Marketing Release wave 1 2020

Twice a year Microsoft comes out with the release notes on what’s to come the next 6 months, today is the release of wave 1! I’ve tried to summarize the notes and write some of them in an easier language.

Some parts are new, others are improved and one is coming to public preview.

News

Support for surveys using Microsoft Forms Pro

D365 Marketing have used Voice of the Customer for surveys, but as VoC is dead, Forms Pro is the new tool and is now supported! Forms Pro is the tool to use for questionnaires, and to know what your customers mean you should ask them. If you want information about Form Pro you should visit the site of the Queen of Forms Pro Megan Walker.

Compliance made easier

Every marketeer, with customers in Europe, should be very familiar with GDPR. In the new release Microsoft write the improvements are:

• Consolidated opt-in confirmation messages, which can combine several notifications and confirmation requests in a single message (such as updated GDPR consent together with multiple new subscriptions)
• Easily view the history of subscription-list and GDPR consent-level changes without building your own report
• Check the accessibility of emails, forms, and pages created using the Dynamics 365 Marketing content designer

Ability to test-send dynamic email messages

This is so cool! You can personalize you emails, that’s not the cool part. The cool part is that you can you can now send out a test and see the dynamics fields in the test email, that way you know that you’ve mapped the right fields.

Export data to Excel for further analysis

Everyone loves Excel, and it’s still a very important tool for many to do their analysis in.

Improved features

Not everything is perfect when it’s released the first time, these are the improved features.

Improved customer journey experience

You can now view relationships between the customer journeys and the marketing entities, split branches and set time-sensitive email messages to expire.

Improved email content designer

They have done a lot with the email content designer to make it better, one important point being the accessibility design and testing.

• New and improved email templates that use new layout capabilities to help jumpstart the process of designing email messages.
• Picture-over-picture and button-over-picture capabilities to allow setting background images and make email messages more attractive.
• Accessibility design and testing built into the email designer.
• Custom email preheaders for higher open rates.
• Ability to set rounded corners for images, borders, and buttons.
• Additional element properties for creating better layout and design. For example, selectable columns with properties to set the background.

Improved event management experience

Event management is one of the features of why you should choose D365 Marketing as your marketing automations system, and now they’ll improve it with some great stuff.

They have updated the registration experience to make it faster and easier to register. You can also create forms for the registration with the drag-and-drop interface of the app, these registrations forms can also be embedded into your CMS (content management system) and you don’t even have to leave the event, you design it from the event.

Improved segment design and management

The enhanced segment designer enables users to define dynamic segments more quickly and intuitively. New features for dynamic segments include:

• Drop-down lists for selecting entities, fields, interactions, and relations now highlight recently used items and provide improved sorting.
• Segment templates for typical marketing use cases help make commonly used segments easier to create.
• Hybrid segments enable marketers to combine hand-picked audiences with demographic, behavioral, and compound segments.
• We’ve improved the list capabilities of static segments to provide the following benefits:
• Static segments can now contain many more members, so it’s no longer necessary to build segments that encapsulate static marketing lists.
• Member management has been improved to feature support for segment queries, including the ability to select members based on their interaction history

Public preview

Contextual email messages

I’m excited to see how this feature actually works. How Microsoft says it will work: “Dynamics 365 Marketing can send context-rich, personalized email messages triggered by business transactions such as purchases, returns, payments, and more. You can create customer journeys that target contacts associated with a recent record change (such as a purchase), and are able to send email messages to the same contact multiple times throughout the customer journey as the context changes.”