Transition from Outbound to Real-time Marketing Playbook

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JinalMakwana Moderator

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With the recent deprecation announcement of Outbound Marketing, it’s now essential to transition to Real-Time Marketing. This shift is not just a change in tools but an evolution in how businesses can engage with their customers more dynamically and effectively.

The Real-time marketing module in Dynamics 365 Marketing was added alongside the Outbound marketing module in 2021, and features supporting it have been in rapid development ever since. With recent deprecation announcement of the Outbound marketing, it is essential to transition to Real-time journeys.

With an even stronger focus on usability and ease of use, Real-time marketing includes trigger-based customer journeys, custom triggers, and SMS and push notifications. In addition to segment-based marketing, it allows you to trigger customer journeys in real time based on the signals and rich profile data you collect from your customers, pick the right channel for each individual, and connect in the moments that matter with the ability to support higher volumes of communications.

The real-time customer journey orchestration canvas lets you visualize your entire customer journey and includes Sankey diagrams so you see how customers are interacting with your brand and how you may want to improve processes to better serve your customers.

“So how do I take advantage of the benefits Real-time marketing offers?” I’m glad you asked.

We’ve created a comprehensive “Transitioning from Outbound to Real-time Marketing Playbook" that will guide you through the transition from Outbound marketing to Real-time marketing. It includes “crawl”, “walk”, and “run” methods to assist your transition and covers the important information you need to know:

How to set up and configure Dynamics 365 Real-time marketing
How to migrate your marketing artefacts
How to identify potential challenges
How to retire the use of Outbound marketing

Transitioning to Real-time marketing

The Transitioning from Outbound to Real-Time Marketing Playbook provides an overview of the main features available in Dynamics 365 Real-time marketing and guides you in your transition from Outbound to Real-time marketing.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Understand the benefits of the Real-time marketing
Get a functional comparison between Outbound and Real-time marketing

Chapter 2: Explore

Develop a strategy for transition
Understand the items and techniques needed for transitioning

Chapter 3: Transition

Plan and execute transition

What you will need

Content in this playbook requires a basic understanding of Dynamics 365 Marketing solution and expertise in marketing practices.

Call to action

Download and use this playbook to help you gain the value of all the new enhancements and features of Real-time marketing by transitioning your current Outbound marketing deployment. We regularly update the playbook content to reflect the latest release changes. We last updated the playbook in March 2025.

For any questions or support, you can check slide 46 in the playbook for various contact options. You can also leave a comment below and we will get back to you.

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VB-28051840-0
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Transition from Outbound to Real-time Marketing Playbook

Is there any way to get a little extension for one client where we are having some challenges to meet the June 30 2025 deadline?

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AKA Cloud 18
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Transition from Outbound to Real-time Marketing Playbook

Really disappointed that Social Media capabilities have been neglected in both outbound and real-time.

"We don’t plan to support social posting in real-time journeys because it has low demand and usage."

The reason it had such low usage was because it was a terrible implementation with only basic features.

We live in a social media world. This is a huge oversight and competitively a problem.

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sharma.sandeep82 743
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Transition from Outbound to Real-time Marketing Playbook

Hi Jinal,

We are attempting to migrate the segment using the Segment Migration Tool; however, we are encountering the following error message for most of the Segments during the migration process.

So, is there any other alternative way to migrate the segment? or any workaround?

--

Regards

Sandeep

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JinalMakwana Moderator
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Transition from Outbound to Real-time Marketing Playbook

DG-31031311-0 Unfortunately we do not have any plan. However, you can use Save AS feature to copy and create new event. More information is here - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-insights/journeys/event-from-event

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JinalMakwana Moderator
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Transition from Outbound to Real-time Marketing Playbook

Sadia Shakil - Custom registration field is already released - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-insights/journeys/create-unmapped-fields-registration-forms. Soon we are releasing dates for below feature. So, keep an eye on our release plan.

Registration end date (available soon).

Event passes (available soon).

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JinalMakwana Moderator
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Transition from Outbound to Real-time Marketing Playbook

BV-12030500-0 - Yes, segment tables are different. Hence you have to migrate OBM segment to Real-time. We have made tool available for easy transition. After the deprecation date you can still have access to OBM segment entity in your environment but UI to show the segment will not be there. Please refer our documentation for more info - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-insights/journeys/transition-walkthrough-segments

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Sadia Shakil 6
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Transition from Outbound to Real-time Marketing Playbook

The transition playbook is of no help when features are still missing. Our customers are using the 'event planning' in outbound marketing with lots of features that are still missing in realtime marketing.

We urgently need Custom Registration Fields on the 'Website and Form' card as well as Event Passes.

In the documentation we still see:

Registration end date (available soon).

Event passes (available soon).

But what is with the Custom Registration Fields? Are they going to be available as well?

Also it is already April, in order to realistically plan a successful transition, we need to have these features now. This is making us all extremely anxious that we do not know how our productive system will be transitioned. If these features will not be available soon, we do not really have a chance at transitioning successfully.

Thank you for a quick update on this!

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DG-31031311-0 30
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Transition from Outbound to Real-time Marketing Playbook

Hi there,

Thanks for your extensive playbook.
I read on slide 44: Note: Event Templates in RTM is not available yet which is a bit of a shock to me...
We have many recurring events and use templates in Outbound Marketing on a daily basis.

When do you expect to get that back in RTM? And if not before the end of June, how are we supposed to create all the recurring events?

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BV-12030500-0
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Transition from Outbound to Real-time Marketing Playbook

@JinalMakwana Is Segment tables are different in Outbound and Real-time marketing. Will be able to use existing OBM segments after deprecation? Is it required to migrate Segments from OBM to RTM before deprecation?

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JinalMakwana Moderator
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Transition from Outbound to Real-time Marketing Playbook

@PH-19111850-0 currently we do not have any plan to bring that feature in Real-time.

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