Not too long ago I wrote a post on what’s to come from December to March ’24, now the plans until September are out!
For the first time, I’m now doing a post on the release wave for both CI-J and CI-D!
Let’s look at the features Microsoft is working on for the next 9 months. Remember that these plans can change and things can be pushed, postponed or even removed by Microsoft. This post was accurate when it was published (25 January ’24).
As always, PP is “Public Preview” and GA is “General Availability”
Boost customer confidence and campaign performance with branded links for your emails and content
PP April ’24
For someone who’s worked extensively with deliverability, domains and all that jazz for the past year, this is a super important feature that I can’t wait to start using!
Vanity domains<3
You know how all the links in your email, your forms and your preference center look awful and your customers might not want to click them because it doesn’t look like it comes from you? With this feature, that’s all in the past. You can now create your own vanity domains which will show in your URLs, digital assets, forms, event registration pages and your preference center.
This feature will be part of configuring your domain and can make your links look even more trustworthy.
Instrument and test real-time events faster with a developer portal
PP April ’24
The developer portal is for easier development, without them gaining access to D365. The developer can get the web tracking script from the dev portal and validate that your real-time events are streaming as expected.
Get faster insights at scale with automatic management of segments and measures
PP June ’24
In several systems I’m working in, I see a lot of segments created. The more segments you have, the longer refresh times you have for the whole environment, which can make your system slower. With this magical feature, CI-J will deactivate, disable and pause segments based on how much it’s used. You can, if you’re an admin, turn the feature on or off and change the retention period. When you’ve used the system for a while, you’ll probably have a lot of segments, some of which have only been used once and will never be used again. Who cleans up their segments? Nobody, it’s not a priority for most companies, so the list of segments will just be growing.
This feature is for both CI-J and CI-D
Collect extra customer information without creating custom attributes
PP July ’24
This is a highly awaited feature! Finally, we can use our RTM forms again without having to have all the columns in Dataverse already. Now you can use it for event registrations and ask about allergies, and not have that stored on the customer or leads record. You create custom form fields the same way as you could in outbound.
Optimize engagement and increase conversion rates with email A/B testing
GA April ’24
This was scheduled to go to PP in February looking back at my previous release post, but it’s now going straight into GA in April.
By the explanation and screenshots, this looks to be about the same as you have with outbound today (a good thing I think).
Understand and optimize journeys with customer flow analysis
GA April ’24
We all want better analysis of our journeys, and now we’ll an improved analytics of our journeys. They’re highlighting the entry, exit and processing analytics of each tile in a journey, making it easier to see the big picture without clicking around and doing the maths on who exited each tile.
Build and test journeys before deploying to production
GA June ’24
Moving stuff from dev to test to production can be a pain! Everyone doing this should be familiar with ALM (If not, Benedikt Bergman is a good resource). This feature will give you the ability to test your journeys in test/dev/pre-production environments and move them to production – in a published state! Your assets can now also follow your solution.
Improve engagement and compliance with double opt-in
PP April ’24 / GA July ’24
Double opt-in is back! This was a feature we had in outbound but has been missing in RTM until now.
You can enable double opt-in on the compliance profile and use that on forms to enforce it. Use your journeys to trigger the email flow for double opt-in. The biggest improvement in this is that contacts/leads won’t be created until they have confirmed the opt-in, thus making your contacts/leads updated with only real email addresses (at the time of the double opt-in that is)
Reach your customers at the right moment with send scheduling
PP April ’24 / GA July ’24
We have frequency caps and quiet times, which dictate when we shouldn’t send an email to customers. This feature is when we want to send an email. You will be able to say which days and at what time during those days you want the email to be sent. The emails outside your timeframe will be sent at the next send time window. This feature also respects quiet times and frequency caps.
Reach customers quickly with 10x increased throughput
GA September ’24
If your company have a lot of interactions, this is for you. You can send up to 20 million interactions per hour with batched journeys, and use event triggers with up to 500 000 interactions per hour.
Qualify leads and route to sales when buying is likely
GA April ’24
The lead qualification process just got better. You can change the qualification criteria and add multiple qualifying or disqualifying criteria. The four signals you can use are:
- Fit – based on the lead’s profile
- Intent – filling out a form or watching a demo
- Recency – Creation of the lead
- Engagement – the lead scoring reaching a certain point
Features going from PP (previously published) to GA
April
- Capture responses from external, third-party forms
- Easily reference copies of sent emails in the timeline
- Prevent duplicate emails to contacts that share an email address
May
- Ensure messages go to the right contact email address
- Easily manage customer consent from contact and lead forms
Malin Martnes 
Hello, do we know if this was removed / when it will be. I can’t find information on it.
Build and test journeys before deploying to production
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