In Dynamics 365 CI Journey, consent management plays a pivotal role in ensuring compliance and respecting the preferences of your contacts. While the official documentation provides valuable insights, this article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of consent management within the platform. We'll explore how the consent enforcement model works, the shareability of purposes, default purposes, and practical solutions to common issues.
Customer Insights - Journeys compliance overview
Understanding Contact Point Consent:
A contact point serves as the destination for marketing messages, such as an email address or phone number. In Customer Insights - Journeys, consent is tied to these contact points and channels.
An added advantage of contact point consent is its flexibility in orchestrating journeys across various entities and enforcing consent for leads, Customer Insights - Data profiles, contacts, and more.
Exploring Compliance Profiles:
Compliance profiles serve as containers for consent settings. In certain scenarios, you might need to separate consent for different department or/and business units (BU) in order to separate access to profiles or to offer different experiences to the customers opting in or out through these profiles. This can be achieved by creating distinct compliance profiles for each BU or any other grouping that is desired.
Exploring Purposes and Topics:
Purposes, also known as Data Use Purpose Consent, define the specific reason for collecting consent. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys offers three standard purposes for consent scopes: Commercial Communication, Transactional Communication, and Tracking Consent. These purposes are customizable to align with your unique requirements.
Each purpose can contain topics that allow customers to refine their communication preferences. Topics, within the context of consent management, are essentially categories or specific areas of interest that customers can choose to opt in or out of. They play a crucial role in refining the consent preferences of your contacts. Topics generally refer to the type of information that a customer is opting in to receive. For example, topics could represent the different products within a given business unit that customers may want to hear news about, specific types of content such as 'Newsletters,' 'Daily Deals,' or 'Product Announcements,' or any other distinct areas of interest. By allowing customers to select or deselect these topics, you provide them with the flexibility to tailor their consent choices to the information that matters most to them.
When creating a message to send, marketers must choose a purpose and can optionally choose a topic that has been created. Messages that have a topic chosen respect the enforcement model of the parent purpose. For example, if the parent purpose has a restrictive enforcement model, a contact point must have an opt-in record for both the purpose and the topic associated with the email.
Understanding Enforcement Models:
Enforcement models for purposes vary based on compliance regulations:
- Restrictive: Only contact points with opted-in consent records for a specific purpose receive communications.
- Non-Restrictive: Contact points with either opted-in or no consent records for a purpose receive communications.
- Disabled: Communications for a purpose are sent to the entire audience without consent checks.
Exploring Compliance Profiles:
Each compliance profile comes with its own preference center, which you can customize with your branding. These centers collect consent and allow recipients to manage their communication preferences. You can add various topics to purposes, enabling recipients to opt in or out of specific communication types.
Preference centers play a crucial role in maintaining compliance by providing recipients with a direct means to manage their consent preferences. Unsubscribe links in emails direct recipients to the preference center associated with the compliance profile chosen for the contact point.
The list of available consent link types that can be created and features:
| Consent link type |
Add Purposes |
Add Topics |
| Preference Center |
YES |
YES |
| Subscription Center |
NO |
YES |
| External link |
YES |
YES |
Frequency capping feature:
Frequency capping in Dynamics 365 CI Journey allows you to limit the number of messages a customer receives within a specific channel and time frame. This feature is crucial in preventing message overload and potential spam perception, thus boosting engagement and reducing unsubscribes. When setting up frequency capping, administrators can create global settings and journeys that adhere to these caps. Messages marked as "commercial" are counted, and caps are calculated daily, weekly, and monthly. If a cap is reached, the message is blocked, but users can continue their journey. Understanding audience preferences, monitoring analytics, and analyzing journey drop-off rates are key to determining the right limits for your campaigns.
Picture 1. Compliance in CIJ. Relationship diagram
How Does the Consent Enforcement Model Work?
In Dynamics 365 CI Journey, first of all the system checks the "Allow email" and "Allow bulk email" fields of contact records to determine if email is allowed to be sent. Both fields must be set to "allow" for sending emails with a commercial purpose type. However, only the "Allow email" field needs to be set to "allow" for emails with a transactional purpose type. These checks are performed alongside the contact-point consent opt-in/opt-out checks for emails sent by real-time journeys. It's important to note that these checks are not performed for other entity types, such as leads or Customer Insights - Data profiles.
The consent enforcement model in Dynamics 365 CI Journey governs how consent is handled based on the presence of consent and the chosen enforcement model. Here's a breakdown:
- No Consent Present, Restrictive Model: If there's no consent, and the enforcement model is restrictive, it's considered an opt-out scenario.
- Consent Present, Restrictive Model: When consent is present, and the enforcement model is restrictive, the consent of the contact point is returned.
- No Consent Present, Non-Restrictive Model: In the absence of consent and with a non-restrictive enforcement model, consent is considered opt-in.
- Consent Present, Non-Restrictive Model: If consent exists, and the enforcement model is non-restrictive, the consent of the contact point is returned.
After all the rules are applied and enforcement model took out emails that should not be used, the frequency cap comes in place.
Picture 2. How Does the Consent Enforcement Model Work?
Are Purposes Sharable?
Yes, purposes can be shared across multiple compliances. This flexibility allows you to align purposes with various compliance scenarios, making it easier to manage consent across your organization.
Default Purposes:
As part of the consent management features, default purposes have been introduced, each with its enforcement model:
Commercial:
- Purpose with ID 10000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000003: This purpose is non-restrictive, meaning it allows a more permissive approach to consent.
- Purpose with ID 10000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000004: This purpose is restrictive, indicating a more cautious and opt-in-oriented approach to consent.
Tracking:
- Purpose with ID 10000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000005: This purpose is non-restrictive, meaning it allows a more permissive approach to consent.
- Purpose with ID 10000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000006: This purpose is restrictive, indicating a more cautious and opt-in-oriented approach to consent.
Transactional:
- Purpose with ID 10000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001: This purpose is disabled, meaning all messages associated with this purpose will be sent without checking for opt-in.
Common problems that customers may face
If you encounter issues related to consent enforcement and you see that your messages are not tracking, consider the following steps:
- Non-Restrictive Purpose: Create an email with compliance that has a non-restrictive purpose associated. Tracking will be captured if no consent is present.
- Restrictive Purpose: When creating an email with compliance that has a tracking purpose of a restrictive model, ensure that the right tracking consent is captured; otherwise, no tracking will be recorded.
- Impact on Other Compliances: making changes for compliances may have an impact on other compliances that use the restrictive purposes. However, upcoming features will allow you to add existing tracking non-restrictive purposes to specific compliances without affecting the configurations of other compliances.
By understanding these key aspects of consent management in Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can navigate compliance requirements, respect contact preferences, and enhance your marketing efforts.
