Building a Custom(er) Journey in D365 Marketing

Dynamics 365 Marketing offers a rich set of available features to create very dynamic and advanced customer journeys that provide marketers multiple channels to reach out to their customers or potential customers.  With the introduction of event-based and real-time marketing enhancements the D365 Marketing has never been more useful.  Even with all this functionality available there may still be a need for custom segments built around the use of custom tables in the DataVerse as well as building your own custom events in D365 Marketing.

Adding Custom Tables to Marketing Segments in D365 Marketing

One of the most basic customizations or configuration changes you may want to make to your D365 Marketing is to allow your Marketing team to build customer journey segments based on data from your own custom tables.  This is straightforward, but it does need to be setup in Marketing for the journey builders to take advantage of the custom tables data.

Step 1

Create the custom table as you would any other new table in the D365 DataVerse.

Step 2

Add the custom table to the Dataset in D365 Marketing.

Step 3

Build your customer segment using the newly added custom table.

Custom Realtime Marketing Events in D365 Marketing

There may be an instance where a marketer may have the need to use some custom customer event or action to use in their customer journey like abandoning a shopping cart on the company website.  This may be an example where your marketing department may want to send the contact more information on some items, they had in their shopping cart that was abandoned on the ecommerce website.  This would be a custom event that could be used in D365 Marketing customer journeys.[1]

Creating a new Event

New event triggers can be created under the Real-time marketing area in D365 Marketing.

Then the new event trigger step-by-step process will be initiated.  This will guide you through creating your event trigger so it’s ready to use in your Marketing customer journeys. 

D365 Marketing Insights

You can add attributes of the data being targeted to use in your customer journey.  Real-time Marketing allows marketers to reach customers through many different channels (mobile, chat, etc.), so the need to create custom events based on actions taken by the potential customers also needs to be created and developed.

Ex.  Perhaps your Salesperson reaches out to a potential new customer in a Teams chat session to explain your new product and you would like to engage that customer in a customer journey and send them follow-up materials.  This could be an example of an event “Sales Chat with Customer” that would trigger some action in a customer journey.

Now that a custom event has been developed in D365 Realtime Marketing, as a marketer, you will be able to use this new event to:

• Make decisions on what “path” to send the customer on the journey.
• Send the customer to another customer journey.
• Add the customer to a new segment based on the event.
  • Ex.  Customer Sales Has Chatted With (Segment)
• Assign a follow-up task to the Salesperson “who” chatted with the customer.

Knowing what actions or events your customers have participated in is a very powerful tool in the marketing toolkit.  It allows a marketer to narrow the focus of their marketing efforts even more and present the customer with timely marketing materials based on what they are doing in Realtime not receive an outdated email weeks after they have engaged with your companies’ website or a Salesperson.

Check out a related blog:

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/real-time-marketing-custom-events