2021 Release Wave 2: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Updates

Microsoft has adopted a twice a year deployment plan for their business applications. The 2021 release wave 2 will roll out between October 2021 and March 2022. There are a lot of improvements and new features.

This blog is the first of a three-part series covering the changes in Dynamics 365 CRM family of products that will affect the clients we work with. This is based off Microsoft’s documented plans so some features may not be available yet or may not be released at all. For a comprehensive list look at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2167122.

Dynamics 365 Marketing

Use Natural Language to Create Targeted Segments

One of the first steps in marketing to potential customers is to define who those customers are. Until this release, the person defining the market segment had to understand the tables and columns in the marketing application and how to specify the exact values that they wanted. Now with the ability to use natural language to define market segments, the marketing professional can create a segment of “Contacts that live in Washington, Oregon, or California and make more than $50K”. By combining multiple query blocks, a market segment can be further refined, and the exact set of contacts can be marketed to.

Not only will this make it easier for marketing professionals to create the exact market segments they want it will also help all stakeholders to be able to discuss the segments without needing to know technical jargon.

Monitor How Your Consumption is Tracking Against Your Quota

The licensing model for Dynamics 365 Marketing allows an organization to market to contacts up to a certain number. Administrators and makers have had to be cognizant of the number of contacts they have marketed to and to make sure that they don’t exceed their quota or face paying for additional contacts. With the 2021 release wave 2, the licensing model has been updated so only contacts that have been marketed to in the last 12 months will count against the quota. This means that you can focus on the contacts that are important to you now without ever having to pay for contacts that have long since become inactive.

In addition to the changes to the licensing model, administrators will be able to see the number of contacts marketed to so they can optimize their spend on marketing without going over quota.

SMS Integration with Twillio and TeleSign

Real-time marketing involves contacting prospects when they are in a location or doing an activity where your product or service may be of value to them. Many companies use SMS to send the real-time communications. With this release wave, there is an Omnichannel service that will enable a company to purchase or reuse a Twillio or TeleSign account to send these SMS messages. This will simplify the integration to these messaging services and enable a complete view of the communications with the contact inside Dynamics 365.

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