*** NOTE: ALL INFORMATION IS ACCURATE AT DATE OF PUBLISHING ***
In previous posts in this compliance series, we looked at setting up your Compliance profile and giving existing audience members a way to opt in or out of content when they receive an email from you. We then looked at how to create a subscription form in Real-time Marketing for brand new people to opt in from your website. What about Contacts or Leads already in your system that don’t already have a consent record for your compliance record? Or, for anyone who has been using Subscription lists in Outbound, how can you transfer the people who are opted in to those and get them opted in to your topics? This post will walk through how to achieve all of those things!
First, navigate to Real-time Marketing, then Audience and then to the Consent center.
This is where any consent records for the different types of communication will be found. If you see records here, either someone has loaded them all in previously, or you might have used the default consent centre and people have been opting out. Click on the Load consent button from the top.
We now have three options. You can load consent for Contacts, Leads or from a Subscription List. We will look at Leads and Contacts first as they are pretty much the same. Select the source, then look for your compliance profile record. In this case I want to load in for commercial consent and update or create a record for my Leads.
For all of the details about loading in the consent records, you can visit this page here on the Microsoft documentation site for D365 Marketing: Migrate consent records to real-time marketing. However, these are the important points that most people want to know.
- For the Commercial purpose, the system checks whether the Contact or Lead has both the Bulk Email and Email fields set to Allow, meaning that if either of those fields is set to Do Not Allow, the contact point consent record is set to Opted out.
- If two or more contacts share the same email address, consent for the email will be set to Opted in only when all contacts contain the value Bulk email=Allow. In all other cases, consent for the email address will be set to Opted out.
- If consent for the email already exists in real-time marketing (for example, you decide to load consent from contacts or leads after some email consent items were already manually added), the above-listed rule applies. The email address is only opted in if both email consent values are set to Allow and all consent records from contacts that share the same email address are set to Allow.
After clicking the Load button, a process will run to create and update contact point consent records for your environment. Let’s look at doing this for a Subscription List next. For me I think this is one of the most important steps and really happy this option exists! Anyone who has been doing Outbound marketing and using Subscription lists will already have Contacts who are members of those lists. The big thing with topics is that Contacts AND Leads can be linked and opted in. Only Contacts could ever be a member of your Subscription Lists.
Selecting the Subscription list option as a consent source, you can then pick one of your subscription lists. You will do this one at a time for each subscription list. Select your compliance profile, the commercial purpose and then pick the topic you added that matches the subscription list. Set the value to be Opt-In and click Load.
Once the process has finished you will be able to view the records created or updated. Here we can see that the source shows two of the records below show Loaded meaning they were generated as part of the process above. It’s a quick way to move over to start using compliance profiles and topics!
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As always, informative, easy-to-understand and up to date information in your blogs. The Realtime Marketing and Compliance information in the last three blogs where really nice summer reading 🙂
Thanks Megan
Ah thank you Mattias! You are very welcome.
Really useful and needed article Megan, can only agree with everything Mattias has written.
If I have 40-odd topics on my current outbound subscription list, would I need to re-create these topics in RTM first, and Load them, one topic at a time?
Thanks Chris! So yes, you would create each one as a topic. Then really the only way to make sure you are moving the right people in to the right topics based on their subscription list membership is to do it one by one. Still a heck of a lot easier than without the load feature!
How would I be able to then send these contacts an email (e.g. those who has subscribed for a newsletter) Am I able to to target the consent in some way?
Hi Marcus, still waiting for that to be added to the Segment Builder but it should be on the way, hopefully soon!
Hello Megan,
As always, your article is very interesting, thank you !
I understood how people can opted in to specific topics (by RTM Marketing forms), but I don’t get how I can send an email to these email addresses.
In outbound Marketing, we can start a customer journey by selecting a subscription list, but it does not seem possible in Real-time Marketing.
I don’t know if I can replace my subscription lists by topics if this feature is not possible.
What do you advice ?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Quentin, unfortunately this is the most annoying thing about this new functionality… it hasn’t made it as an option to segments yet. I know it is on the way, but I don’t have a timeframe yet!
Hi Megan,
Thanks for your reply. Then we will follow closely in next months.
Best regards
Hi Megan
We’ve tested the new segmentbuilder for some time, and recently added the contactpointconsent table. However, when we’ve added ‘topics’ in our segments, it doesn’t seem to have any impact on the size of the segment at all. We’ve added topic consents to a few test contactpoints in the preference center, but there’s still thousands in the segment.
Have you tested this further?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Venke,
I am very curious how you were able to add the Contact Point Consent table to the segment builder. The most current table is msdynmkt_contactpointconsent4 which is not available as an option to add to the list. Also, there is currently no link between a Topic and a specific Contact/Lead, or even the Contact Point Consent record for that matter. The ‘link’ is via the email address… which you wouldn’t be able to factor in. At this point I think our only option is to wait for Microsoft to add the functionality to the segment builder. ☹️
Quick note here for anyone finding that loading consents into compliance profiles from a subscription list doesn’t work (as was the case for us): check that the OWNER of your CONTACTS that you are trying to load has READ access to all the “contact point consent” tables (because you can’t see which one in number 4 from the role editor!).
Good to know, thanks for sharing Klaas! Just a note on updating your security roles, doing it in the https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/ area for your environment is a great way to do it and quickly find the right table. No idea why Microsoft have begun doing this but they seem to be fans of adding new tables with the exact same name as the other one and just adding a number to the end of it. Not fun when you are trying to do things like build entity relationships, add lookups etc. It’s just messy!
Hi Megan,
Thanks for all your helpful articles. I was wondering if you have tested or maybe written something on importing contact point consents. When we try to test we get an error saying that “A duplicate look up reference was found” on the topic. We are going to use a topic for our newsletter send outs. It looks like Dynamics is trying to add a new topic when we import however we have this set up.
Kind Regards,
Marianne Godiksen
Hi Marianne, I’ve not written anything, and only needed to import them once. These were the column headers that I had used with an example for you:
Contact point – this is the actual email address for the person
Channel – this was set as Email
Consent type – this was either Purpose or Topic
Purpose – the exact name of the Purpose to link the CPC to
Topic – only needed if your Consent type is Topic, then it is the exact name of the Topic to link the CPC to. The purpose column above would still be needed
Consent status2 – this is either Opted In or Opted Out
Source – Loaded
Reason – No reasons
Requested by – this is free form text, I just put “NAME OF COMPANY” IMPORT
Hope that helps!
Hi,
Thanks for this great article about the transfer to the new consent management.
We already have it up and running, but we are missing an easy way to see the current consent points at the contact level.
There is no way to show the contact point consent entries in the related tab of the contact. I assume, that there is no real relation between contact point consent and the contact.
Do you have an idea on how this could be achieved?
Thanks and best regards,
David
Hi David, there is nothing yet, but this is coming to Public Preview in February (that is the current ETA) – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/release-plan/2023wave2/marketing/dynamics365-marketing/easily-manage-customer-consent-contact-lead-forms
Hi Megan,
Thanks for the post. Very helpful.
I am facing an issue with max number of topic that I can use in preference center design. Its allowing at the design level. But when I navigate to preference center from a marketing email. It says something went wrong. But If I remove some topics and try again , it starts working.
Is there any limit on number of topics that I can use in preference center design ? I dont find any documentation on this.
Thanks,
Sindhu
Hi Sindhu, I would imagine there is a limit, but don’t know what that is. Curious, how many Topic’s are you trying to include?
Hi Megan,
Thank you for this series of posts on this topic – it’s been very helpful!
I just have one question:
Say I load the consents from Outbound Marketing over to Real-time, and then during the transition to exclusively using Real-time marketing (a few weeks potentially), a number of contacts update their preferences in Outbound Marketing – causing the two environments to have differing consent settings. Is there a way to load the consents again when we have fully transitioned over, and have the consents just update for the contacts that need it??? Or do you recommend setting everything up in Real-time marketing first, then move the consent settings over as the last step?
It’s a bit of an unusual situation, as normally we move in one sweep – however I wanted to ask if you think we’d have the option to update consents if need be.
Thanks,
J
Hi James, sorry for the delay! Nothing to stop you from loading them more than once, especially if you are doing a staggered role out to move completely to Realtime Marketing. It runs in the background so shouldn’t be impacting anything when doing it.