*** NOTE: ALL INFORMATION IS ACCURATE AT DATE OF PUBLISHING ***
One of the key things to set up in D365 Marketing is a way for people to opt in and out and subscribe for specific types of content. This has existed in Outbound Marketing as Subscription Lists (actually old school Marketing Lists with a flag to indicate it is a subscription list). This has been great and a good way to make sure people can decide if they want to reduce what they get from you without feeling like they need to opt out of everything. However, this has never worked for Leads, and there was no way around it but to end up using the ugly out of the box default Compliance record should you want to start emailing Leads… until now. In this post I will walk through the multi-brand consent and customisable preference centers. It’s Generally Available meaning it’s out of preview now.
IMPORTANT: At the time of writing this, there is currently no way to use the new functionality to build segments to find all people who want a specific topic from you. This should be coming but no timeframe as of yet.
First thing to look at is to make sure you are on the latest version from the Settings area. If you are not sure, check out this post to see how to get things up to date. After that, go in to the Feature switches and scroll down a little and you should see this new setting for Compliance. Once you turn this on, that’s it. However, you can still turn it on and not necessarily use it in terms of setting up specific topics for opting in and out, so it’s not something I would stress too much about!
Then navigate to the Customer engagement section, then Compliance profiles. Once you’ve done this, you might need to wait a bit to see the option below if you just turned on configurable compliance, but you should end up seeing a drop down with a new option for With preference center.
Give the record a name and add the Company address.
When adding a Compliance profile for the first time, don’t use this option. This will allow you to add an additional record and pull in the consent already confirmed for people. However, there is another way we can do this later on (which will be shown in a different blog post). Click Save and close to create the record.
Now click on the name of the new record you created to open it. Click on the Consent purposes tab. Here we can see the two types of consent for communication for Commercial and Transactional. I would suggest leaving the Transactional one as is, where there is no enforcement, meaning if you send out a transactional email, those will never be blocked from going out to your Contacts/Leads (at least not from the D365 Marketing side). Click on the Commercial option.
Here we can see the enforcement model used. You can use restrictive or non-restrictive for Commercial. I would never recommend changing it to Disabled!!! Consult your legal team if you think that is the way to go! π¨
The bottom section is where you can add your topics. Click to add a new one and just give it a name. Simple as that!
Now we can see a list of all the Topics that have been added and linked to the Commercial communication purpose.
Going back to the Consent purposes tab on the Compliance profile, you will find the Tracking purpose directly beneath. Click on the Tracking link.
From here you can change the enforcement model used for setting the tracking consent. One thing to keep in mind when considering what to use, if using UTM Parameters in D365 Marketing, tracking needs to be opted in to for them to be used for a Contact or Lead in their emails.
Ok, now go back to the Compliance profile record again. This time click the link from the General tab for the preference center. Your Compliance profile contains a preference center form that has been created for you automatically. However, you will want to review and edit it first. Currently there is no way to embed these forms in your own website, so you will want to make it look at least like it’s got some of your company branding on it. Edit the form and click on the right side to get to the Elements section. Drag a Topic on to the form.
Once you have added it, you will then be able to link it to the right Topic.
When you add it, the text is a bit meaningless, so you can just change it to match the name of the Topic someone can opt in or out of.
You can edit it like you would an email or any other form. You can also set a message to be displayed when someone has submitted the form, or if there is an error that occurs when trying to submit.
Add your logo, add in your text etc. here you can see my finished edited form. The bottom tick box is a Purpose consent link. So if someone ticks that, it will opt them out of everything. I want to give someone options so have included all of the topics too. Once you are finished, make sure you save the form so it goes back to being live.
Now you can use this new Compliance profile record in your emails by selecting it in the Compliance section on the Email header settings. When someone clicks the link to unsubscribe or update their preferences, you will see which Topics they have already opted in to.
If the Unsubscribe box is ticked, all others are unticked which would make the related contact point consent records set to Opted Out.
If you navigate to Real-time Marketing, then the Audience section and Consent center, you can see all of the Contact Point Consent records. We can filter by email and see that this person has opted out of Articles and Industry News, but is Opted In for Case Studies and Events, and most important, is Opted In overall to receive Commercial communication from the organisation.
Check out the latest post:
Installing Updates For D365 Marketing AKA Customer Insights Journeys
This is just 1 of 409 articles. You can browse through all of them by going to the main blog page, or navigate through different categories to find more content you are interested in. You can also subscribe and get new blog posts emailed to you directly.
Thank you so much Megan for all the 3 articles.
We are now switching from outbound to real-time, and we have 3 Marketing lists and each one has a single subscription form, so in our emails we have an “unsubscribe” link that refers to the related subscription form. And under each of these forms/pages we have a link that refers to the “Manage Preference” so the users can klick on it which will redirect them to the 4th form/page so they can manage their references all together.
Can this be implemented using compliance profiles ? I tried to have 4 compliance profiles and each one with different preference form, but couldn’t apply the same flow we used in the outbound process.
Hi Seej – what part is not working?
Hello Megan,
thank you so much for posting such good content on the topic so regularly! Since you may be closer, is there any news on when Topics can be used as a segmentation rule in the same way I would have used a subscription list to build a newsletter list in the past?
Thanks and cheers, Johannes
Hi Johannes, not yet unfortunately! Keep hoping to see it in a new release. Would be great if we get it in September or October!