In today’s fast-paced digital world, customers have rising expectations for responsive interactions with brands. With rapid shifts in customer preferences, how can businesses stay ahead? 

Enter Dynamics 365 Customer Insights- a real-time marketing powered by artificial intelligence (AI), an evolving strategy that lets companies anticipate and respond to customer needs instantly. 

Here’s how AI can reshape your marketing strategy and deliver the competitive edge in this customer-centric era.

 

What is Dynamics 365 Customer Insights?

The new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offering combines the standalone Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing apps into a single offering. 

According to Microsoft, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing (now called Customer Insights – Journeys) are coming together as one offering named Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an AI driven solution which will revolutionize your customers’ experiences. 

The new D365 Customer Insights will now have 2 elements, Data and Journeys. “Customer Insights – Data” will be the official name of the existing Customer Insights solution, functioning primarily as a customer data platform that provides an organization with a 360-degree view of their customers.

Source: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights FAQs

Why Real-Time Marketing?

Transitioning to real-time marketing enables users to do more with less. This caters to the evolving customer experience landscape and helps propel businesses into the future of marketing. 

Real-time marketing has already surpassed traditional outbound marketing in functionality, effectiveness, usability testing results, and satisfaction surveys. In addition, Microsoft’s innovations and upcoming AI features are only available exclusively in real-time marketing. 

For example, now with AI and natural language input assistance, business users can build trigger-based journeys that reach customers across multiple touch-points. This grows the relationships from prospects, through sales and support.

Let’s dive deeper into some of the benefits with Real-Time Marketing below! 

5 Benefits of Real-Time Marketing

1) Leverage AI to do more with less

• • Leverage Copilot features to assist you in targeting the right audience simply by describing your segments using everyday words

  • Turn insights into relevant action with AI-driven recommendations for content, channels, and analytics.

  • Receive image recommendations from the library that complement your emails.

  • Customer Insights – Data segment and profile integration allows organizations to seamlessly leverage the deep customer understanding in Customer Insights – Data.

2) Optimize every interaction

• • Leverage real-time marketing to craft journeys for contact and lead entities in Dataverse, or profiles from Customer Insights. 

  • React to customers’ actions instantly using out-of-the-box triggers, custom triggers, or triggers based on any data change in Dataverse without writing any code.

  • Refine your audience targeting with advanced segmentation capabilities and an unlimited number of segments.

  • Deliver your messages through out-of-the-box text messages, push notifications, and custom channels, and benefit from AI-powered channel optimization to reach customers on the most effective channel.

  • Embrace hyper-personalization features like dynamic text and no-code conditional content to support 1:1 targeted, responsive campaigns tailored to individual preferences.

Source: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights FAQs

3) Unify sales and marketing

• • Easily create powerful registration forms, identify leads, organize events or create nurturing journeys.

  • Define granular qualification criteria to better identify and prioritize leads with the upcoming enhanced lead scoring builder.

  • Align your efforts with sellers by sharing a unified timeline of customer activities.

  • Seamlessly transfer qualified leads to the sales team or engage sales representatives within your customer journey at exactly the right time by assigning a sales call or triggering a sales sequence to further increase the likelihood of closing deals.

4) Scale your business

• • Leverage business units, brand profiles, and the new consent center to tailor real-time journeys to cater to your business’s unique requirements.

  • Scale your business with 300 million monthly interactions and reach up to 100 million marketing contacts

5) Engage customers in real time

• • With trigger-based customer journeys using email, text message, or push notification channels, organizations can trigger customer journeys in real time.

  • Pick the right channel for each individual, and react to customer-led actions in the moments that matter.

This change to an AI powered, unified Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, with a generative AI interface coming to every capability will fundamentally change what your business can achieve.

Changes to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing by 1 Sep 2025

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys includes 2 modules: outbound marketing and real-time journeys. Released in August 2021, real-time journeys offer advanced enterprise capabilities and has been the default offering to new customers since August 2023.

In August 2024, Microsoft announced that outbound marketing will be removed as of June 30, 2025. To avoid any business continuity issues, all customers still using outbound marketing must transition to real-time journeys before this date.

• Outbound marketing 

The outbound marketing module will be removed from Customer Insights – Journeys on June 30, 2025. Customers using outbound marketing should transition to real-time journeys before this date. 

• Social posting and LinkedIn lead generation

Social posting and LinkedIn lead generation capabilities will be removed on December 2, 2024. 

• Adding new co-pilot features

The 2023 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Marketing added new Copilot features to help marketers create experiences and personalized email content.

The renewal assessment and certification for this role will retire on November 30, 2024. 

To learn more, please visit Dynamics 365 Customer Insights FAQs.

What’s new in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys (November 2024)

General Availability 

1. Split audience into groups to deliver unique customer experiences

• The new journey split allows you to split your audience into branches to provide a subset of your audience with unique experiences, whether that be a survey, a new type of experience to test, or a first-come promotional offer. 

• E.g: Send a survey out to a random subset of your customers for feedback without the time-consuming configuration today. 

2. Improve engagement and compliance with double opt-in

• By implementing double opt-in, you can improve your email marketing strategy, leading to improved compliance, increased open and click-through rates and a better overall brand experience for subscribers.

• Double opt-in requires users to confirm subscription preferences through a follow-up email after the initial subscription, thus reducing spam and email bounce rates. 

3. Export segment membership data for offline analysis

• Export segment membership data directly to Excel, supporting up to 100,000 rows per segment for offline analysis and verification, enhancing your ability to make data-driven decisions.

• The export feature is available for segments with up to 100,000 members and includes a predefined set of columns: Contact/Lead ID, First Name, Last Name, Email, and Phone Number. 

Public preview

4. Wait on segment membership to trigger the next step in a journey

• Gain greater control over your customers’ experience by waiting for them to become a segment member before continuing to the next steps in a journey. Personalize each customer’s experience path and actions relevant to individual customers based on whether they’re in a segment. 

• E.g: Use your journey to send credit card activation emails and you want to wait for the customer to activate their card before sending a welcome email. If the customer doesn’t activate their credit card within a few days, you may want to send another reminder email. 

More information: Transition overview

Staying Ahead with Generative AI in Marketing

If you want to remain an industry leader, there’s more than just keeping up with customer expectations isn’t enough. Businesses must be proactive, offering unparalleled levels of personalization and engagement. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables brands to achieve exactly this, offering tools to leverage generative AI and transform your customer interactions.

Make the most of Customer Insights to move beyond traditional customer data, utilizing unified, real-time insights to tailor every experience.

At Aristou Pte Ltd, we specialize in guiding businesses through this transformation, offering expert consulting to help you make the most of Customer Insights and generative AI.

Let us help you unlock the future of customer experience—connect with Aristou Pte Ltd today to discover how we can elevate your marketing strategy.