Deliver a marketing email with send now

  • 5 minutes

In some cases, you may just want to write a quick email and send it to a few specific recipients instead of going through the entire process of creating a journey and target segment. In this situation, use the send now feature, which lets you design an email as usual and then just select Send now to choose your recipients and deliver the message.

In the background, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys creates a static segment to contain your recipients and a customer journey preconfigured to send your message to that segment. The journey goes live automatically and starts sending right away. After this, you can open the generated customer journey to view results and insights as usual. Both the segment and the journey that are generated by this feature are easy to identify because Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys assigns them the same name as the email message that generated them.

When you use send now, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys generates a static segment that contains the contacts you selected while using the feature, and saves the segment using the same name as the email message you used to generate it. The name of your email message is especially important because this name will also be applied to the segment and customer journey created by this feature. Always be sure to choose a meaningful name before selecting Send now.

Note

Compared to the standard procedure for sending marketing emails, in which you manually set up a segment and customer journey to send a message you've already designed, the send-now feature adds a few limitations. These limitations are:

  • You can send to a maximum of 30 contacts, selected one at a time (as with a static segment).
  • Your message can include dynamic expressions, but you can't use relations. That means you can have just one hop (period) in your dynamic expressions, so for example, {{contact.name}} is supported but {{contact.contact_account_parentcustomerid.name}} isn't.
  • Your message must still pass the standard error check, and must therefore include all the standard required content (including a subject, a subscription-center link, your organization's physical post address, and valid to and from addresses).

For more information, see Quickly design and deliver a marketing email with send now.