Lists in emails in Customer Insights – Journeys

Customers have often asked me if they can’t list out different things in an email in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys. For example;

• Different insurances the contact has registered
• Names of contacts registered on an account
• Products a customer has bought
• Passes or sessions a contact has registered for in an event
• Events a contact has registered for the past 3 years

As long as things are registered in Dataverse, you can create a list and add it to an email, this post will show you how this is done and how it’ll work.

I wanted to add the passes people have registered for at Scottish Summit to the email for everyone who registered, it’s a good way of showing people what they registered for.

The first and hardest part is figuring out how the data is connected. For events, there are a lot of many-to-many relationships and a lot of tables to work with.

I have my event where all the passes are registered.

I have the actual passes with information about the passes.

I have the event registration where the contact is connected to the event and the attendee passes.

And I have the attendee passes where the event registration is connected to the actual pass.

As you can see, there are a lot of tables and it can be hard to find the correct path to the list you’re looking for.

For Scottish Summit, I want to list the names of all the passes every person has registered for. We trigger our journey for everyone who registered with the out-of-the-box trigger “Marketing Event Registration Created” and set the condition to Scottish Summit 2024. Now that we have a trigger, we can use the trigger as our starting point, so we know we only get the passes from that specific event registration, we could fix it with conditions, but this is a much easier way of doing it.

Easier way of doing it.. Well, there are three different options for triggers, which is the correct one? Or are all of them correct? Or can all of them be correct?

• Marketing Event Reference
• Marketing Event Registration
• Marketing Event Registration Reference

This is where knowing your data model is important, if you know how things are connected, it’s easier to find the correct relationship to use. So let’s test all of them and see if we can get all of them working.

I first need to tell you that if you want to test and use different relationship paths, you can only test for the first one you add to the system.

The first one is the Marketing Event Reference, I select the trigger and select “Attendee Passes”. Now I want to add the name of the pass to the email, this is where it gets complicated, you can’t select the name from the dropdown in column, that wont give you the correct name, you have to select the attendee pass connected to the pass and that name. Otherwise you’ll get random names from the event, and not connected to the pass connected to the registration that’s been triggered.

The second one is the Marketing Event Registration Reference, where I also select the Attendee Passes. Same thing here for name, I need to find the name of the pass connected to the attendee pass.

The third option is Marketing Event Registration. Like the other two triggers, relationship is needed to find the correct name.

Now we have our three lists set up, how do we get them in the email? You select one of them, click save and copy, or the code sign to the right of the list, which looks like this: <✏️>. You then get pop-up where you can copy the generated code.

This piece of code, you add to the email. I’ve added mine directly into a text box in the email itself, that looks like this:

The easiest way of testing it is to go to “Preview and test”. Here we get the standard preview, and I can see that the code is in the email, but I have no idea if it works, because I can just see the Name-1, Name-2 etc.

Now let’s try to edit the sample data and see how it looks with a contact who’s registered. Here I can select a contact or a trigger. Because all the information we’ve put in the list is connected to a trigger, selecting contact here will not work, you have to select the trigger.

Once I’ve selected a trigger (depending on the list you added it will give you different options), you will see that the email will update with information from that registration. You can also have personalization from the contact in the same e-mail and you can also test with a contact, to see that this also works.

I think lists are a great feature many users don’t realise is already in the system. There are many use cases for it, as long as you know your data model.

If you have no idea how the data is connected, this won’t help you at all, you need to learn the data model and how things are connected in Dataverse to be able to utilize the system fully.