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One of my favourite features, that often goes un-viewed, is that of the Insights tab on a Contact record, showing information from D365 Marketing interactions. You can see an interactions timeline and breakdown of things like form visits and submissions, emails sent, clicked and opened, subscription list interactions and event registrations and check-ins. It’s always been a good place to start for finding out more about a Contact and how engaged they might be. This has always been a good tool BUT only worked for Outbound interactions. Until now! April 2023 release for D365 Marketing has brought us a new Real-time marketing Contact insights view. Let’s check it out!
Here is the Insights tab, and this SHOULD be what you are familiar with, the Outbound marketing view.
Now we have a Real-time marketing section! Note that this is currently ONLY on a Contact record, and does not transfer across on to Leads. Clicking on it gives us an overview of channel engagement providing information on the number of email opened and clicked, forms visited and submitted and some KPI’s giving the email open rate and number of delivery issues. We can then click on the link for view email insights to dig a little deeper.
This section gives the breakdown to where we can actually see which emails were delivered, opened and clicked, including number of emails, unique opens, unique clicks and the rates for each. There is a little information icon next to opened and clicked email links, and I’ve shared the definitions below:
Unique opens refer to the number of times a contact opened an email, excluding repeated opens of the same email, and Open rate is the ratio of unique email opens to total delivered.
Unique clicks is the number of clicks on a link, not counting multiple clicks of the same message, and Click rate is the ratio of unique clicks on a link to total message deliveries.
Scrolling a bit further, we can see any delivery failures, blocked emails or any emails that the Contact marked as spam.
Going back to the Real-time marketing overview, we can now click in the Form section to review the form insights. This gives us a summary of the number of forms visits and number of forms submitted. Remember that these are all Real-time forms, so this part might remain empty for a while until you are ready to embrace the new form experience.
If you see the three dots (ellipsis) on any of the cards, you can click to export the data and review in Excel.
I’m happy to see this, and I HOPE (keeping everything crossed) to see Journeys added to the Real-time Marketing insights tab soon! So many of my clients want to see not only emails and forms, but ultimately which Journeys has someone gone through. Fingers crossed!
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Hello, thank you for this article !! Do you know if we can retrieve this data in powerBI dashboard for example ? Or in a data warehouse ? Thank you !
Hi Tristan. This link used to provide information about the Real-time Marketing data, where and how it is stored and how to access it from Power BI – https://community.dynamics.com/365/dynamics-365-fasttrack/b/dynamics-365-fasttrack-blog/posts/extracting-marketing-interactions-in-dynamics-365-marketing – unfortunately when I clicked on it, it shows the blog is being updated. Sorry, that’s all I had at this point!
Assuming that data from real-time marketing is the same as outbound marketing then this article explains how to build dashboards of your Marketing Insights: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/custom-analytics
That is definitely how to do it for Outbound Marketing. However, Real-time used to be different. The article is also included under the Outbound Marketing section in the documentation. Will be interesting to see from Microsoft if they update their RTM blog as I know it was a very different approach previously.
Mm, maybe it isn’t available yet in our region, but in our environment it isn’t visible.
Since last week we’re over to wave 1 2023 it should be?
Or am I missing something in a setting?
Hi Rob. Marketing updates are not applied in the same way as the other Wave environments for Dynamics. Take a look at this documentation page for more information on updating D365 Marketing – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/apply-updates#find-out-which-version-of-dynamics-365-marketing-you-are-running
Thanks for your quick response, Megan, but we have the latest version installed, so that can’t be the cause.
No problem, then I would maybe try contacting Microsoft Support.
Thanks for the Article. The insights is available in the OOB “Contacts” form, but we are using a custom Form and we did not know how to add the Tab to our form. I’ve found an article explaining how to do it but it was the previous version, it does not work with the new one. Any Idea how to add such tab to a custom form?
Hi Jordi, I tried looking at the form and digging in to the Component used on the OOB form, but doesn’t seem to be a way to add it! Best option is to make a copy of the OOB form so that it includes the new component, then adjust so that it has the fields you want on it so that is then your new custom form.
Hi Megan
Do you know if we can then base a segment in realtime on these email insights. For example, find me everyone who has opened a particular realtime email and create a segment with this particular feature and start them on a journey.
Hi Donna, yes you can. The May release included the ability to use behavioural insights in segments for Real-time Marketing – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/whats-new-marketing#general-availability – the first item in the General Availability section explains the new feature, and this is a documentation page about using them – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/real-time-marketing-redesigned-segment-builder
Hope that helps!
Hi Megan,
We noticed that the registered clicks and opens do not always come through. We have noticed this with several journeys. We had a different way of measuring that did not correspond at all with the number of clicks and opens.
Would you know what can cause this?
Thanks you!
Hi Martijn, that’s interesting. Usually I have heard it the other way around, that you see more clicks and opens than you would expect rather than less. If you have another way to track it and have some evidence that there should be more, I would suggest opening a support ticket with Microsoft to ask them to review. They are the only ones that can review your data to that level.
Are we still unable to retrieve the data for our custom PBI dashboards?
Hi Jezza – this is part of the Wave 2 2023 release which looks like you would be able to retrieve the Realtime Marketing data via Microsoft Fabric, using Power BI – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/dynamics365/release-plan/2023wave2/marketing/dynamics365-marketing/effortlessly-build-custom-reports-tailored-business-needs-using-fabric-integration – currently has a date of October 2023 for the ability to do this though.
Do you know which table we need to include in our custom security roles to give users access to the Insight tab statistics?
Users without a Marketing security role can’t see the data for opens and clicks, instead they receive this error message: Unable to retrieve customer insights info due to missing entity privilege.
Hi Stephen, look for something called ‘Customer insights information’ in the list of custom entities on your security role. Give them read access to that and it should give them access!
Hi Megan, is it possible in RTM that interactions from related leads (via “parent contact”) are also displayed in the Insights at contact level?
Hi Carsten, I don’t believe so. If you are sending emails to a Lead using RTM then the insights are all about the Lead rather than being a Parent Contact interaction.