How to Use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Segments

This blog post is based on a short demo that we recently did featuring Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Segments.

If you’d like to follow along and watch as you read, you can tune in here.

To start using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Segments, open Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing on your desktop computer and navigate to “Segments” (on the left-hand sidebar).

Segments inside of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing are your lists that you are marketing to. They may be contacts or leads, for example.

If you know anything about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Marketing Lists, Microsoft didn’t just rebrand these lists for D365 Marketing, but got rid of them in D365 Marketing and started fresh with Segments.

Segments are much more robust than the Marketing Lists you may be familiar with in D365 Sales, which have been completely eradicated in D365 Marketing by Microsoft, except in the case of what the marketing app calls, “Subscription Lists,” which use Marketing Lists behind the scenes. Marketing Lists are primarily available in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and are not widely used by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.

You can have Dynamic Segments and Static Segments in D365 Marketing. Dynamic Segments have filters. Any records that meet the criteria you set for these types of segments will be automatically added to this list. If one of the records no longer meets the defined criteria, it will fall out of the list automatically.

Static Segments define the list of leads or contacts that you want to market to that stay the same unless you physically go into your lists and remove or add people to it. The basis for these lists is manual selection or enrollment. Keep in mind that you can use queries to add people to the list. They won’t simply fall off the list unless you choose to remove them. It is not based on the filter criteria.

Next to each segment, you will see the member count next to them, whether they are active or not, what status they’re in (Dynamic or Static), and how many members are a part of the segment.

For this demo, we used a demo environment, so if you are following along watching and reading at the same time, you will see that these segments have very few members. In reality, your segments will probably have hundreds or thousands of people that you are marketing to.

In the sample segment that we show, we start with a Contact and want the email that has data in it to show us any potential Opportunities we have where it is greater than 30,000.

We also search by product type, where we look at a product whose product type contains the word “service.” You can filter this segment as much or as little as you like in order to define your audience.

The nice thing about this functionality is that the tool knows what the relationship is. So, if you are on the Opportunity product like we are in this example and you would like to add something related to it, you can:

• Add Condition to Opportunity Product
• Add Group
• or Add Related Entity

When you choose to add a related entity, you can select the related entity in a new dropdown menu that will appear on your screen.

You can keep filtering and defining more and more, so long as you have an entity or data that can somehow link back to either a contact, you are able to filter it inside of a segment and be able to build your list and market to it.

This is a very powerful tool that can work with any out-of-the-box, custom, or virtual entities that you have inside of your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing environment. Note that if you want to use custom entities for segmentation, you may need to add them to the list of entities monitored by the marketing data service.

When you turn on D365 Marketing, it sits on top of your D365 Sales, Marketing, or Field Service environment. All of your accounts, contacts, and activities are automatically in it. The information is consistent across the board.

That is the power – there is no connector or integration. As soon as you turn it on, you will see your data. That’s what you do inside of the Query Block!

As you scroll down, you will see different types of blocks you can create. After you’ve created your Query Block (explained above), you can move on to behavior blocks and define how your target audience is interacting (or not interacting) with you.

You may select attributes to assign the contact such as if the email you sent to them has bounced, been forwarded, or sent, if they filled out a form, visited you on LinkedIn, interacted with your website, checked in for an event, or registered for one, and so on.

You can define what they’ve done and haven’t done to decide on your next steps with this contact.

Defining these attributes can help you better filter and grab who you want for your marketing segments.

The segment block allows you to pull pre-created logic segments as well.

A helpful attribute is defining who you want “but they haven’t done this,” or in this case, “but not.” So, you may decide you want to market to everyone who has a valid email address but you haven’t sent an email to them yet.

These are some of the things that you can build within the segment.

We explain how to use the segment in the demo, “Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing: Customer Journey,” which we will also recap in a future blog post if you prefer to read instead of watch.

Segments are very powerful. If you have worked with Marketing Lists in D365 Sales before, they are definitely worth exploring.

Watch the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Segments Demo and more like it via our resource library.

If you would like to learn more about what’s possible with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing for your organization, contact us to request a personal demo.