D365 Marketing - Outbound Marketing and Real time Marketing

Dynamics 365 Marketing provides organizations with the ability to plan and execute customer experiences through which they can engage with their customers. Those journeys can be based on targeting specified audiences using the Outbound Marketing capabilities or have an engagement based on key moments using Real-Time Marketing. In either scenario, how customers engage with the organization is recorded and tracked and this information provides valuable insights to the organization.

Dynamics 365 Marketing includes visualizations and dashboards to allow organizations to perform the analysis of this insights data but it also allows organizations the opportunity to create custom reporting by exporting that data.

Example: clients seeking to use CJO data within Customer Insights for things like churn models. 

This blog explores how the export of this data can be achieved along with the implications of doing so.

Within the Dynamics 365 Marketing product there are two main modules which group the available functionality: Outbound Marketing (OBM) and Real-Time Marketing (RTM). Each carry their own features but, from a reporting perspective, they provide similar capabilities:

• In-app insights which cover the more common uses and analysis (in RTM this is provided through PBI Embedded reports while OBM provides Insights controls in the Email, Journey and Contact forms)
• Export approach for building custom reports.

Where the bigger difference occurs is in how the interaction data is stored and exported.

Dynamics 365 Marketing keeps track of the way marketed contacts react to marketing messages and provides detailed analytical views to help organisations understand the impact and analyse the ROI of executed campaigns. Each key marketing table provides statistics, analytics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) based on the marketing results. These insight categories cover a wide range of activities like email interactions, web interactions, form interactions etc.

When Outbound Marketing was designed, it created an architecture which utilized Azure storage to hold the interaction data for the journeys. This provided a faster response times than what was possible in Dataverse at that time. Dataverse has evolved and a managed data lake is now available, providing the faster storage that Dynamics Marketing needs. Real-Time Marketing makes use of this storage to take the place of the previously created Azure storage. The resulting architecture looks like this:

All real-time marketing interaction data is stored in a managed data lake as opposed to the Azure blob storage. The blob storage is used to store only outbound marketing specific interactions. In fact, outbound marketing interactions have also started flowing into the managed data lake which contains all historical real-time marketing interactions. The managed data lake however might not have all historical outbound marketing interactions (this depends on when the customer installed CJO/real-time marketing on their org). This blog on the community forum provides guidance to help export marketing interactions from the managed data lake. Please note that we’re also working to improve guidance in this blog at the moment and we should have it updated soon – we’ll also publish a product documentation on the same by next month.