Tag Archives: Dynamics 365 Marketing

Add Dynamics 365 Marketing Trial To Your Instance

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Here is the step by step process for adding Dynamics 365 Marketing to your dynamics 365 instance.
You can sign up for, install, and use a trial version of Dynamics 365 Marketing for free. Trials last for 30 days.

Few important points to remember :

  • You will receive a trial Dynamics 365 instance together with your Marketing trial. You must run the Marketing trial on a trial instance, and can’t install it on a production instance.
  • You can’t convert a trial instance into a production instance.
  • You can install, at most, one Dynamics 365 Marketing trial per Microsoft 365 tenant.
  1. Go to the admin platform of your tenant:  https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/  
    Expand Admin centers and click on Dynamics 365:
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  2. In Dynamics 365 Admin centre, click on Applications tab  –> Select Dynamics 365 Marketing Application  –> Click on Manage:
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  3. Otherwise access this url directly :  https://port.crm8.dynamics.com/G/Applications 
    [Replace crm8 with appropriate region]. Follow the steps given on step 2. 

  4. On the next screen you will be asked to provide a portal name, Please note that a portal is needed to host your pages which can be accessed by customers publically. In this installation a portal of type “Events” will be created for us.
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  5. On the next screen, wait a few seconds:
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  6. Another important step : You must provide a physical address of the organization ; In our case its a trial, you can put it in anything and also accept the data consent.
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  7. The installation will start, though it says it will take approx 10 mins, I would suggest you leave it for sometime and come back later. 
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  8. Once that is done, You will see something like below:
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  9. And its done! Now to access the app, you can click on “Go to app” from the above screen or simply navigate to “Marketing” App from your dynamics 365 instance navigation as it will start appearing post installation:
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Hope this helps.

Cheers!

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Get Contacts/Customers Used In A Customer Journey In Dynamics 365 Marketing

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This is going to be a very short blog as I am going to just reference my previous blogs to achieve a solution for this.

I have talked about Customer Journey entity in dynamics in a recent post here:  The ‘Mysterious’ Customer Journey Entity In Dynamics 365 Marketing.

By now, we know that it’s not easy or straight forward to get any details from a customer journey from the back-end.

segment1

In a customer journey, customers are not directly added but rather through a “Marketing Segment”. Now we have seen in the blog above on how to get segment details used in the journey. Once we have the segment Id, the next step is to fetch the customers from the segment and for that I have another blog explaining it: Dynamics 365 For Marketing – Retrieve Contacts From A Segment

By doing the above mentioned, you should be able to get all customer that are part of a journey.

I hope this helps.
Cheers!

 

The ‘Mysterious’ Customer Journey Entity In Dynamics 365 Marketing

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In today’s blog I am going to be talking about ‘Customer Journey’ entity in dynamics 365 for marketing app or to be specific the ‘Customer Journey Designer’ which looks like below:

customerjourney1

 

I call it ‘Mysterious’ because whatever happens in the journey ‘stays’ in the customer journey. i.e there is no way or its difficult to get the segment/contents being used in it. I am talking about Marketing Email, Marketing Page, Marketing Form etc. The question you might want to ask is why would I need that information? well, because of may be below:

  1. You might have some validations on the content you can use in the customer journey
  2. You might want to retrieve the data for reporting purpose

If you look into the relationships from customer journey to these entities, you wont find anything hence it gets difficult to retrieve these records or perform operations. In short Dynamics 365 Marketing works a little differently then our typical dynamics 365.

Whatever happens inside a customer journey designer sits in a field on this entity named as “msdyncrm_workflowdefintion“. It stores information about content added in this the journey in JSON format. 

customerjourney2

This is how it looks:
customerjourney3

 

Let’s understand what this JSON means:

  1. Each content is stored in a node called “ActivityTypeId“.
  2. The Id of the content is stored in property “Itemid“.
  3. To identify the type of content such as Marketing page form etc. refer to below table because it uses different names to each type of content:

Dynamics Entity Name Internal Name In Customer Journey
Marketing Page LandingPage
Marketing Form MarketingForm
SurveySurvey
Marketing EmailEmail
Marketing Event Event
Marketing SegmentSegment

If you debug and parse this field data into JSON, looks like something below:

customerjourney4

So when you retrieve/query this field, you have to loop through these JSON nodes and do validation using the Guids of these records like in the below example of Javascript:

 var workflowDefintion= formContext.getAttribute("msdyncrm_workflowdefinition").getValue();
 var workflowDefintionData = JSON.parse(workflowDefintion); //Parse it

                    var nodeLength = workflowDefintionData.length;
                    for (var i = 0; i < workflowDefintionData.length; i++) {
                        var node = workflowDefintionData[i];                        
                        /* Check if node is a Marketing page*/                       
                        if (node.ActivityTypeId === "LandingPage" && (i + 1) === nodeLength) {

// Perform Operations here
}

Same way you can do in the code if needed.

I hope this help!

Cheers!