Here is a selection of updates we are most looking forward to.

1 – Use Teams to Collaborate in D365 Marketing

Dynamics 365 for Marketing is an incredible tool, which combines so many great marketing features under one roof. From September 2022 it will be even easier to collaborate with your colleagues with a direct integration of Microsoft Teams chat.

This new feature will enable the Teams experience within D365 for Marketing, allowing you to have real time chats and group chats whilst working on your next campaign.

Whether you’re discussing your next email marketing campaign or reviewing key reports and analytics from your latest activities, you’ll be able to discuss and collaborate on it together. The features include:

• Adding and removing people from the chat, so you can talk with the right people for each project or campaign
• View recent chats, to remind yourself of what was discussed, or catch up on a conversation if you were busy on other things whilst it happened
• Set up which entities to include chat, so that you can add it to the right type of work, but limit it on other areas if it’s not appropriate

This is a small but significant improvement and brings us one step closer to a completely unified and seamless real time working environment.

2 – Easily Personalise Emails

OK, we are cheating a bit on this one as we are combining two wave updates that will each improve your email creation experience.

The first is rolling out in June 2022 and includes a new ability to create emails using enhanced reusable content fragments. These reusable blocks of content will enable you to create layouts, blocks of content, buttons or personalised elements.

Rather than building emails from scratch every time, you will be able to reuse the core elements, so that you will be able to rebuild a new campaign from existing modules and then just update the content, such as text images and links. This will not only make it much easier and quicker to build future email campaigns, but it will also create a strong consistency to your emails that will help develop your brand and marketing messages.

The second new feature is launching earlier, in April 2022. This feature will allow users to quickly personalise emails with predefined dynamic text, without any developer knowledge.

If you’d like to include a personalised snippet, such as a first name, birthday, etc, you can just select the Personalisation button in the text editor and then choose the snippet from a dropdown menu. These predefined snippets can be customised, to make sure that you have the right set of content you need to make your message impactful and help them resonate with individual subscribers.

3 – Create Conditional Content in Email Campaigns

Still on the topic of email creation, this new feature is so exciting we wanted to give it a separate spot on our list.

This new update will enable you to create conditional dynamic content with easy-to-use no-code experiences. So what does that really mean?

You will be able to personalise sections of an email to target a specific segment of audience. This could include different images, text and more, specific to different audiences. This could be ideal if you would like to send a single campaign that delivers different content for different groups, such as:

• Subscribers
• Customers/clients
• Press contacts
• Internal staff
• VIP contacts
• & more

This feature won’t require any code knowledge, instead using an intuitive and simple designer interface and will roll out in June 2022.

The more personal and specific your content, the better it resonates with your audience, so we can see this new feature becoming an essential tool for marketing teams using D365.

4 – Use Triggers in One Journey From Another Journey

Marketing automation is becoming more powerful and more accessible each year. From April 2022 D365 for Marketing will take another step forward in this by enabling one journey to trigger another journey of Power Automate flow.

This will allow you to string together a series of user journeys together, integrating D365 Marketing campaigns at key points to communicate with your customers and audiences.

For example, you could create a series of automations that trigger when a user purchases a birthday card online for their partner. You could send an initial series of emails confirming the order process. But now, you could also add an additional flow that triggers a reminder email 11 months later, to remind them of the upcoming birthday.

Alternatively, you could create a workflow that triggers two different campaigns based on whether a customer proceeds with or abandons an order.

If you can map out your customer journeys with ITTT (If This, Then That) types of flow diagrams, this new feature is going to unlock some very powerful marketing automations.

5 – Create Quicker, Easier Segments

Microsoft will soon be releasing a new segment builder for D365 Marketing. This new tool will enable marketing teams to create advanced and complex segments, without the need for any development or advanced knowledge.

Instead, the segment will use a combination of filters and Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT) to segment an audience. This could include existing or custom fields and can include partial or complete matches.

If you have ever used LinkedIn Sales Navigator or LinkedIn advertising you might find the tool familiar. However, this D365 version will enable much more detailed and focused expressions to create incredibly specific segments.

The tool will also enable you to preview and estimate the number of users in your segments, perfect for testing your filters before you apply them in a campaign.

Unlike the other updates mentioned here, there is no current eta on when this might be available to the public. However, we hope to see a release soon and it should be worth the wait.

For more updates on Microsoft D365, stay tuned.

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