I think this is one of my longest post, the team behind the Dynamics 365 Marketing sure has been busy since the last release! A lot of new and cool stuff is coming in the first release of 2021! All of the features are coming in public preview April 2021.
Two sentences stood out for me in the release notes;
Our approach with Dynamics 365 Marketing is to unleash the power of all your data – infusing it with AI and empowering you to deliver meaningful messages to your customers. Making the product easy to use is a guiding principle for us as we build features to help you achieve your goals.
Microsoft release notes
The Marketing team wants to make the app easy for the users, and make sure you have happy customers that gets the relevant information from your company. Wonderful statement from the product team!
There are three main focus areas in this release for the Marketing app
- Deeper personalization to engage your customers
- More channels, power, and ease to reach your customers with the right messages
- Analytics to improve results and achieve your business goals
Lets take a closer look at the features in the release.
Use AI-generated segments and recency, frequency, and monetization attributes to target
high-value customers
This feature uses insights from Customer Insights to make even better segments that you can use for targeting specific customers.
Experiment with the next action in a journey to optimize for results
This is the king of A/B-testing! It lets you test different things against each other, just about everything can be compared, the doc says; “different channels with the same message, different messages with the same channel, different channels with different messages, slight variants of the same message (with different subject lines or content), or any actions in the customer journey”
Wow, this feature really lets you test out every different setup you want to test, then it lets you choose how the winner is chosen by a specific date, or send a default version of the message. Really good from the system that didn’t have ordinary A/B testing until October 2019.
Improve journey effectiveness with a new set of built-in analytics dashboards and cross-journey insights
I love pre-built dashboards and reports, they can be very helpful. This will show you statistics across your journeys and channels, you can see what is working and transfer that to other journeys and make them even better.
In real-time, monitor your customer journeys and channel KPIs
This is another analytics feature. See how your journeys are doing in real time, evaluate the steps and channels in each journey, see where your customers stop or leave the journey, so you can make it even better preforming.
Set business goals for journeys and measure progress to the goal
You should never set up a journey without having a clear goal on what you want the journey to do. Now you can set those goals in Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can track customer engagement and satisfaction, general onboarding, or drive a purchase.
You can set those goal to a count or percent and choose channels and decide the outcome of A/B testing based on those goals.
Create and send SMS messages to any mobile phone
Another amazing feature that I’ve been waiting for, functionality for sending SMS and MMS messages. You can send these messages via toll-free numbers and short codes and even buy your own numbers.
Create emails quickly with low effort, and without compromises
The marketing team is continuing to improve the email editor. This time with a massive range of improvements, AI recommendations, flexible layout options, better image editor and most important (in my opinion) it automatically discovers errors!
Deliver push notifications to any Android or iOS app
New cool feature where you can send push notifications to phones, you can even create notifications with pictures, video and sound.
Search, version, manage, and tag your digital assets with a new centralized asset library
This is HUGE, you can now save all your digital assets in one place, it even shares with Dynamics 365 Commerce! This is one place where you can add all you pictures, videos and binaries which you can bulk import, you even get AI tagging the content for an easier search.
Author dynamic content with ease through a new point-and-click interface
No more need for custom code in HTML – you can now do all your dynamics content yourself no matter what your skills are with your point-and-click interface!
Create deeply personalized emails with a more flexible set of data sources
Wow, again a great new feature! You can move beyond the contact record and beyond CDS/Dataverse, you can use any data and even list data, it just keeps expanding and getting even better.
Use continuously updating, multidata source segments from Customer Insights in your marketing campaigns
Expand you segments with the use of Customer Insights. Get segments from you Customer Insights instantly, see the segment creation logic and use them in your journeys, save the segments as static segments.
Can’t wait to get my hands on all the great stuff in this release!
Read the full release notes on Dynamics 365 and The Power Platform
Malin Martnes 
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