Personalized signatures in Dynamics 365 Marketing

Personalization is more important than ever. Your audience expects you to be personal and relevant.

I recently received a question about how we can create dynamic email signatures (or salutations) that not only includes dynamic texts, but also dynamic image(s) – e.g. a picture of the “sender”, e.g. the recipients account manager.

With the new asset library in real-time marketing it is easy to share documents with recipients since the assets in the library has a public URL.

That public URL goes for the images in the library as well, which opens up for a solution to the above scenario

Example

Lets walk through an example, in which I will want to write a bunch of customers, each ‘owned’ by a (different) colleague of mine – e.g. Karen whos contact with us is Carl.

I want to send an email to all the customers like Karen, ‘owned’ by colleagues similar to Carl. The email should include the name AND picture of the colleagues who owns the contact.

To enable this I

1. Upload the pictures of the colleague(s) to the Library in Dynamics 365 Marketing Real-time,
2. Copy the Public URL of the uploaded image to the clipboard
3. Open the user
4. and paste the URL into an unused field, e.g. the Nickname field (obviously I could create a custom field for this, but I am keeping things simple for now)

I design an email, add an Image placeholder to the canvas (1), click Choose an image (2), and then Insert from URL (3) to open the Insert Image from URL dialog

Then with a little help from the Content assist wizard I generate the dynamic field for the content in a user’s Nickname field – {{contact.contact_systemuser_owninguser.nickname}} (1) – and paste the field into the Image URL text box (2)

(what this actually does is setting the value of the img src element in the HTML)

Closing out the Insert image from URL dialog takes me back to the email designer, with the image control set (1). To verify things works as expected I can click Preview and test (2) to open the preview

In the preview I can select a contact to preview (1) and confirm that the contacts owners picture is in fact displayed (2)

So now we can be even more personal in our communication with Dynamics 365 Marketing.