I’ve been getting a lot of questions from people about how the new consent center in real-time marketing works in Customer Insights – Journeys. In this post, I’ll try to explain how it’s set up and how you can use it as it is with the December ’23 release.
- To (need) consent or not (need) consent
- Compliance profile
- Contact point consent
- Moving from Outbound
- Conclusion
To (need) consent or not (need) consent
Before you even start thinking about the technical stuff, you need to know what you’re sending and who your customers are. The easy way of separating if you need consent or not is if it’s marketing material or if it’s something the contact has asked for. If it’s something the contact has asked for, f.ex. filled in a form, signed up for an event or something related to a purchase or membership, then you don’t necessarily need consent to send out that information. If you don’t need consent, you send a transactional email. Now over to the communications you need consent for.
In this post, I’m going to create my own company’s compliance profile.
MaCoTra has the following needs:
- Monthly newsletter
- Event invitations
- Event information after registration
- General communication with existing customers
The two first I need consent to send out, but the two last points are both transactional emails that I don’t need any consent to send to contacts.
In the email in real-time marketing, under compliance, you need to set your compliance profile and you can set a purpose and topic. What does this mean? How can we create this the way we want? Let’s find out how we sort out all of this and get ready to fully move over to real-time marketing.
Compliance profile
The first thing you need to create is a compliance profile. To do this you go to the settings area under “Customer Engagement” and find “Compliance profiles”
In the compliance profiles, you always have one default created, so you can start using it immediately, or create your own version of the profile. You can create as many profiles as you want or you can use the default profile if you prefer that.
I’m going to create my own compliance profile. I click on the “+ New Profile” and get the choices for creating profiles with a preference center or with an external link. I don’t have my subscription center in another system, so I click on “+ With preference center”.
A quick create appears on the right side of the screen and you give your profile a name and a company address (this is the physical address for your company, if you’re wondering why, here’s a link for the CAN-SPAM act). If you’ve already used compliance profiles, if you’re for example moving from the default profile to one you create, then you can use the previously captured consent from that profile. This is not connected with Outbound and getting consent from Outbound to the compliance profile!
When it’s created I can open it and look at customising my profile. Here I can change the name and edit my company address. I can also see that the default preference center has been created for til compliance profile. We’ll look at how to change the content of this a bit later in the post.
As you can see in the screenshot, you now also have your “Quiet time setting” in your consent profile. Let’s say your company operates in different countries and you don’t want to send emails at certain times of the week, or certain dates, you can set this in the quiet time setting and add it to the consent profile.
Consent purposes
In the consent profile, you have consent purposes. When you create a new profile, two communication purposes are created, commercial and transactional. Be aware that the commercial communication purpose is set to Non-Restrictive out-of-the-box. For GDPR you need to use the restrictive enforcement model. Transactional purpose you don’t have to change, that will be used for the last two cases I need (event information after registration and general information to existing customers) and work as they are.
You also set the tracking purpose to say if you will track the behavioral tracking. In the default profile, the tracking is also set to non-restrictive.
Commercial purpose
To change the commercial purpose you click on it, and it opens a new form where you can do edits. You can click on the email enforcement model column and change it from “Non-Restrictive”, to “Restrictive”.
In the information you can read the following about each of the enforcement models:
Restrictive: Customer opt-in is required for sending email messages associated with this Purpose. Double opt-in is not currently supported in real-time journeys.
Non-restrictive: Unless they explicitly opt-out, customers will receive email messages
Disabled: All email messages associated with this Purpose will be sent without checking for opt-in. This enforcement model is typically used for Transactional email messages.
From CI-J in purpose
The restrictive model is what you would need to be GDPR compliant. It does state that double opt-in isn’t supported now, but it is in the release planner and will be available from February ’24.
Topics
As you can see in the screenshot, you also have an area for topics. This is where I’ll add the two areas I want to differentiate between; monthly newsletter and event invitation.
When you click on “+ Add topic”, a panel opens with the quick create form for topics. Here you give the topic a name, the rest is set. I’ve created my monthly newsletter and event invitation.
Now I can save, first the topics and then the purpose, and I’m back on my compliance profile and can see that I have the restrictive commercial purpose with 2 topics.
Now it’s time to go back to the general tab and make changes to our preference center. I click on the form and can see that the unsubscribe from everything is set, but not our topics. I click on the Edit in the top right.
I get a warning box when I click edit, which tells me that any changes I make on this form will show everywhere the form is used. For now, my form isn’t used anywhere, so it’s safe to make any change I want.
Now that my form is in edit mode, I get access to the elements I need. I can now add my topics and add my logo or other visual elements.
When I add the topic I need to select which purpose and which topic I want that specific box is for. I also need to replace the text “I agree to …”, I just click in the text and write what I want.
After I’ve done my edits and saved my form is ready to be used in the contact profile and in my emails.
Now I have everything I need to start using consent in real-time marketing. But what about if you come from outbound or you have consent stored from somewhere else? Let’s see how consent is stored first.
Contact point consent
In outbound, consent is stored by each contact. In real-time marketing, consent is stored by contact point, which is not the same as a contact. An email address will only have one contact point consent, even if the email is used by multiple contacts. So if you have duplicates, you will still only have one consent record. The same applies for phone numbers.
If you have consent you want to load from another system, you can import it from Exel, either from CSV or XML. You can also add content manually by clicking “Email consent” in the toolbar.
To enter email consent manually you need to fill in the information in the screenshot below and click save. Be aware that you should always have your customers’ consent, and never “just” update this for people you think might be interested.
Moving from Outbound
If you’ve been using D365 Marketing for a while, you’ll probably have multiple consents from your contacts and you don’t want to start from scratch, you want to load into the new contact point center in real-time marketing. Let’s see a couple ways of doing this.
Load consent
In the top bar, you can click “Load consent” and you get some options from where you want to load your consent from:
- Contacts
- Leads
- Subscription or marketing lists
For all of these, you need to select your compliance profile and purpose. The system needs to know where to import the information.
Contact/lead
Loading consent from contacts or leads, the consent needs to come from somewhere. For commercial purposes, it loads consent from the column “Do not allow Bulk Email”, but also checks if the contact has the column “Do not allow Emails” set to allow. If the contact/lead has one of these columns set to do not allow, they will get an opt-out in the contact point record. If both are set you allow, then the contact point record will be set to opt-in for commercial purposes.
If the column “Do not allow Emails” is set to allow, the transactional purpose will be set to opt-in. If it’s set to not allow, you will not be able to send even transactional emails to your customers. Be aware that some companies might have used these columns for something else if they’ve used Dynamics 365 for many years, if they’re having trouble with sending transactional emails, make sure this column haven’t been used for something else.
Subscription lists
If you’ve been using subscriptions in Outbound or you have marketing lists (for example if you’ve been using ClickDimensions and subscriptions from that, that consent is stored in marketing lists.) where you’ve stored content, you can load from that. You select the list, and the compliance profile, set the purpose and set the matching topic and load in the consent.
If you also have one or several unsubscribe lists, you can load the consent with the value opt-out.
Conclusion
With everything set up, you can now also create segments based on topics, so that you have full control over every contact point which has signed up for your different topics.
Congratulations if you’ve read through everything and come all the way to the bottom of this post! I know it’s a very long one, but consent is one of the most important areas of marketing and communications. I know a lot of people have had lots of questions on how this is done in real-time marketing, and have struggled to understand how to move from outbound marketing consent. I hope this post is a good help for how you can transition over to real-time marketing consent.
Malin Martnes 
Hi,
Thank you for clarifying some of the areas in real-time marketing consent. I have some questions regarding custom consents that has been set up in outbound marketing, in some cases, clients dont use the do not bulk email field for collecting consent, and have made other custom fields that says if this contact has consented or not. Is there a way to move this? and how would you go forward to move these clients to real-time? Have you experienced any of these scenarios?
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Hello,
If it’s a one-one with the custom fields, then I would create a job to move the consent over to the bulk email field. Or you could export the custom consent field content to Excel and import in into the contact point consent with Excel. I think those are the two easiest ways of doing it. Good luck!
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