In Dynamics 365 Marketing, building segments for audience hygiene and inactive email engagement can be challenging due to the limited filtering operators in the segment builder. However, there are a few strategies you can use to create segments that meet your criteria as closely as possible. Let’s go over each scenario and some workarounds.
1. Excluding Inactive Contacts from a Journey:
Goal: Identify contacts who received at least 6 emails in the last 12 months but did not open any of them.
Unfortunately, Dynamics 365’s segment builder does not support a "not opened" or "0 times" condition directly. Here’s a workaround:
Workaround:
- Step 1: Create a segment for contacts who received at least 6 emails in the last 12 months.
- Condition:
Email > Delivered > At least 6 times in the last 12 months.
- Step 2: Create another segment for contacts who have opened emails at least once in the last 12 months.
- Condition:
Email > Opened > At least 1 time in the last 12 months.
- Step 3: Use a combined segment to filter out the inactive contacts:
- Include the contacts from Step 1 (delivered at least 6 times).
- Exclude the contacts from Step 2 (opened at least once).
This combined segment will give you the contacts who received at least 6 emails but did not open any in the last 12 months. You can then use this combined segment to exclude these contacts from your journey.
2. Including Engaged Contacts in a Journey:
Goal: Include contacts who:
- Were delivered at least 6 emails in the last 12 months and opened at least one in the last 6 months, or
- Received fewer than 6 emails in the last 6 months, or have not received any emails at all.
Workaround:
- Step 1: Create a segment for contacts who received at least 6 emails in the last 12 months and opened at least once in the last 6 months.
- Condition 1:
Email > Delivered > At least 6 times in the last 12 months.
- Condition 2:
Email > Opened > At least 1 time in the last 6 months.
- Step 2: Create a segment for contacts who were delivered fewer than 6 emails in the last 6 months, or no emails at all.
- Condition:
Email > Delivered > Fewer than 6 times in the last 6 months or Email > Delivered > Exactly 0 times.
- Step 3: Use a combined segment to include both of the above groups:
- Group 1: Contacts from Step 1.
- Group 2: Contacts from Step 2.
This combined segment will include contacts who are either engaged (received at least 6 emails and opened one recently) or have not been overly contacted (received fewer than 6 emails in the last 6 months or none at all). You can use this segment to target active or less-targeted contacts in your journey.
3. Creating a Hygiene Segment for Inactive Contacts
To identify inactive contacts for ongoing email hygiene and potential re-engagement or removal, you can create a segment specifically for contacts who meet a variety of inactivity criteria. Here are a few options:
-
Option A: Contacts who have not opened or clicked any email in the last 12 months.
- Condition:
Email > Opened > Exactly 0 times in the last 12 months and Email > Clicked > Exactly 0 times in the last 12 months.
-
Option B: Contacts who have not opened or clicked any email in the last 6 months but were delivered at least 6 emails.
- Condition 1:
Email > Opened > Exactly 0 times in the last 6 months.
- Condition 2:
Email > Clicked > Exactly 0 times in the last 6 months.
- Condition 3:
Email > Delivered > At least 6 times in the last 6 months.
-
Option C: Contacts who have been delivered a high number of emails with minimal engagement (e.g., less than 1% open rate).
- Unfortunately, Dynamics 365 Marketing does not currently support advanced calculations like open rate in segments, so this would require custom metrics or an export for external analysis.
4. Using Customer Insights for More Complex Conditions
If you have Dynamics 365 Customer Insights integrated with Marketing, you can use Customer Insights to create more complex segments based on custom conditions. Customer Insights offers more flexibility for defining engagement metrics and can create calculated attributes, such as open rates or advanced engagement scores.
You can then sync these segments back to Dynamics 365 Marketing and use them to target or exclude contacts in real-time journeys.
5. Automated Marketing Lists as a Temporary Solution
If real-time updates aren’t critical, you could periodically run an automated workflow or batch job to identify and update these inactive contacts into a marketing list based on your engagement criteria. This approach is more manual but can serve as a workaround until the segmentation capabilities in Dynamics 365 improve.
Summary
While Dynamics 365 Marketing’s segment builder doesn’t currently support advanced conditions like "not opened" or complex engagement rates, using combined segments and Customer Insights can help you achieve similar results. For real-time journeys, create combined segments that approximate your criteria as closely as possible by including and excluding specific engagement behaviors.
If you need further customization, consider creating calculated fields in Customer Insights or automating marketing lists to periodically update based on engagement history.
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