Describe customer journeys
A customer journey is a path a customer takes while interacting with your organization's marketing process. The goal of a completed journey is to generate revenue.
For example, a simple customer journey might look like this:
A potential customer opens a marketing email they received from Contoso Coffee.
The email includes multiple links the customer can click on to learn more about the different Contoso products highlighted in the email.
They're directed to a marketing page related to that product, based on the link they select.
The customer indicates they would like some additional information about the product they selected while they're on the marketing page.
The customer is sent targeted marketing materials, based on the request. A task is assigned to a Contoso Coffee sales associate to follow up with potential customers within a day or two, aiming to convert them into revenue.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys lets you create powerful customer journeys tailored to the products you're marketing and the objectives of your campaign. You can easily visualize and automate the journey customers take while interacting with your sales and marketing processes. From emails and task assignments to business workflows, decision points, and internal action items, journeys can be customized based on customer needs and preferences.
With customer journeys, you can:
Attract the right prospects: Create campaigns that target specific customer segments across multiple channels. These channels include email marketing, web landing pages, events, telemarketing, Short Message Service (SMS) integration, LinkedIn integration, and others.
Create customer reusable campaign assets quickly: Automation features such as configurable templates, reusable content blocks, and design tools make it easy to create a vast library of marketing content that can be easily applied across different customer journeys. Tools like Power Automate can help streamline content approvals and easily integrate with third-party content management systems.
Personalize customer journeys: By applying buyer preferences and their past interactions, you can create personalized customer journeys as well as automatically sync and nurture LinkedIn leads with the Dynamics 365 Connector for LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms app.
Run business unit level marketing: Reusable shared campaign content lets you define which audiences are targeted.
To get started, a basic customer journey needs at least two pieces of information:
Customers to target: You should have a segment containing the contacts to whom you want to send your email.
Marketing activity: You should include a marketing email that is both valid and live.
Depending on your desired complexity and specific goals, a customer journey can include various elements to guide engaged customers. These are represented in the journey’s visual designer as tiles.
The different tiles that can be used include:
Audience: Specifies who the people are that this journey is targeting. A customer journey’s audience can be any of the following:
Segment: A segment is a collection of contacts grouped according to a common attribute or explicit assignment.
Form submitted: All new or existing contacts who submit the form are sent along the customer journey.
Record updated: Use the record-updated tile to monitor specific table records and find associated contacts created, deleted, or updated during the journey.
Messages: The content that your customer journey delivers to contacts as they traverse the pipeline.
Branches: Provides different directions that a customer can be led to on their journey based on how they interact with the different elements. Branches include the following:
If/then: This tile replaces the Trigger tile. The If/then tile holds contacts either until a defined condition is true, or until a defined amount of time expires. The If/then tile splits the path. Contacts who fulfill the conditions in time follow the true path. Contacts who don't meet the conditions when the time expires follow the false path.
Split: This tile replaces the Splitter and Splitter-branch tiles. The Split tile adds a fork to the customer journey pipeline, sending a random selection of contacts along each available path.
Wait/delay: Specifies how long to wait until performing the next step in the journey. It can be set to one of the following:
Wait for: The Wait for tile holds contacts for an amount of time before sending them to the next tile in the journey. You could use tile to insert a delay of, say, a week between sending an initial marketing email message and then sending a reminder.
Wait until: The Wait until tile holds contacts until a certain date is reached. For example, you could set the tile to wait until December 31 before sending the contacts to the next tile in the journey.
Actions: Specifies what to do in response to a condition or wait item being met. Options include:
Create lead: The create-lead tile creates a new lead for each contact or account that enters the tile.
Run workflow: Use a Run workflow tile to invoke a custom workflow at any point in the customer journey. You can use this tile to advance a process stage, create alerts, and more. Workflows are highly customizable.
LinkedIn campaign: The LinkedIn campaign tile links each contact who passes through it to a specific LinkedIn campaign.
Sales activities: Defines the sales activity such as Appointment, Phone call, Task that should be initiated.
Real-time marketing provides organizations with two different journey options:
Trigger-based journeys: Enables you to react to customers’ actions in real time. Journeys are triggered based on real-world interactions such as walking into a store and connecting to Wi-Fi or visiting a shopping website.
Segment-based journeys: Similar to how customer journeys are built in outbound marketing. You identify a segment of customers that you want to target with your journey.
Trigger-based journeys
Triggers represent actions taken by a customer such as a whitepaper download, a form submitted, or a Wi-Fi sign-up. They can also represent significant business events, such as a purchase that shipped or completion of an enrollment process. Trigger-based journeys are effective because they represent the ability to perform more targeted marketing based on customer related interactions and events.
Real-time marketing offers three types of triggers in the triggers catalog:
Custom triggers: These are triggers defined by real-time marketing users. They provide a flexible way to capture any customer action or significant business event.
Interaction triggers: These triggers are customer interactions with journey elements such as email, text message, and push channels. They don’t start or stop journeys. They're used within a journey and represent a logical continuation of a preceding step. When a journey sends an email, triggers like Email delivered, Email bounced, or Email opened become available to journey authors, helping them decide the next steps.
Business triggers: These triggers represent changes in Dynamics 365 applications such as Sales or Service. These changes can reflect either the creation of a new record or an update to an existing one. A business trigger occurs when a contact is created or when an email address, phone number, or physical address is updated.