Context:?
A common question usually comes up while creating a customer journey in Dynamics 365 for marketing, which is whether to utilize the Outbound or Real-time marketing.
History:
The introduction of Real-time marketing was in 2021. Building customer journeys using Realtime marketing provided a new set of capabilities such as trigger-based customer journeys, custom triggers, SMS, and push notifications.?This has now been extended to include richer capabilities in email editing (like code-free conditional content), segmenting (a new segmentation engine is in preview currently) and integrations (Real-Time Marketing can leverage an embedded integration with Customer Insights).
Real-Time Marketing was conceptualized as a new tool that would allow marketers better serve new scenarios, communicating with customers in moments that matter and with a level of personalization that is not always the objective of bulk communications which Outbound Marketing was already serving. Today, the majority of the use cases for which Outbound Marketing can be used are also available for Real-time Marketing and could leverage the latest evolution of the product.
Which type of customer journey should the users utilise?
Picking a specific journey type is usually the most common question that adds confusion since most marketing users are already familiar with building outbound marketing journeys. In general, users should be looking to use RTM and look at OBM only if there is a scenario that can only be achieved there. Answering the below questions should be a general guideline for easier justification of transition to RTM: ?
- What is the trigger for the journey (Segment or Event based)? Outbound marketing primarily supports segment-based journeys. But with Real-time marketing, you can use both segments & events to start a customer’s journey.?
- What are the types of communication channels needed? With Real-time marketing, you can trigger?SMS?and?Push notifications?along with the emails, which cannot be achieved by default with the Outbound journeys.?Custom channels have been available in Outbound Marketing since its origin, but that will become available in Real Time Marketing.
? 
- What is the average number of interactions required? Real-time and Outbound marketing have different?service limits and fair use policies. With Real-time marketing, the organisation will almost have 10X the number of interactions per month. This number is going to grow to reach 300M per month soon. So, Real-time marketing is the answer if you plan to send more than 10M interactions per month.?
? 
- Do you need to trigger a Power Automate or start another journey within your customer journey? One of the common scenarios is the need to call a Power Automate when a particular event happens within the customer journey.
For example, create a record in an external system or seek approval. Real-time marketing can quickly achieve that, as you can?raise triggers?from a journey to call?Power Automate.
Also, if you are planning to have multiple journeys that logically function together, using?custom event triggers?in real-time marketing can act as a glue between journeys.
This capability is only available in Real-time marketing journeys.
Conclusion:
As Real-time marketing continues to evolve, almost all the current capabilities and features of Outbound marketing will become available in Real-time marketing, along with many more modern and enhanced capabilities. You should utilise Real-Time marketing unless there is a dependency on a specific feature or?limitation?that has not yet been addressed in Real-time marketing.
Despite Microsoft's responsibility to keep supporting Outbound marketing from a product perspective, all future enhancements & investments will target the Real-time marketing space.?
