for giving me the energy and push I needed. And the technical reviewers, Dilyana and Vivian, for giving great feedback and making the book even better.

About the reviewers

Vivian Voss is a functional solution architect with 7 years of experience with CRM and Dynamics products. Starting off as a technical consultant on Dynamics CRM 2011, she has followed Microsoft’s development to the now-known Dynamics 365 and most of the products within it. In 2022, she got rewarded as a Microsoft Business Applications MVP for her blogging about Dynamics 365 Marketing and organizing or volunteering at various Power Platform and Dynamics 365 events. Being part of the Dynamics365/Power Platform community, and especially the people within it, is what keeps her passion for the area burning.

Dilyana Radulova works as a technical specialist for Microsoft, focusing on Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights. Dilyana has years of experience working with the Microsoft stack as a functional consultant and running projects as the functional lead.

Dilyana is one of the leaders in the Dynamics 365 Customer Experience User Group, a user group focusing on Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part 1 – The Foundation of Dynamics 365 Marketing

1

The Basic Configuration of Dynamics 365 Marketing

Prerequisites of Dynamics 365 Marketing

Microsoft 365 tenants

License

Setting up and managing Dynamics 365 Marketing

Configuring marketing settings

Overview

Email marketing

Customer engagement

Collaboration

Event management

Lead management

Data management

Other settings – Feature switches

Templates

Asset library

Outbound

Real-time marketing-specific configuration

Summary

Questions

2

Managing Leads, Accounts, and Contacts

Understanding and managing leads

Defining leads

Creating a lead

The out-of-the-box form in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Understanding and managing contacts

Defining contacts

Creating a contact

The out-of-the-box form in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Understanding and managing accounts

Defining accounts

Creating an account

The out-of-the-box form in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Relationships – connecting everything

One-to-many or many-to-one (1:N/N:1)

Many-to-many (N:N)

The lead life cycle

Lead scoring

Lead-to-opportunity marketing sales business process flow

Summary

Questions

3

What Are Segments and Lists?

Understanding and managing segments

What are segments?

Dynamic segments

Static segments

CI segments

Real-time marketing segments

Understanding and managing subscription centers and lists

Subscription centers

Marketing lists

Summary

Questions

Part 2 – Core Features of Dynamics 365 Marketing

4

Managing Marketing Forms, Pages, and Websites

Understanding and managing marketing forms

Types of marketing forms

Marketing form fields

Creating marketing forms

Using marketing forms

Capturing forms

Understanding and managing marketing pages

Types of marketing pages

Creating marketing pages

Understanding and managing marketing websites

Analytics for marketing forms, pages, and websites

Marketing forms

Marketing pages

Marketing websites

Summary

Questions

5

Creating Marketing Emails

Creating marketing emails

Getting started with emails in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Email templates

Creating Real-time marketing templates

Creating outbound marketing templates

Sending emails

Send now

Customer journeys

Double opt-in confirmation

Analytics

Outbound analytics

Real-time marketing analytics

Summary

Questions

6

Outbound Customer Journeys

Creating and understanding outbound customer journeys

Creating an outbound customer journey

Using the designer

General settings

Analytics

Summary

Questions

7

Real-Time Marketing Journeys

Real-time marketing triggers

Out-of-the-box triggers

Creating custom triggers

Creating and understanding real-time marketing journeys

Creating a real-time marketing journey

Adding actions or other elements

Analytics

Summary

Questions

8

Managing Events

Event management settings

Web applications

Webinar providers

Webinar configurations

Event administration

Website table configurations

Creating and managing events

Tabs of an event record

Speakers

Sessions

Session tracks

Check-ins

Sponsorships management

Creating and managing in-person events

Venue management

Logistics

Creating and managing webinars

Teams

Event communication

Event website

Summary

Questions

Part 3 – The Microsoft Ecosystem Adding Value

9

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

What is Dynamics 365 Customer Voice?

Creating and managing surveys

Projects

Analytics

Adding questions to a survey

Question types

Adding logic

Customization

Post-survey message

Footer

Share

Sending surveys

Distribution settings

Automation

Email

Embedded code

Link

QR code

Dynamics 365 Marketing

Summary

Questions

Further reading

10

Power Platform

Dataverse

Security

Solutions

Creating new tables

Creating new columns

Creating forms

Creating views

Power Apps

Model-driven

Canvas

Power Automate

Cloud flows

Custom marketing triggers

Power Pages

Customer Insights

Summary

Questions

Further reading

Assessments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Index

Other Books You May Enjoy

Preface

Dynamics 365 Marketing is Microsoft’s solution to help companies achieve more with marketing. This book will guide you through learning about and using Dynamics 365 Marketing to better your company’s marketing automation efforts.

The first part of the book is all about getting the foundation correct so that you have a solid ground on which to keep building your marketing. Understanding the basis of how the system is built and the configuration is important before you start using it.

The second part of the book gives you an in-depth walk-through of the core functionalities of Dynamics 365 Marketing and gives you the dos and don’ts of the functionality.

The third part explores one of the biggest advantages of choosing a Microsoft system: the surrounding environment and the large ecosystem. From extending the marketing system to having an event portal and asking customers for their feedback, there is a solution in the Microsoft world to fix it.

This book will guide you through everything you need to know to have a flying start in your implementation or when working with Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Who this book is for

This book is for both marketing consultants doing implementations and marketers using the system, who are interested in learning all about Dynamics 365 Marketing. This book is ideal if you want to learn all about the system, to implement it from end to end, to pass the MB-220 certification, or just to get more knowledge about Dynamics 365 Marketing.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, The Basic Configuration of Dynamics 365 Marketing, covers the prerequisites before you start implementing Dynamics 365 Marketing and what kind of setup you will need before you can start using the system.

Chapter 2, Managing Leads, Accounts, and Contacts, covers how Dynamics 365 Marketing defines your customer. We’ll go through what accounts, contacts, and leads are and how they are connected. We’ll also look at active marketing customers, who you can send information to, and learn what the lead life cycle is.

Chapter 3, What Are Segments and Lists?, goes through the creation and administration of segments, subscription centers, and lists.

Chapter 4, Managing Marketing Forms, Pages, and Websites, covers how to create marketing forms, pages, and websites. We will have a look at what they are and some use cases for them.

Chapter 5, Creating Marketing Emails, explains how you can create a good email, what different layouts are available, and how you can create your own with templates. We’ll also go through the analytics of emails and how you can read these to improve your emails.

Chapter 6, Outbound Customer Journeys, combines all of your efforts together in journeys. There are two different types of customer journeys: outbound and real-time. In this chapter, we’ll go through the outbound customer journeys. Lastly, we will look at the analytics and how we can read them to create even better journeys.

Chapter 7, Real-Time Marketing Journeys, goes through the more modern real-time marketing journeys. Lastly, we will look at the analytics and how we can read them to create even better journeys.

Chapter 8, Managing Events, covers one of the features that make Dynamic 365 Marketing stand out most: the event module. We go through the setup of both in-person events and webinars. We look at the event journeys and see how we can use Power Pages as the event website.

Chapter 9, Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, covers an important part of marketing: getting responses, feedback, and information from your customers. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is tightly connected to Dynamics 365 Marketing, and is the system where you create surveys to send to your customers, potential customers, and event participants.

Chapter 10, Power Platform, covers the ecosystem of the Microsoft Power Platform. No system is created perfect but the possibility to make changes and customize the system to your company’s needs is key, and the Power Platform can help with this. In this chapter, we’ll go through all the applications that are relevant to the system and how you can use them to get even better usage of Dynamics 365 Marketing.

To get the most out of this book

To get the most out of the book, I highly recommend you have a Dynamics 365 solution set up. If you do not have this set up, you can easily create a trial from https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-gb/dynamics-365-free-trial/ and select Dynamics 365 Marketing. You will then get a 30-day free trial, where you can test everything we go through in the book.

You can read more about the prerequisites for setting up a system on this site: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/purchase-setup#prerequisites-and-requirements.

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/yJxeH.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “If you have a list of contacts to which you should never send any emails, that’s an important block to add to any segment that you’ll use to send an email, in the form of a but notsegment block.”

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “On the Usage limits screen, you can see the fair use policy usage limits.”

Tips or important notes

Appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, email us at [email protected] and mention the book title in the subject of your message.

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata and fill in the form.

Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the material.

If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.

Share Your Thoughts

Once you’ve read Becoming a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Functional Consultant, we’d love to hear your thoughts! Please click here to go straight to the Amazon review page for this book and share your feedback.

Your review is important to us and the tech community and will help us make sure we’re delivering excellent quality content.

Download a free PDF copy of this book

Thanks for purchasing this book!

Do you like to read on the go but are unable to carry your print books everywhere?

Is your eBook purchase not compatible with the device of your choice?

Don’t worry, now with every Packt book you get a DRM-free PDF version of that book at no cost.

Read anywhere, any place, on any device. Search, copy, and paste code from your favorite technical books directly into your application.

The perks don’t stop there, you can get exclusive access to discounts, newsletters, and great free content in your inbox daily

Follow these simple steps to get the benefits:

Scan the QR code or visit the link below

https://packt.link/free-ebook/9781803234601

Submit your proof of purchaseThat’s it! We’ll send your free PDF and other benefits to your email directly

Part 1 –The Foundation of Dynamics 365 Marketing

This first part of the book is all about creating the foundation to build your marketing on. Understanding the basics of how the system is built and its configuration is important before you start using it. The following chapters are included in this part:

Chapter 1, The Basic Configuration of Dynamics 365 MarketingChapter 2, Managing Leads, Accounts, and ContactsChapter 3, What Are Segments and Lists?

1

The Basic Configuration of Dynamics 365 Marketing

Welcome to the world of Dynamics 365 Marketing! We’re going to have a lot of fun with this book, and you will learn all about how to use the system the right way, taking advantage of all the features of this amazing system.

This first chapter of this book is a fragmented chapter about setting up the system correctly. If you’re brand new to Dynamics 365 Marketing, you might want to skip this part and circle back to it when you’re done with this book and keep it as a reference for when you’re doing implementations. This chapter will tell you all about what you need to set up to use the system effectively and efficiently.

You will learn about the following main topics in this chapter:

Prerequisites of Dynamics 365 MarketingSetting up and managing Dynamics 365 MarketingConfiguring marketing settingsTemplatesAsset library

By the end of this chapter, you’ll know what all the different settings are for and how you can use them to get your Dynamics 365 tailored to your needs.

Prerequisites of Dynamics 365 Marketing

Before we start using the system, we need to make sure you can access Dynamics 365 Marketing, so the first thing we need to go through is how to get access to the system.

The first thing you should check is that Dynamics 365 Marketing is available in your region. The easiest way to do that is by going to https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/availability-reports/georeport/ and checking if it’s listed as generally available in your region.

In this section, we’ll go through Microsoft 365 tenants and which licensing you need to use the system.

Microsoft 365 tenants

The first thing you need is an existing Microsoft 365 (M365) tenant. An M365 tenant is a location where all your organization’s data is stored. If you’re located in Europe, you will most likely have a tenant localized in the European data centers. To create an environment for Dynamics 365 Marketing, you’ll need to have your M365 tenant already set up. If this is not something your company has already done, it will need to be created before you can continue creating your Dynamics 365 Marketing environment. To learn more about administrating Microsoft 365, I highly recommend the book Microsoft Office 365 Administration Cookbook by Nate Chamberlain, available at https://www.packtpub.com/product/microsoft-office-365-administration-cookbook/9781838551230.

License

Once you have your tenant in place, you need a license. If you’re familiar with the world of Microsoft licensing, you might know that this isn’t always the easiest area to explain, but let’s see if we can make sense of it.

The first thing you need to check is if you have 10 or more licenses for other Dynamics 365 applications such as Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Supply Chain Management, Finance, or Commerce. If you have 10 or more of these licenses, then you qualify for an attach license, which is half the price of the normal full-price Marketing license. Marketing isn’t licensed per user, but per app, so you don’t have to buy multiple licenses because you have multiple users.

When you’ve purchased the base license, you get 10,000 marketing contacts and 100,000 marketing interactions included in the price. Now, let’s dig deeper into what this means.

A marketing interaction is a personalized message sent through a customer journey (where all messages from the system are sent from). No matter what channel you send this information through, it’s a marketing interaction.

A marketing contact is anyone with at least one marketing interaction registered in the past 12 months.

If you need more marketing contacts or marketing interactions than those included in the base license, you can buy additional packs for both. If you want to have more than one production environment or a sandbox or development environment, you can buy additional licenses for that as well.

The world of licensing is always changing. You can read all about pricing on the pricing page at https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/ or the licensing guide at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=866544&clcid=0x409.

Now, you’re ready to start installing Dynamics 365 Marketing!

Setting up and managing Dynamics 365 Marketing

If you’re a Global admin or Service support admin, you can install the system on your tenant. If you already have a Dynamics 365 Marketing app installed, you won’t be able to install a new one, but you can do a reinstallation. Each Marketing app can only be used with one Dynamics 365 environment. Let’s begin:

Go to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/ and choose Resources | Dynamics 365 apps from the left menu. On the Dynamics 365 apps pane, you need to find Dynamics 365 Marketing Application and click the three dots, then choose Manage, as shown in Figure 1.1:

Figure 1.1 – Power Platform admin center – Dynamics 365 apps

This will start the setup wizard, where you can choose which environment you want to set up and the web hosting you want to use (you can change this after the setup), as shown in Figure 1.2:

Figure 1.2 – Connecting to the Dynamics 365 environment and web hosting

If you have a web server, you can create pages and link them back to Dynamics 365 Marketing. If you use Power Apps Portals (now called Power Pages), you can use the out-of-the-box functionality of marketing pages. We will cover all of this in Chapter 4, Managing Marketing Forms, Pages, and Websites.

When you’ve selected your environment and hosting, you must accept the Microsoft terms and conditions and put in your company’s physical street address. There are several laws and regulations in different countries that state that you need to add your company’s physical street address, so this needs to be done in the setup. It will take about 3 hours for everything to be set up so that you’re ready to start configuring.

Configuring marketing settings

When you set up a new Dynamics 365 Marketing system, you have a lot of links to go through on the Settings overview page, as shown in Figure 1.3:

Figure 1.3 – Settings overview

We’re going to go through all of these so that you know what each one does and how you can use them to tailor your system in the best way possible.

Overview

The first area we start with is the Overview area. Here, you can see the available versions, quota limits, and usage limits.

Versions

About once a month, the team from Microsoft comes out with a new version. Some of these contain lots of new stuff, while others just contain bug fixes and minor changes. The Versions area is where you make sure that your Dynamics 365 Marketing is up to date with all the new features. I highly recommend updating the system outside of normal business hours to make sure that you don’t interfere with the usage of the system.

If you set up your system before March 2022, the Versions area is where you activate the real-time marketing features. This book will dive deeper into the features of real-time marketing in Chapter 6, Outbound Customer Journeys, and Chapter 7, Real-Time Marketing Journeys. If you don’t see it on your system, go to Settings | Versions and activate it. This will take a couple of hours.

Quota limits

As we discussed in the first part of this chapter, you get a set of interactions and marketing contacts with your license. In the Quota limits area, you get an overview of what you have used every month based on the licenses you have. You can see how many emails, text messages, or push notifications you have used that month and how much you have left on your quota. You can also see how many marketing contacts you have in Dataverse. If you have gone over your limit of marketing contacts or your interaction quota, then you can buy additional licenses. The contacts in your system with which you haven’t done marketing for the last 12 months move over to regular contacts and no longer count against the quota of your marketing contacts.

Usage limits

On the Usage limits screen, you can see the fair use policy usage limits. Dynamics 365 uses cloud resources for data and processing that are shared with other organizations, and to avoid taking up all the capacity of the tenant, there are limits per organization. You can see these limits in Figure 1.4:

Figure 1.4 – Fair use policy usage limit

Email marketing

For many, email marketing is a fundamental part of their marketing. Email marketing is how a lot of companies share their information with both established and potential customers. There are several settings you should go through to tailor your system to your company’s needs as much as possible.

Domain authentication

When sending an email to a customer or hosting a form, you want the sender to be your organization and the sender’s email to be your company’s email. To be allowed to do this, you need to register your domain in Dynamics 365 Marketing. First, you need to claim your domain through a method called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). DKIM is an authentication method that tells your users that this is a safe domain and is not used for phishing or email spam. Domain authentication is implemented through the internet’s DNS system; you will need to own your domain before you can claim it in Dynamics 365 Marketing, as shown in Figure 1.5:

Figure 1.5 – Domain authentication

This means that you cannot send an email in Dynamics 365 Marketing from another domain that you do not own. This is for security reasons – you can only use a domain that you own; otherwise, it will automatically be flagged as spam and will not be sent out by the system. When you start with Dynamics 365 Marketing, you get a default domain that you can use. While it won’t look as pretty as your domain, it gives you a place to start.

Landing pages

The settings area for landing pages is where you create a record for configuring your landing pages. You need to have one record that will act as the default configuration for your landing pages, as shown in Figure 1.6, but you can have multiple configurations for landing pages. Maybe your company has several departments, or you might have multiple companies in the same organization:

Figure 1.6 – Default Marketing Page Configuration

In the record, you can specify if you want a privacy banner and what links you want in that banner. You can also set the form matching and whether you want to store form submissions and allow submissions where you don’t update the contact or lead. All these settings will impact how your landing pages will behave.

Designer feature protection

There is at least one of these people in every company. You know the ones I’m talking about – the ones that always break the design guidelines or just tweak the email a bit so that it becomes exactly as they wanted. With designer feature protection, you can add a team or a user and block them from using either the HTML features or the Litmus integration (preview functionality for emails you create). This can be great when you need to make sure that everyone in your company is using predefined templates for their emails or landing pages.

Default settings

You can have multiple default settings, but you can only have one default setting record that is the default and will be used as a standard. These are confusing names, but I will make sense of it all later in this book when we go through how you use these settings.

In the Marketing email tab (Figure 1.7), you need to connect to features such as default content settings and default sending domain, which we’ll go through in depth in this chapter:

Figure 1.7 – Default settings – the Marketing email tab

Another important feature to enable here is Litmus integration. Litmus allows you to preview your emails in different browsers and systems. A limited number of previews are included in your Marketing license, but you can always buy more previews directly from Litmus if that’s needed.

In the Customer journey tab, you can set the preferred time zone.

Double opt-in is when you send an email to have the customer confirm that they want to sign up for your newsletter, as you need to confirm that it’s them that signed up for it. The global level double opt-in option allows you to set this for the entire tenant, and you can change the settings for it in the Global level double opt-in tab (Figure 1.8):

Figure 1.8 – Default settings – Global level double opt-in

Important note

I don’t recommend using this feature – there are only a few customers I’ve met that need to use double opt-in, and I’ve never come across any that should use Global level double opt-in.

The Bypass email deduplication tab is also a rare feature for my customers to use, but some special customers need it. One of my customers is a bank; their customers are parents and their children, often with the same email address. If they want to send out an email that’s personalized to each of their customers, they can use Bypass email deduplication so that only one of these emails is sent out, even if it is supposed to go to each contact, so long as it’s the same email. They need to change this setting to Yes if they want multiple emails to be sent to the same email address.

Customer engagement

In the Customer engagement section, we can find areas for compliance, audience configuration, push notifications, SMS providers, Azure SMS preview, and social media accounts. Let’s take a look at all of these.

Compliance

With the importance of the GDPR and privacy, you need good features to help you make sure you use the system correctly. There are different options for this, including Outbound consent and Real-Time consent. Let’s take a look at what the different options are.

Real-Time consent

In the Real-Time consent part of compliance (Figure 1.9), you can decide if you’re going to use a restrictive or non-restrictive consent model. If you’re somewhere where the GDPR is in play, you need to use the restrictive model, which means you can’t send anything to customers without their consent to do so. The non-restrictive model means you can send commercial information to every customer until they opt out.

You can also specify whether you want to get tracking consent from customers and fill out the physical postal address for your company:

Figure 1.9 – Compliance – Real-Time consent

Preference page

The Preference page options (Figure 1.10) are where you edit the page your customers go to so that they can change their preferences for things such as whether you can send them information or not via email and/or SMS:

Figure 1.10 – Compliance – Preference page

You can also preview the page to see how the page will appear to your customers, as shown in Figure 1.11:

Figure 1.11 – Compliance – Preview of Preference page

Outbound consent

In the Outbound marketing consent area (Figure 1.12), you must decide if you want to enable a dropdown in the outbound customer journey and if you want to log the changes on that field:

Figure 1.12 – Compliance – Outbound consent

Audience configuration

In real-time marketing, you can send information to contacts, leads, and/or customer profile entities. Both contacts and leads use the default fields for email and phone numbers, so if you aren’t using the default fields for email and phone, you’ll have to go into the audience data configuration options (Figure 1.13) and edit the recipient fields:

Figure 1.13 – Audience configuration

Push notifications

To use push notifications in Dynamics 365 Marketing, you will have to have a complete app already available on the iOS App Store and/or Google Play. To connect the app and Dynamics 365 Marketing, you need to create a new mobile app configuration, as shown in Figure 1.14:

Figure 1.14 – Mobile app configuration

In the configuration, you need to get the Android FCM key and/or the iOS APN certificate from your developers. When you’ve created a new mobile app configuration, you get the access token and application ID you will need to connect your app to the system. Now, you can start using push notifications directly from Dynamics 365 Marketing in your app.

SMS providers

In Dynamics 365 Marketing, you have the option to connect to two out-of-the-box SMS providers, either TeleSign or Twilio, as of October 2022. From October 2022 you have the option of creating a custom channel where you can connect to your local provider. To use either provider, you must become a customer of them, after which you can connect the provider to your Dynamics 365 Marketing instance, and then use the provider to send your text messages. After you become a customer, you need to fill in the details shown in Figure 1.15 to connect with your SMS provider:

Figure 1.15 – SMS number setup

You will need some information from your provider so that you can register your number. Then, you’ll be ready to start sending SMSs from the system.

Azure SMS

The third choice of SMS provider is the SMS functionality in the Azure communication services, which lets you send out text messages in bulk, have a two-way conversation, and get access to analytics. To see where the data from Azure communication services is available, along with any geographical restrictions, check the page at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/communication-services/concepts/privacy.

To learn more about subscription eligibility and number capabilities, visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/communication-services/concepts/numbers/sub-eligibility-number-capability.

Social media accounts

Social media is a big part of marketing, and Dynamics 365 Marketing gives us the functionality to work with social media through the platform. To create social media posts directly from Dynamics 365 Marketing, you will have to set up the connection between the system and your social media profile, which you can do by accepting the terms and conditions and giving the configuration a name (Figure 1.16). When you click Create, you need to sign in to the social media account:

Figure 1.16 – Create new social media account

You will need to sign in to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram account before you can utilize the social media posting feature.

With LinkedIn, you can also connect your account with LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. Be aware that the LinkedIn user profile (Figure 1.17) is set up a bit differently than other social media, as you always need to connect to it with your own personal LinkedIn that is connected to your company’s LinkedIn site. If you have any campaigns or Lead Gen Forms, the information from these can be automatically sent to your system:

Figure 1.17 – LinkedIn user profile

Collaboration

Collaborating with your colleagues is getting more and more important and Dynamics 365 Marketing has features to help you with this.

Teams chat

Over the last couple of years, Microsoft Teams has become increasingly popular across the globe. In the Teams chat settings area, you can turn on the ability to link your records to different Microsoft Teams channels, which allows you to pin records and views in your Teams channel from Dynamics 365. Another feature allows you to turn on confidential labels so that you can create private teams that only you and selected users have access to.

If you and your team want to chat about the new campaign you are creating in Dynamics 365 Marketing in Teams, this Teams chat can be linked to a record in Dynamics 365, thus storing all the information about this specific customer journey in one place. These two systems working together makes it even easier for marketers to collaborate and share information about the marketing efforts they do for your company.

Event management

The Event management module is one of the features that most separates Dynamics 365 Marketing from other