Microsoft have announced the content of its 2020 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Marketing.

This articles summaries some of the standout highlights from the release. As there are so many noteworthy updates coming to Dynamics 365 Marketing this article forms the first of two – access the second article.

Natural language

With release wave 2, Dynamics 365 Marketing users will be able to use natural language sentences to build or view segments. This means you can use simple words to specify the attributes and logic for the segment you want to target so you can reach the exact audience you are looking for. For example, using natural language, you can create a segment of “customers who live in the US but not Florida, and work in retail.”

Natural language queries enable the following:

• When creating a complex segment that includes contact attributes and interactions or behaviours, users can use natural language to target the right audience in a campaign without complex syntax.
• When looking at a segment created by another user (or imported from an external tool), users can understand the logic of the segment in natural language to decide whether it meets the target profile for a campaign.
• When using a segment template to create a segment, users can fill in the template using natural language instead of spending time parsing the segment logic.

This update will allow marketing professionals to create customer segments in a simple, easy way.

Customer Insights segments

With release wave 2, Dynamics 365 Marketing users will be able to precisely identify audiences for your campaigns by leveraging data from multiple data sources across your organisation. Users can build segments in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and use them directly in Dynamics 365 Marketing to make campaigns even more targeted and effective.

• Discover Dynamics 365 Customer Insights segments instantly, see the segment creation logic and use the segments for customer journeys.
• Customer Insights segments in Marketing are dynamically updated as long as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing are connected.
• Save snapshots of Customer Insights dynamic segments as static segments in Dynamics 365 Marketing.
• Use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights segments directly in customer journeys, just like native Dynamics 365 Marketing dynamic segments.

With this release, we are now giving Dynamics 365 Marketing users a lot more options in terms of being able to use Customer Insights segments within the marketing platform. It is fantastic to see Microsoft continuing to align and closely build the products together.

Faster email customisation

The better your emails look, the more likely your audience is to read and engage with them. With release wave 2, users can now create more customised emails, without the need to use HTML.

The updated email editor has the following improvements:

• Ability to add more than three columns to an email.
• Better support for email rendering in Outlook.
• Improved email editing performance, including faster loading and element interaction.

It seems that with every release wave comes another improvement to the email editor. The feature just keeps getting better and better and, in many instances, surpassed its competitors.

Journey building experience

Creating sophisticated, multistep campaigns can feel intimidating. With release wave 2, the customer journey canvas has been completely redesigned with enhanced UI, journey building and email preview capabilities. Additionally, marketers can now design negative paths in journeys and have more options to adjust the canvas view to suit their preferences.

• Complete redesign of the canvas, making the experience of building customer journeys more intuitive.
• Enhanced performance and reliability when building complex, multistep journeys.
• Simplified time-based journey actions.
• Negative journey paths, enabling follow-up events exclusively for recipients who didn’t meet a certain condition – for example, didn’t open an email or click on a link.

This is a major enhancement to Dynamics 365 Marketing. For superusers of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, using the canvas to build journeys is typically easy however this update makes it more accessible for all users. It would be great to see the new design make it way into the Power Platform as well.

If you want to know more about the highlights outlined in this article and how they can enhance your marketing efforts, please get in touch.