Whoa, that was a long blog title. I'm still trying to palette the recent Microsoft rebrand of Dynamics Marketing. The new name still causes me to stumble a bit. With that said, today I’ll walk through a scenario that comes up regularly, multi-brand contact management and marketing.
"Can't I already do that?
Microsoft has made huge strides on the marketing front with the introduction of brand profiles that storing preset values used in Journey messaging. It leaves a big hole still for contacts that have no prior marketing or order history. How do you keep track of what brand they are interested in to ensure you are giving them the right messaging at the right time to best cultivate them?
From a super simple, pure lead perspective in real-time journeys, the task is not too difficult. You can simply have a journey trigger fire when a lead is created or updated, ensure there is a hidden brand field on the lead form (Custom configuration), and put them in the correct journey. The challenge arises when you are trying to build a scalable enterprise-class system that executes on the best-practice goal of a single pane-of-glass into a contact that provides quick and accurate access to their status and interactions with your company.
If you read my previous blog article, Lead vs Contact: What's the Difference and How to Make It Work for Digital Marketing and Sales Teams you understand that the improved approach to modeling leads and contacts and making them work best together requires a model where one contact can have many leads and every lead has a contact associated. To make this model work optimally, we need to maintain a list of brands that we interact with the contact about within sales and marketing. So, how do you build and keep that brand list correct?
Here's how to do it
#1 Make sure you've created each of your brands in the Brand Profile entity of Customer Insights - Journeys
#2 Add a “Brand” lookup field to your lead entity that points to the Brand Profile entity (This is what I mentioned above in the super simple approach.)
It’s probably a good idea to have this field actually shown to users on the CE app form since it’s relevant to both marketing and sales users.
#3 For web-facing lead intake marketing forms:
Make sure every form has this new “Brand” field added, prepopulated, and hidden so that it’s collected with each submission.
#4 Add two new fields to the contact entity
Submitted Brand: a lookup field to your contact that points to the Brand Profile entity.
Brand List: a single line of text that will be used for marketing segment building
#5 For web-facing contact intake marketing forms
Make sure every web facing contact intake form has this new “Submitted Brand” field added, prepopulated, and hidden so that it is collected with each submission.
#6 Add a new N:N relationship between the contact and brand profile tables
While you are here, I would also suggest adding a new view for the brand profile table that just has the name in it. This will make a better user experience in the subgrid you're about to make by not requiring you to use the default view from MS that includes the create date.
#7 Replace the existing Subscription Lists subgrid on your app contact form > Details tab with a new Brand List subgrid using the relationship you just created
Use that new view you created a moment ago
Now the fun part!
Configure three power automate flows
#1 When a lead is created with a brand, or the brand field is updated on a lead, link the brand to the parent contact of lead’s brand list
#2 When a contact is created with a submitted brand, or the submitted brand field is updated, link the brand to the contact’s brand list
The build for this is the same as the previously shown lead flow, just using the contact record instead.
#3 When a new brand is associated/disassociated to a contact, rebuild the brand list text field
The need here is to rebuild the “Brand List’ text field each time a brand is associated or disassociated to a contact.
This one is more challenging since we need to trigger the Power Automate flow on association and disassociation of a brand to a contact. For this we will use a webhook to capture the event happening as outlined in this great post that I had nothing to do with writing here How to Trigger Power Automate on N:N Relationship in Dynamics 365 - (whizzwave.com)
With all of that in place...
You now have a fully functioning brand management solution for handling contacts and leads in D365 Sales and Customer Insights – Journeys. It keeps a single contact record in the system for an easy 365 degree view of the contact. Marketers can use the contact’s brand list field to build accurate segments and journey triggers in Customer Insights – Journeys for marketing success.
Comments