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!

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:

1. 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

2. 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.

3. 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.

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 marketing automation tools, so naturally, there are some settings you need to go through before you can start using it. We will look at some of these in the following sections.

Web applications

If you are using APIs to interact programmatically with events, you need to register them in web applications.

Webinar providers

If you want to use another third-party webinar host, you can use On24, for which there is a record already set up, but you rarely need to go into this setting.

Webinar configurations

To use On24 as your webinar host, you need to set up a webinar configuration where you can add your credentials to On24 and connect the two systems.

Event administration

The most important setting in New event administration is Match contact based on, as shown in Figure 1.18.

Figure 1.18 – New Event administration

When a customer registers for an event, this is the field that defines the matching criteria for contacts. If the event participant registers their details, and these match in terms of email, first name, and last name, then the registration for event participation will be connected to the contact. All of these attributes need to match to deem it a contact match. If you have duplicates in your system, then it also makes sense to match on email, first name, and last name to ensure it’s the correct contact.

If you’re in your production environment, you should never enable the demo payment confirmation. This is only meant to be used if you’re doing a demonstration.

Website table configurations

If you want to connect with the event API and expose custom fields, you need to set up website table configurations.

Lead management

Leads are an important part of your system. You can read more about this in Chapter 2, Managing Leads, Accounts, and Contacts. To work with leads and utilize the leads you have in your system properly, you have several settings to do in lead management. Let’s go through the most important aspects of lead management.

Scoring configuration

If you want to use lead scoring in Dynamics 365 Marketing, you must have one scoring configuration. One possible setup is shown in Figure 1.19:

Figure 1.19 – Scoring configuration

When you set Automatic sales ready or Automated marketing qualification to Yes, this will change the out-of-the-box Business Process Flow for the lead. If the lead is Sales-ready, it’s ready for the sales team to take over to work with the lead. If it’s automatically marketing qualified, this means that marketing has approved the lead and the status in the Business Process Flow changes automatically.

The Automatic lead scores cleanup option allows you to specify what will happen with the calculated scores if you stop a lead-scoring model – that is, whether it will remove or keep all the scores of existing leads.

Form matching

Nobody wants duplicates in their system. The Form matching area of the settings is where you set up how you want to match your contacts and leads from forms. You can specify which attributes need to match to map new leads or contacts coming into the system, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 1.20 – Form matching

Commonly used matching strategies include email addresses and/or phone numbers. You always have one default contact matching and one default lead matching strategy, but you can also have multiple types of strategies that you can use on different landing pages.

Lead matching strategies

In the Email Lead Matching Strategy (Default) area (Figure 1.21), you define how to connect the leads coming from LinkedIn into your system, with the choice of always creating a lead or enabling contact creation. You need to set which matching leads fields you want to use:

Figure 1.21 – LinkedIn matching

LinkedIn field mapping

In the Active LinkedIn Field Mappings area (Figure 1.22), you define which field from LinkedIn is connected to which field in Dataverse. The reason you do this is to be able to collect all the data from LinkedIn and place it in the correct fields in Dynamics 365 Marketing. If you don’t map them, the system doesn’t know where to store the information and just ignores it:

Figure 1.22 – Active LinkedIn Field Mappings

Data management

One of the big advantages of working in the Microsoft ecosystem is the possibility to connect to other Microsoft systems. In this section, we’re going to go through the Customer Insights connector, analytics configuration, and dataset configuration.

Customer Insights connector

The Customer Insights connector (Figure 1.23) lets you connect Dynamics 365 Marketing to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Customer Insights is a system that gives you a 360-degree view of your customers using data coming from multiple systems across your company. This gives you a unique opportunity to get insights and helps create segments that you can use in Dynamics 365 Marketing. You will learn more about Customer Insights and the benefits of integrating it into Dynamics 365 Marketing in Chapter 10, Power Platform:

Figure 1.23 – Customer Insights connector

Analytics configuration

In the Analytics configuration area, you can add your existing Azure Blob storage. Many companies connect multiple systems with their Azure Blob storage, such as Power BI or other analytics systems.

Dataset configuration

Imagine you have a lot of custom tables in Dataverse, and you want to do any of the following:

• Use those custom tables in queries in your segments
• Want to show them as dynamic data in your email messages
• Want to use the column values of these tables in lead scoring
• Want to export data to Azure Blob storage

To do so, you have to go into your Dataset configuration area (Figure 1.24) and add your custom tables:

Figure 1.24 – Dataset configuration

It’s important to know that if you add tables to the configuration, you cannot remove them again later. To be able to synchronize these tables, you will need storage space and processing time, so you should never sync tables that you will not use. Be sure that you know which specific tables you need for your work with analytics, dynamic email content, segmentation criteria, and lead scoring.

Other settings – Feature switches

In the Feature switches area (Figure 1.25), you can enable or deactivate several features such as integration with Customer Voice, the usage of event registration forms, and the required consent level to use the smart scheduler. Remember that after you’ve made changes in the settings for the different features, you need to click Save in the top-right corner.

The feature switches are always changing with the new features that are coming. As of August 2022, the following features are available:

• Business unit scoping: If your company has several business units (or perhaps you have two different companies in one system), you can differentiate between the marketing process and data for the different business units.
• Event registration forms: The event registration forms are useful if you’re using event management in Dynamics 365 Marketing and want to have participants register through your forms and fully utilize the system.
• Updated customer journey designer: This offers new features for designing customer journeys.
• New canvas experience and content blocks: When you enable this feature, you get the new and improved version of creation and content blocks.
• Brand profiles: Brand profiles are great if you have different brands that you do marketing for. When you turn this option on, you get the choice to simply choose different brand profiles for a marketing email, for example.
• Conditional content in email editor: This feature is only available in real-time marketing. You can now create personalized messages much more easily than previously.
• Data sharing program: You need to be very careful with this feature if you’re in the EU. This gives Microsoft permission to review and access your customer data to develop better AI models.
• Customer voice integration: This is the feature that enables Dynamics 365 Customer Voice integrations with Marketing.
• Smart scheduler: This lets you specify which level of consent is required from your customers to use the smart scheduler, which allows you to send emails to your different customers at their preferred times:

Figure 1.25 – Feature switches, parts one and two

With that, we’ve gone through all the system settings and made sure our system is set up correctly. We’ve tailored the setup to our company’s needs. Now, we’re ready to start using it. One of the first things we should create is templates.

Templates will make your life easier once you start using the system. Every time I do training or talk to customers, I always stress the importance of creating templates, whether it’s email templates, customer journey templates, or landing page templates. It’s a way to make sure that everyone is using the same layout and graphic design and just generally makes it easier to not have to start from scratch every time.

There are some important settings in this area we’re going to go through – that is, content settings, form fields, and email templates. We will also take a look at some templates specifically for outbound and real-time marketing.

Content settings

Content settings is where you register companies’ addresses, social media URLs, subscription center, and Forward to a friend details. We’ll go through the subscription center and Forward to a friend in depth in Chapter 4, Managing Marketing Forms, Pages, and Websites. These will then be used when you send out your marketing emails. If you have multiple companies using the same Marketing solution, you can use different content settings (Figure 1.26) for the different companies:

Figure 1.26 – Content settings

Form fields

To be able to store information in a form, you need to create a form field and connect this to the correct field on your contact or lead table (Figure 1.27). Several of the most used fields (such as name, email, and address) are already created by default, but if you want to add others, you need to create the relevant form fields before you can use them in your marketing forms:

Figure 1.27 – Form fields

Email templates

Your emails are one of the most important places to create templates. You want all your emails that are sent out to look somewhat the same, in line with your company’s established graphical profile, and templates are a good way of making sure of this. You can create template emails with different layouts ready for use by everyone who needs to create any type of email (Figure 1.28). This way, you can just focus on creating relevant content and not have to worry about the actual layout of the email each time:

Figure 1.28 – Email templates

Outbound specific

As of November 2022, most templates are created in the Outbound section of Dynamics 365 Marketing. Let’s go through which templates you can create from the outbound area.

Customer journey templates

Let’s say you want to create a simple customer journey based on how you run your events and how you communicate with the attendees from Dynamics 365 Marketing. If you use templates (Figure 1.29), you can have all of this set up for you so that you don’t have to start from scratch. If you start from nothing, it is easy to miss some important steps in your communication – you might miss a reminder the day before the event starts, or you might miss the evaluation afterward. If you create a customer journey template, then you can make sure that everyone follows and creates the same type of journey for all the same types of events:

Figure 1.29 – Outbound customer journey templates

Forms, pages, and websites

Other types of templates you can make are forms, pages, and websites (Figure 1.30). For example, if you do a Christmas campaign each year with the same form, the same page, and the same website, that’s a perfect reason to create a template:

Figure 1.30 – Marketing website template

I often use event-form templates (Figure 1.31) to make it easier for people to register for events. Other contact forms are also good to have templates for:

Figure 1.31 – Event form template

Segments

Segments are another type of template you can create, as shown in Figure 1.32. There are some segments that you will likely want to use several times, such as to find out who attended an event. If you create a template with the most used segments, it will make it easier to create that segment in the future:

Figure 1.32 – Segment templates

Maybe you have one core criterion you always want to have in all your segments. You can have that as your template and create all your new segments from that template, making sure the base criterion is always in place.

Activities

You can also create calls, tasks, and appointments as templates. This way, you can use them in a customer journey. If, for example, you have a customer journey that starts with a lead coming into your system, then you want to automatically register a call to the new potential customer to get more information on their needs, and this process will use a call template. Another use for this is if you want to make sure you run credit checks on all potential customers, and you have one person that does this whenever a new lead comes into the system. In this context, you can create a task for each lead that comes in for the credit checker to go through.

As you can see, there are several templates you should consider setting up in your system before you start using it. All of these templates can make it easier for you to work with the system in the future.

Pictures, videos, and graphical content are very important for anyone working in marketing, and your asset library is where you control all this. Let’s go through how Dynamics 365 Marketing lets you work with pictures, videos, documents, and content blocks in outbound and real-time marketing.

Outbound

Because outbound and real-time marketing are different, there are different ways of working with graphical content. We’re going to dive deeper into the differences in Chapter 6, Outbound Customer Journeys. First, let’s go through the outbound way of working with this.

Keywords

Keywords are a terrific way of keeping track of your pictures in outbound marketing. You will have to tag each picture with the correct keyword. To search for a picture, you can either use the keyword or search for the name of the picture.

Pictures

In outbound marketing, you can add pictures you want to use in your emails or pages. You can add keywords for pictures to make sure you can easily find the different pictures.

Video

You cannot host a video directly in outbound marketing; you can only link to a video that’s hosted somewhere else.

Content blocks

To make it even easier for your marketers to create content, you can create content blocks (Figure 1.33) they can reuse. If you always want to use the same type of picture in the header, then you can create a content block to be used in emails with the right format for the picture, or maybe you want to create a footer to be used on all pages with the correct information. This can be created with a content block; you must go live with a content block before you can use it.

You need to specify where the content block will be available – that is, out of email, forms, and/or pages. You can also specify if the content block is protected, meaning that only certain security roles will be able to edit the content block:

Figure 1.33 – Content block

Real-time marketing-specific configuration

Now that we’ve taken a look at how to work with graphical content in outbound marketing, let’s go through how this is done in real-time marketing.

Tags

In the real-time marketing asset library, it has been made a lot easier to find your pictures by using tags. Dynamics 365 Marketing uses an AI to automatically tag your pictures, and you can also add your own tags if needed.

Pictures

Pictures are probably the main focus of your asset library. These are the images you want to add to your emails, forms, landing pages, and websites. You can upload one picture, several pictures at once, or a whole folder. You can see the pictures in my asset library in the following screenshot:

Figure 1.34 – Asset library

You’re most likely going to have a lot of pictures, but your tagging will make sure that you can find them again when you need them. If you make sure you name your pictures correctly and you tag them with something that makes sense, then other people will be able to access them efficiently and use the correct format of, for example, your logo without difficulty.

Video

In real-time marketing, you can upload your videos and use them in your marketing efforts. This will upload the video to your marketing Azure Blob storage, so you don’t have to worry about where to store your video so that your customers can access it.

Documents

There are so many use cases for documents in marketing. You might create a white paper that you want to send to your customers or a presentation that needs to be sent to your event participants, or maybe you want to send some meeting minutes to your potential customers. All of this is possible by uploading your documents to the asset library.

Copying files from outbound

Because companies already use the outbound marketing library, Microsoft has made it easier to copy all content from outbound marketing over to the real-time marketing asset library. From outbound marketing, you can click on the Copy all files into Real-time marketing option. You can just copy all your files – there’s no need to select the ones you want to copy.

With that, you’ve seen how Dynamics 365 Marketing works with pictures, video, and other elements you can use in your emails and other content. Having control over these elements will make it easier for you to have oversight over the creation and presentation of graphics for your company.

There are many settings you should go through in Dynamics 365 Marketing to make sure you have the best possible system set up before you use the system in production. You need to go through and be familiar with each of these settings. This chapter is good to keep in mind and come back to when you’re doing an implementation or before you go live with your system, to make sure you’ve remembered all the important settings.

In this chapter, you learned about the different settings you need to go through. You saw how you need to set up Dynamics 365 Marketing to use it properly. We also went through how you can work with templates to make future content creation easier. All of this is information you will need every time you implement Dynamics 365 Marketing. If you go through everything you’ve learned in this chapter every time you implement Dynamics 365, you’re going to create a fully functioning system that is tailored to each company.

In the next chapter, we’re going to dig deeper into the data of your system and take a look at leads, contacts, and accounts. We’re going to look at what they are and how they are set up out of the box.

The following are some questions that will help you gauge your understanding of the topics discussed in this chapter. The answers are available in the Assessments section at the end of the book.

1. Can you turn off the tables you don’t need for synchronization on data tables?

(a) Yes

(b) No

2. What are the different types of templates in outbound marketing?

(a) Email

(b) Form

(c) Pages

(d) Websites

(e) Event

(f) Segment

(g) Customer journeys

3. What tables can a landing page update?

(a) Contacts

(b) Leads

(c) Contacts and leads

(d) Contacts, leads, and custom tables

4. Can you send emails from any domains in Dynamics 365 Marketing?

(a) Yes

(b) Yes, but you need to connect the domain first

(c) No

5. Do you have one consent center for both outbound and real-time marketing?

(a) Yes

(b) No

6. Which social media sites can you connect to?

(a) Facebook

(b) Google Plus

(c) Google Ads

(d) Twitter

(e) Pinterest

(f) LinkedIn

(g) Instagram

7. Which third-party webinar provider can you connect to?

(a) On24

(b) Microsoft Teams

(c) Zoom

(d) Slack

8. If you have a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form and want to add that to your system, what do you need to do, and in which order?

(a) Sign in to LinkedIn with your company profile, then connect to the correct LinkedIn Lead Gen Form

(b) Sign in to LinkedIn with your profile, then connect to the correct LinkedIn Lead Gen Form

(c) Sign in to LinkedIn with your profile that’s connected to your company’s profile and the LinkedIn Lead Gen Form

9. Which fields can you define your lead matching strategy on?

(a) Email

(b) First name

(c) Last name

(d) First and last name

(e) Email, first name, and last name

(f) Any field you want

10. You can only have global double opt-in.

(a) Yes

(b) No

11. When is a lead sent to Sales?

(a) When a lead gets a lead score of 100 points

(b) When a lead comes into the system

(c) When a lead hits the sales-ready score set by lead scoring

(d) When a lead is set as sales-ready by marketing

12. You can store documents in outbound marketing.

(a) Yes

(b) No

13. You can store videos in real-time marketing.

(a) Yes

(b) No