Harness the transformative potential of journeys in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to design cohesive, hyper-personalized, and timely customer experiences that not only capture attention but also deepen brand loyalty and engagement. By integrating customer data, insights, and touchpoints, journeys empower businesses to deliver the right message to the right audience at precisely the right time.
In this blog, we’ll delve into the core concept of journeys, explore various journey types such as transactional, engagement-driven, and retention-focused journeys, and provide actionable strategies to leverage them for optimizing marketing campaigns. Learn how to streamline workflows, enhance customer interactions, and ultimately drive measurable growth by creating impactful, data-driven journeys tailored to individual customer preferences and behaviors.
What is Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a cutting-edge customer data platform (CDP) by Microsoft that helps businesses unify and analyze their customer data from various sources to gain a 360-degree view of their customers. By consolidating data from CRM systems, transactional records, social media, and other touchpoints, enables organizations to better understand customer behavior, preferences, and interactions.
Key Features of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights:
- Unified Customer Profiles: Combines data from multiple sources into a single, comprehensive customer profile for accurate insights.
- AI-Driven Insights: Leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and recommendations.
- Journey Orchestration: Allows businesses to create personalized and dynamic customer journeys across marketing, sales, and service channels.
- Real-Time Engagement: Enables real-time data integration for immediate decision-making and enhanced customer interactions.
- Customization and Extensibility: Supports integration with other Dynamics 365 apps, Power Platform, and third-party tools to extend capabilities.
What Are Journeys in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Journeys in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights are personalized, automated pathways designed to enhance customer engagement. These journeys enable marketing teams to create and manage multi-step, cross-channel interactions tailored to individual customer profiles, preferences, and behaviors. By guiding customers along customized paths, businesses can boost engagement, drive sales, and build loyalty.
Marketing teams can leverage two types of journeys. Let’s explore each in more detail:
- Segment-Based Journeys
- Trigger-Based Journeys
Segment-Based Journeys
Segments are collections of customers who share similar characteristics or behaviors. When you design a segment-based journey, you are focusing on reaching a defined, highly targeted audience. Examples of common segments include:
- Customers subscribed to your newsletter.
- Potential clients scheduled to receive follow-up emails on a specific date.
- Contacts who have signed up for an event.
- Customers are located within specific geographic regions.
- High-value customers with a strong purchase history.
- Prospects or customers included in a sales campaign.
By leveraging segments, businesses can deliver more personalized and relevant experiences to drive engagement and results.
How to Create a Segment-Based Journey
Before creating a segment-based journey, ensure the following prerequisites are met:
- Create the segments you wish to target.
- Prepare and finalize the content you’ll send, and add a trigger, ensuring it is in a “Ready to send” state to avoid errors or incomplete messaging.
For example, we used to send an email related to the Sky Inspections Track to Newly added contacts and the Institute is Skysoft Sharjah.
Once the segments and content are ready, follow these steps to set up your segment-based journey.
Steps to Create a Segment-Based Journey
To create a new one, select “+New journey” in the top navigation bar.
On the next screen, select the Segment-based checkbox and then fill out the relevant information.
- Giving the journey a name
- Selecting a segment
- Selecting the frequency – which includes three options
- A one-time journey with a static audience means the email will be sent one time and only to the contacts currently on the list
- A one-time journey where newly added audience members can start at any time means newly added members can go through the journey at any time
- A repeating journey where all audience members repeat the journey as many times as the user determines (for example, every three days)
In our example, it’s “Send Email Related to Sky Inspections Track”.
- The time zone
- The start date and time the communication will go out
Create your journey
Once you have filled all the relevant information in, click “Create” (reference the photo below) to move to the next screen.
Select the Action email you want to send to the desired segment
You can do this by clicking the + button directly beneath your segment.
Select “Email” from the top of the list.
We can see more Channels Like Web forms, Push notifications, text messages, and custom Channels. You will notice there are a lot of options in the list, in this example, we are sending a simple email to a subset of customers, but there are other things you can do outside of that.
Click “Publish” to finish your journey.
Once your journey is published, it will be sent out on the day and at the time you set it to on the previous screen.
Note: The system will not allow you to send your journey until you save the most recent update. If the “Publish” button appears gray and you can’t click on it, saving your journey should resolve the issue. This stops users from accidentally sending communications that contain errors or haven’t been edited yet.
Email Received from a Segment-Based Journeys (Sample email)
Trigger-Based Journeys
Trigger-based journeys are designed to respond to customer actions in real time. These triggers can be based on physical interactions, such as making a purchase in-store, or digital actions, like completing an online transaction. The key advantage of trigger-based journeys is their ability to deliver timely, relevant communications to customers and prospects, ensuring engagement at critical moments.
How to Create a Trigger-Based Journey
Sticking with our example we will trigger the Journey when a new contact is created.
You can now create your trigger-based journey with these steps:
The step one is the same as segment-based journeys. Follow the same steps to create a new journey. The only difference is you will now select the Trigger-based checkbox.
Then Name the journey and choose your trigger. On the second screen, give your journey a name and then select your desired trigger. Since the journey is only triggered when a customer takes a specific action, you don’t need to fill out the additional information from segment-based journeys.
Select “Create” to go into your journey
The creation button is the same as in the steps for the segment-based journey.
Set trigger conditions – if you have any (Sample condition in the below image)
You can further personalize triggers by adding conditions, or data attributes, that will target customers who are more specific. You can do this by clicking the “+Add condition” button on the right-hand side.
Set the journey goal (optional)
On the very right-hand side of the screen, click on the small target icon in the gray sidebar.
In this section, you can select from multiple options, including:
- Drive a purchase
- Engage customers
- Increase loyalty
- Onboard new people
- Send a general notification
- Custom goal
Now add the Action and then Publish as we published the segment-based journey.
Tracking Marketing Activity Performance
Once you have published a journey, you can use the Analytics section to track performance. Just navigate to Engagement > Analytics.
From this screen, you will see a list of journeys that you can track analytics for, including:
- Total inflow and outflow
- Email engagement rate
- Push notification or text message engagement rate
- Why do people participate in and leave journeys
- Channel engagement success rate
- Channel engagement issues
- Channel performance
Why Use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights?
It empowers businesses to:
- Deliver personalized, data-driven customer experiences.
- Improve customer retention and loyalty through tailored engagement.
- Optimize marketing, sales, and service strategies using actionable insights.
- Stay competitive by adapting to customer needs in real-time.
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a powerful tool for organizations aiming to elevate their customer-centric strategies and foster long-term relationships.
Readmore : the evolution of microsoft dynamics crm over the years
FAQ’s
Segment-based journeys focus on targeting specific groups of customers with similar characteristics, delivering personalized campaigns to drive engagement.
Trigger-based journeys respond to real-time customer actions, such as a purchase or form submission, to deliver timely, relevant communications.
Yes, you can use the Analytics section to monitor metrics like engagement rates, inflow and outflow, and channel performance for better insights.
