Microsoft Release Wave 1 in 2024: what's new for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing?

Are you ready for the many new features in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing? From the creation of journeys with Copilot to personalised communication based on website interaction: you can read all about them in this article! The updates in this Release Wave will be available between April and September 2024.

Email: from real-time HTML edits to double opt-in

Are you a fan of email marketing in your communication? Then this Release Wave has some great new features for you to discover:

• Choose the email address to interact with: sometimes you have contacts with multiple email addresses. This update makes it possible for you to select the email address that you want to interact with. For instance, certain messages may be better suited for a contact's work email, while others are  more fitting for their personal email.
• Prevent email duplication: if you have contacts that share an email address (for example info@companyXX), the system enables email deduplication, so your message will be sent once to the customer.
• Streamline email creation with real-time HTML edits: you no longer have to switch between the marketing email designer and HTML code, but will be able to work with a split screen. A great time saver and no more endless switching & clicking!

• Optimise engagement and increase conversions with email A/B testing: in real-time journeys you will be able to compare and test different versions of your emails, on various subsets of recipients. Which variation is performing best? You can then easily create alternate versions by adjusting elements such as the subject line, or the body content.
• Stay compliant with one-click unsubscribe emails: starting February 2024, Google & Yahoo will have stronger rules implemented for email senders. In order to comply with these rules, there is now a ‘one click unsubscribe’ option. This will improve the overall experience with your brand, and your emails will be less likely to be marked as spam. 
• Improve engagement and compliance with double opt-in: double opt-in helps to improve the quality of your subscriber base. With this feature you can potentially reduce spam complaints, lower bounce rates and improve your reputation as a sender. 
• Timing is essential for effective communication. With the new ‘send scheduling’ feature you can make sure messages reach customers when they are most likely to take action, for example during business hours. 
• Not a fan of these automatically generated URLs in your emails? Then we have good news: it will be possible to customise links to show your company name. This will improve your score with email clients, and gain more trust with your customers. 
  
  

Journeys: Copilot, Split Tiles & enhanced analytics

In this Release Wave there are 3 exciting journey optimisations that we would like to call out.

2) Do you want to target a specific amount of people with a personal journey? With the new ‘Split Tiles’ you don’t have to A/B split your audience, but you can really fill in the numeric amount. This is a great solution, if you for example, want to gather feedback from 500 of your customers. 

3) Sometimes it is difficult to assess the effectiveness of your journeys, and there is a lot of manual work involved. Enhanced journey analytics streamline this process by identifying both large-scale patterns and individual flows. This helps you to evaluate if the journey is delivering the desired customer experience!

Personalised messages, consent & form updates

Being able to track customers on your website is key to understanding them better. Which pages are they visiting? And what documents are they downloading? With this new feature you can engage customers with personalised messages, based on website interactions. By understanding and tracking them, you can adapt to new market trends and interact even better with your customers. 

Another great update in the Release Wave: the ability to easily manage customer consent from contact and lead forms. A centralised view allows you to efficiently handle consent across all channels and lines of business, and see their preferences for certain topics and channels. 

Do you use external third-party forms? You can now capture submissions from any third-party forms on your website and automatically (without the hassle of duplicating them!) create new leads or contacts in Customer Insights – Journeys. This way you can get the most out of your external forms!

And last, but not least: on landing pages you will be able to easily add additional fields, without the need to actually create them on the lead or contact table. Do you for example need the meal preference of someone for a training day? Then you can add this question to the landing page, and the information will be stored within the submission.

Do you want to learn more about the updates in this Release Wave for Dynamics Marketing? 

Contact our experts to find out more about the opportunities these updates can bring to your business.