Announcing: Dynamics 365 for Marketing August 2018 update

We are proud to announce the August 2018 update of Dynamics 365 for Marketing, which is available starting now!

For even more information about this update, including known and fixed issues, see the Dynamics 365 for Marketing readme page.

How to get the update

Dynamics 365 for Marketing includes both solutions, which must be installed on your own Dynamics 365 instances, and services, which are centrally managed by Microsoft.

To benefit from solution updates, you must manually discover and apply them to your instances as described in Keep Marketing up to date.

To benefit from services updates, you don’t have to do anything—these improvements are being rolled out on a continuous basis and will become available to your instances automatically as soon as the services in your region are finished updating.

Email marketing improvements

We’ve improved the dynamic-content capabilities for email messages, so now you can set up if-then statements and for-each loops to control message content more easily. These features further enhance the previous ability to personalize messages with dynamic values fetched from recipients’ contact records and related fields. This feature is being rolled out gradually, so it may not be available to your organization right away. For more information, including how to find out if you have this feature yet, see Add dynamic content to email messages.

Insights improvements

The following new marketing insights are now available:

• Blocked contact activities: A new table provided in the Insights form view for customer journeys, contacts, and leads lists each time a contact was stopped in the middle of a journey where that contact was in the target segment. The reason is specified as one of the following:
  • Consent: the contact hasn’t provided the level of consent required by the journey according to Dynamics 365 for Marketing’s internal GDPR mechanism.
  • External consent: the contact hasn’t provided the level of consent required by a journey according to an external GDPR-management system that you have integrated with Dynamics 365 for Marketing.
  • Suppression: the contact is part of the suppression segment established for a journey, or the contact removed themselves from a subscription list targeted by a journey while it was running.
• Cancelled event registrations: Timelines in the Insights form views for contacts and leads now show when a contact or lead cancelled an event registration.
• Total email blocked count for journeys: The Total Sent chart shown in the Insights form view for customer journeys now indicates the total number of emails that the journey couldn’t send due to recipients’ contact preferences or a problem with their email address.

For more information, see Analyze results to gain insights.

New support for double opt-in

The double opt-in process (also known as confirmed opt-in) asks contacts who sign up for a new subscription list, or who choose to increase their level of GDPR data-protection consent, to confirm their request by clicking on a link sent to their registered email address. This system helps make sure that the request is intentional, and that the supplied email address is legitimate and functional. Double opt-in is optional in Dynamics 365 for Marketing, but it is a good idea to use it, and in many countries/regions (especially in Europe), it’s required by law.

For details about how to set up and use the double opt-in feature, see Set up double opt-in for new subscriptions and consent changes.

Event management improvements

Event management functionality has been enhanced with the following:

• Improved waitlist management for events: You now have better control over how contacts on the waiting list can be invited to an event when more space becomes available. You can choose among several options for how to register waitlisted contacts automatically, or if you are using manual registration, for how many invitations to send out for each available slot. For details, see Set up and manage an event waitlist.
• Improved venue management for events: You could already set up your event venues using a hierarchy of building > room > room-layout, but now this structure is better reflected in the way you assign the venue for each event or session. This helps make your event planning easier and more intuitive. For details, see Set up an event.
• Easier check-ins: Now you can select several event-registration records at once and check them all in with just one click.

Segmentation improvements

Marketing segments now offer:

• A faster segment designer: The segment designer now loads faster and is more responsive during use.
• New segment operators: We have added many new logical operators for defining logical clauses in dynamic segments, including: contains, does not contain, contains data, contains no data, begins with, and ends with. Also, when you set up a clause with multiple values, you can now use operators such as: contains at least one of, does not contain any of, begins with one of, and ends with one of. For example, you could add a clause such as “City contains at least one of: Copenhagen, Prague, Advanta” to find contacts from any of those cities. The availability of each operator varies by data type.

Expanded documentation

New documentation topics will help you discover existing features and be more productive. New topics include:

• Go live with publishable entities and track their status: lists all entities that are published through a go-live function (such as emails, customer journeys, segments, and landing pages), and tells how to track and edit records that are live or going live.
• Analyze results to gain insights from your marketing activities: summarizes the many analytical displays and KPIs reported by the system and how to find them.
• Marketing videos: provides a collection of embedded videos that provide an overview of the system and explain how to use its major features.
• Add dynamic content to email messages: describes how to personalize marketing email messages to each recipient by adding logic and dynamic values, including the new features introduced by the V2 sending platform.
• Use custom attributes to enable designer features in emails, pages, and forms: describes how to use custom attributes to create templates that provide global style settings to help users build content more effectively. Global style settings appear in the Styles tab of the graphical designer and help users change the overall color palette, typography, and other standardized options that you establish for the template.
• Market to leads with Dynamics 365 for Marketing: though the Marketing app focuses on contacts, this topic explains how you can use the system to work from a leads-based perspective that better supports some types of sales operations.
• Set up and manage an event waitlist: shows how to enable and manage a waitlist for sold-out events.
• Create and manage recurring events: explains how to set up and manage recurring events, which work similarly to recurring appointments in Microsoft Outlook.
• Create and use event templates: if you often run similar events, you can save time by setting up and using event templates to establish their basic settings, agenda, and more.