Boost Your Marketing Efforts with Journeys in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Using journeys in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables businesses to build cohesive, personalized, and timely customer experiences to drive brand engagement.
In this blog, we’ll provide a brief outline of journeys, highlight different journey types, and detail how you can use them to improve marketing activities and increase positive customer engagements.
What are Journeys in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights?
Journeys in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights are personalized, automated customer engagement paths that allow your marketing team to create and manage multi-step, cross-channel customer interactions based on individual customer profiles, preferences, and behaviors. They can help guide customers along tailored paths to enhance engagement, drive sales, and foster loyalty.
There are two types of journeys your marketing team can use. Let’s unpack both types in greater detail:
Segment-Based Journeys
Segments are groups of customers who share common characteristics. When you create a segment-based journey, you are targeting specific or targeted audiences. Some common examples of segments include:
- Clients who have subscribed to your newsletter
- Prospective clients who will receive follow-up emails on the same date
- Contacts who have registered for an event
- Customers located in specific regions
- High-value customers with a high purchase rate
- Customers or prospects who are targeted as part of a sales campaign
How to Create a Segment-Based Journey
Before you create a segment-based journey, you need to fulfill two prerequisites:
- You need to create the segments you want to send your communication to
- There must be content in place for you to send to customers in a segment and it has to be in a “Ready to send” state. This is a good safeguard against accidentally sending something that is incomplete or needs editing.
For the purposes of this blog, we will use the example of a bakery wanting to inform loyalty club members about upcoming holiday product deals ahead of the general public.
Once you have segments and content in place, follow these steps to create a segment-based journey:
1 – In Customer Insights, navigate to the Engagement Section and click “Journeys”
Once there, you will see a list of previous journeys. To create a new one, select "+New journey" in the top navigation bar.
2 – On the next screen, select the Segment-based checkbox and then fill out the relevant information
This includes:
- 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)
- The time zone
- The start date and time the communication will go out
For this example, we will select a one-time journey where newly added members can start at any time. This is because between now and the end of the promotion, new customers might join the bakery’s loyalty program and can also access special deals.
3 – Create your journey
Once you have filled all the relevant information in, click “Create” (reference the photo above) to move to the next screen.
4 – Select the email you want to send to the desired segment
You can do this by clicking the + button directly beneath your segment.
5 – Select “Email” from the top of the list.
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. You can learn more about that here.
6 – Find your email in the sidebar
You can search for it by name. If it is the most recent email you have created it should pop up on the top of the drop-down list when you click the search bar.
7 – 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.
Trigger-Based Journeys
Trigger-based journeys react to specific customer actions in real time. You can define specific triggers based on real-world interactions like buying from a store or virtual interactions like buying from a website. The benefit of trigger-based journeys is they send important communications to customers and prospective customers quickly.
How to Create a Trigger-Based Journey
Sticking with the bakery example, we are setting up a trigger-based journey for new loyalty club members who receive a discount on their next order when they sign up. The only prerequisite you have to meet is you need a trigger setup.
One important thing to note is that if you select your trigger to activate when a customer interacts with a website or app, you will need the assistance of a developer for code integration, or else the trigger journey won’t publish. In this example, a customer would either be inputting their email on the bakery’s website or through a computer system in-store.
You can now create your trigger-based journey with these steps:
1 – 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.
2 – 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.
3 – Select “Create” to go into your journey
The create button is the same as in the steps for the segment-based journey.
4 – Set trigger conditions – if you have any
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.
For this example, we won't use any conditions, as the trigger goes to any customers who submit their email to enter the customer loyalty program. If you require more information on trigger conditions, reference this link.
5 – 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
In this case, we will set the goal as increasing loyalty.
6 – Set the journey exit
There is no exit for this example since we are just getting customers to sign up via email, there is no exit. You can learn more about journey exits here.
7 – Follow steps four, five, six, and seven from the previous section, and then Publish your trigger-based journey.
Once you have set your conditions, goals, and exits, follow the same steps as the segment-based section to publish your 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 people participate in and leave journeys
- Channel engagement success rate
- Channel engagement issues
- Channel performance
This area helps you analyze what is going right and what could be improved on with your marketing activities.
A Note on Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys
Microsoft currently has an exciting feature in preview mode where you can ask Copilot to create a journey for you based on natural language prompts. Depending on your licensing and how your environment is set up, you might be able to try this feature out. All you have to do is either put your prompt into the box or select from pre-loaded prompts.
After that, you can preview the journey Copilot creates for you to ensure it is accurate and correct. Once you click on"Create Journey", you will be able to publish your automated journey.
Keep an eye on Microsoft release notes or contact Stoneridge to stay updated when new features go live.
Reach out to Stoneridge Software Today to Improve Your Marketing Strategy
Our team of experts can help you implement and maximize the effectiveness of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights so your marketers can work smarter and your business can increase overall customer engagement.
Get in touch today to learn more.
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