Microsoft is planning Moments-based marketing upcoming features to be introduced soon for a real-time marketing experience as part of their plans for the 2021 wave two release.
What is Moments-based marketing?
Microsoft defines the moments-based market as engaging your customers in moments that matter across all customer touchpoints. To me, moments-based marketing identifies the client interactions (touchpoints), defines the right message for each of these interactions and the means to deliver the message.
We discussed moments-based marketing and real-time marketing before in the blog. Read more previous posts.
Also, we discussed how moments-based marketing and real-time is different from traditional outgoing marketing.
Below we will briefly go through the Moments-based marketing upcoming features and, in future posts, will explore each in detail.
Moments-based marketing upcoming features
As Microsoft announced in their latest wave 2 updates for 2021, Moments-based marketing upcoming features are as follows.
- Connect Customer Insights to customer journey
- Send SMS Messages using Twilio and TeleSign integration
- Increate your reach with improved scalablity in real-time marketing
- Create emails faster with precise drage and drop, in-context menu, and easyselect interactions.
- Visualize customer journey inteactions on customer insights activity timeline.
Connect Customer Insights to customer journey
Clients who store their customers’ data in Azure Data Lake Storage will soon use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to connect with customer journey orchestration.
Using Customer Insights, marketers will also build highly personalized data.
The new feature is expected to be available for preview in February of 2022.
Send SMS messages using Twilio and TeleSign integration.
I always believed that SMSs were one of the main features missing in Dynamics 365 Marketing. We had to use third-party connectors to be able to send SMSs from customer journeys. Soon, by the end of October 2021, once we acquire an account with either Twilio or TeleSign, we will be able to natively use SMS messages within the customer journey.
Dynamics 365 Marketing users will purchase Azure Communication Services phone numbers in the regions where Azure Communication Services SMS phone numbers are available, either local numbers or toll-free numbers. Read more about the availability of phone number types in Azure Communication Services.
Increase your reach with improved scalability in real-time marketing
Dynamics 365 real-time marketing users will be able to send up to 100 million interactions per month, out of which Interactions are email, SMS, and push notifications.
Easily create webinar registration experiences in Teams, then design the participants’ journeys in a few clicks using Dynamics 365 Marketing.
Use account-based profile data from Customer Insights as part of your customer journeys.
Visualize customer journey interactions on the Customer Insights activity timeline.
Create emails faster with precise drag and drop, in-context menu, and easyselect interactions
I believe that emails are still the most commonly used channel to reach out to clients, and Microsoft realized that users are required to be able to author those emails as simple as possible and directly from Dynamis 365 Marketing without the need for third-party HTML editors.
This is not the first enhancement to the email editor, which is expected to come out this December and won’t be the last!
The new canvas app will have unique features, such as
- Precise dragging and dropping.
- Easy selection of elements, columns, and sections.
- In-context menu.
Visualize customer journey interactions on the Customer Insights activity timeline
By December as well, we will be able to view Dynamics 365 Marketing contacts interactions with the marketing activities, such as emails, events, website visits and many more, alongside other data sources using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
The new feature will help companies build an entire 365 view of their customers and potential customers by intersecting the marketing engagement with other data sources such as ERP or any other enterprise application.
I am looking forward to testing and blogging about each of the new features as they come out for preview.
Dynamics365 2021 release wave 2 plan
For detailed information about Dynamics365 2021 release wave 2 plan for all the streams, download the pdf.
dynamics365-2021-release-wave-2-plan