Customer engagement
The Customer engagement section of the Settings work area contains pages that let you set up and configure the following settings:
Compliance
Brand profiles
Audience configuration
Azure SMS preview
SMS providers
SMS keywords
Push notifications
Custom channels
UTM tracking
Frequency cap
Quiet times
Form matching strategy
Social media accounts
Compliance profiles
Compliance profiles are the hubs to manage consent and compliance in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys. Compliance profiles govern how consent is captured and enforced. Compliance profiles store information such as company address, preference management experience, and related configuration. Compliance profile settings vary based on the type of compliance profile you're creating or modifying.
To create and manage your compliance profile, open the Settings work area and go to Customer engagement > Compliance profiles.
For more information, see Manage user compliance settings.
Brand profiles
Brand profiles allow you to create consistently branded content efficiently, even if your organization has multiple brands. Here, you can define default senders for emails, set default social links, and even extend your brand profile entity with custom values that you can use when creating content.
To create and manage brand profiles, open the Settings work area and go to Customer engagement > Brand profiles.
For more information, see Create consistent branding with brand profiles.
Audience configuration
Audience configuration allows you to manage your audience data sources. Real-time marketing supports Contact, Lead, and Customer profile entities.
Contacts and Leads have default recipient fields set up for emails and phone numbers. The values from these fields are automatically populated in the Send-to field. You can modify the default settings by adding more recipient fields or changing the default field content.
Customer Profiles have no default fields set. You can choose which fields from a Customer Profile should be used when sending an email or text message.
To view and manage your audience configuration records, open the Settings work area and go to Customer engagement > Audience configuration.
Important
For Contacts, only one recipient email address can be used. This is done to remove consent ambiguity. In outbound marketing, a Contact record may store several email addresses with one consent for the entire contact. But in real-time marketing, consent is given per each email address. For more information, see Outbound consent.
For more information, see Select the audience source for real-time journeys.
Azure SMS preview
Important
Effective November 8, 2023, unverified toll-free numbers sending messages to US phone numbers will have its traffic blocked. Due to this new restriction, the Azure SMS Preview feature is temporarily unavailable. Numbers that were previously verified will continue to send text messages.
Important
Text messaging using a toll free number generated in the Azure Communication Services preview is only supported in the United States.
Note
During the Azure Communication Services preview, the text message service is limited to a single toll-free phone number with a limited number of outbound messages per month. The phone number you receive will be your dedicated number for the duration of the preview.
If you want to integrate an already active Azure Communication Services subscription, refer to Sign up for and configure an Azure Communication Services subscription.
To view or set up your Azure Communication phone number, open the Settings work area and go to Customer engagement > Azure SMS preview.
For more information, see Add a sender number using the Azure Communication Services preview (US only).
SMS providers
Text messages (SMS) allow you to reach customers directly on their mobile devices. You can send text messages from the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys app by generating a phone number to use within the app.
Note
Customer Insight - Journeys offers native integration with Azure Communication Services, Infobip, LINK Mobility, Telesign, Twilio, or Vibes (US and Canada). You can bring your own provider by creating up a custom channel.
To view or set up a new text message provider, open the Settings work area and go to Customer engagement > SMS providers.
For more information, see Set up text messages.
SMS keywords
Adding SMS keywords in your text message allows you to use them in your customer journey to branch based on your customer’s response to your text messages.
To add, delete, or update a keyword, open the Settings work area and go to Customer engagement > SMS keywords.
For more information, see Manage SMS (text message) keywords used in customer journeys.
Push notifications
Push notifications are messages sent to customers who have installed your mobile app. Push messages allow you to quickly convey offers, messages, or other information directly to users of your app. You can send push messages as part of real-time journeys.
Push notification configuration for real-time marketing requires some setup that must be completed by an app developer. This includes:
App registration
Device registration
Receiving notifications and creating interactions
For more information, see Push notification setup for application developers.
Custom channels
You can use Customer Insights - Journeys personalization, consent, and analytics tools to create compelling content and deliver it over your preferred communication channels such as a local SMS provider or WhatsApp. Capitalize on proven channels, plug any of them into your new or existing journeys.
To add custom channels, open the Settings work area and go to Customer engagement > Custom channels.
To create a new custom channel, begin by first installing the corresponding custom channel app.
There are two ways to install a custom channel app:
Manually create and install the package.
Install the package through AppSource if the app is listed by your service provider.
For more information, see Create custom channels in real-time marketing.
UTM tracking
UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) codes are an essential tool for marketers as they allow them to track the effectiveness of their digital marketing. By adding UTM parameters to URLs, marketers can track the specific source, medium, and journey name that generated website visitors.
UTM codes also provide valuable insights into customer behavior. UTM codes can help identify which channels are most effective in generating traffic for your websites and landing pages, which enables you to attribute conversions to the right source.
To view and manage UTM tracking, open the Settings work area, and go to Customer engagement > UTM tracking.
To use UTM codes, an administrator needs to first enable the UTM codes feature switch. After enabling the UTM code feature, you can customize UTM links to meet your organization’s needs.
For more information, see Measure marketing effectiveness using UTM codes.
Frequency cap
The frequency cap feature lets you set a limit on the number of messages your customers receive in a given amount of time through a particular channel.
Some customers qualify for multiple journeys and campaigns that run simultaneously. This results in them receiving multiple messages through one channel in a short period of time. This can be perceived as spam and lower the customers’ engagement with your messages.
With the frequency cap feature, you can optimize engagement by controlling how many messages are sent across multiple channels over a period of time. This improves engagement, decreases unsubscriptions, and reduces the number of messages marked as spam over time.
By default, the Marketing Manager - Business role has the rights to create a frequency cap setting. You can create a frequency cap setting for each business unit in your organization.
The frequency cap setting is enabled by default for all journeys. Once the frequency cap limits are defined in the global settings, the messages will be capped. Users who have editing rights for a journey are able to decide if the cap should be bypassed for a specific journey.
To view and manage frequency cap settings, open the Settings work area, and go to Customer engagement > Frequency cap.
For more information, see Limit the number of messages sent with frequency capping.
Quiet times
Quiet times enable you to configure specific times when messages won't send to customers to avoid contacting them when it's inappropriate. You might not want to send messages at specific times due to regulations, business policies, or other factors. Typically, quiet times are configured for overnight hours, weekends, or holidays. When quiet times are in place, the system holds the messages until the quiet times end.
You can specify different quiet times for commercial and transactional message types. For instance, many organizations want to prevent commercial messages from sending at odd hours, but they expect transactional messages to send immediately.
In addition, you can differentiate your quiet times by message channel, such as email, text message, and custom channels. Often, customers are more sensitive about receiving text messages during off-hours than they're to receive an email, so you can have different quiet times for each channel, if desired.
To set up quiet times, open the Settings work area, and go to Customer engagement > Quiet times.
For more information, see Set quiet times to prevent messages from sending during unwanted hours.
Form matching strategy
Form matching strategies enable you to define how form submissions are matched to existing contacts or leads. These strategies are necessary when you're deciding to update an existing record or create a new one.
The default approach to duplicate records is different for contact and lead entities.
Contact (default: Update contact using email): If the user submits a form with an existing email address, the form submission updates the existing record. There's no new record created.
Lead (default: Always create a new record): If the user submits a form with an existing email address, a new record with the same email address is created.
You can update the default matching strategies or create custom matching strategies. Marketers can then choose the appropriate matching strategy on individual forms.
For more information, see Manage Customer Insights - Journeys forms.
Social media accounts
Important
This topic only applies to outbound marketing.
Social posting enables Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys users to create, schedule, and publish posts to a variety of social media channels and accounts, including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. To use this feature, you must first configure and authenticate each channel and account that you want to make available for use with this feature.
To access the social media settings, open the Settings work area and go to Customer engagement > Social media accounts.
For more information, see Configure your social media accounts.