With two release announcements a year, we now have the details on Wave 1 2024. Each new feature or change includes a proposed date for either public preview, general availability or both. If you missed it, take a look at the details. What feature are you looking forward to the most?

The release notes for Dynamics 365 Wave 1 2024 have been published. My good friend Amey Holden and I got together to chat about each proposed change or new feature from the Customer Insights – Journeys section (formerly D365 Marketing). We talk through what each of us thinks of the new proposed features from Microsoft and share ideas with each other that we hadn’t necessarily thought of!

One of the best things about the release wave announcements are all of the different posts and articles where people share their thoughts and opinions on the new features. This post is from Malin, who has also written one on Customer Insights – Data if you want to read that too! Below is the link to the one on Customer Insights – Journeys.

This issue has so many people featured for the first time which is so cool to see! From Fiona is a post all about one-click unsubscribe, what is it and why you should care. Hopefully if you are reading this newsletter you at least know what it is, but it’s great to have a reminder because it is pretty much upon us. Great post Fiona, and looking forward to seeing more!

I wrote about using the new preview (as of time of writing this) feature on Realtime Marketing forms with form capture. This gives you the ability to map submissions from 3rd party forms but still create the new/updated Contact or Lead record in D365. In that post, I wrote about the process of mapping the fields on your other form to fields on your form in the marketing app. That all works great, but what about setting defaults on the record in Dynamics 365 when there is no corresponding field on your external form? This post shows you how to do that.

I am really enjoying this mini series from Amey all about building segments in Realtime marketing. This one looks at building segments with nested conditions using a combination of AND and OR. Keep these coming Amey!!! Very helpful for people.

This one from Pauline digs in to the insights tab that we get on the out of the box Contact form, and understand more about how to add it to a custom Contact form. She even gives a shout out to Amey Holden where she uses one of her posts as a great starting guide, but she found a few more challenges she needed to over come. A really helpful post to check out!

I saw this post from Marco covering the feature of ‘Quiet Times’ in Customer Insights – Journeys (D365 Marketing). Marco walks through how to set up a quiet time record to prevent commercial emails from being sent out on a specific holiday or out of business hours. Marco does state on his site that the blog is a hobby so might not post that often, but I hope we see more articles from him!

I love finding people writing about Marketing and Dynamics 365 Marketing (or Customer Insights – Journeys or whatever you want to call it). Stephan already has quite a few posts on his site, but this one caught my eye, how to add information about Contact Point Consent records on to the Contact or Lead record. Although this has been announced as a new feature in the Wave 1 release notes, it won’t be till June, so Stephan’s solution might just be for you!

First, this website just makes me smile. It’s so colourful! ColorCloud Hamburg is April 18th and 19th and has 50% of the content in English and 50% in German. Also great to see several regular contributors I feature in the newsletter presenting. You can go and attend sessions from Guro Faller, Malin Martnes, Mark Christie, Pauline Kolde and Vivian Voss. So much great content for marketers!

I’m a massive fan of building your own personal brand and something I put a lot of thought it to. For me, the biggest thing is authenticity. This is a great article from Hera, a company run by Martyn Thorp and Rebecca Herbert-Thorp. They identify some of the key points when developing your own personal brand, and also have a blog on identifying your brand attributes. I am looking forward to more articles from them!

Have you heard the term third party data, first party data or even zero party data? It’s coming up more and more with changes ahead. I feel like this article does a fantastic job of explaining the difference between zero, first, second and third party data. It’s definitely one to take time to read through!

I think Copilot is going to be around for a while, so no matter of personal opinion on the subject, I know I need to understand and be aware of what is going on. I appreciated some of the views and opinions in this article questioning if everything needs to have a conversational interface (I don’t believe it does!!!)

Like it or not, generative AI is having a massive impact on the software we use for email marketing. We are seeing it massively with Customer Insights – Journeys, and it is being incorporated in to other tools out there in the marketing world. Interesting article from Pamela Parker writing for Martech.