Including Purposes & Topics In Real-time Marketing Segments

37 thoughts on “Including Purposes & Topics In Real-time Marketing Segments”

1. When I went to my environment, the Topics and Purpose related table was not available. I was also unable to add it or find it under feature switches.

   How did you enable this functionality?

   Reply

   1. Hi Kevin, are you on the latest version of 1.1.30993.107?

   2. I also cant see the table of topics and purpose table? Is there a own table for where you can see all of the topics you have created? The same way as it is in outbound under subscription lists?

   3. Hi Charlotte, there isn’t a place to go and see them all in the Marketing App unfortunately. You could do an Advanced find (go to Advanced Settings then click the old filter to get to it) and you can then find all Topics and Purposes that way. It’s certainly not an obvious or quick thing to find!

2. This is a great addition to segments. Do you know how it joins the segment to the contact point consent as contact point consent does not have a direct relationship to contact?

   Contacts can also have multiple email addresses so it seems a little strange it would just try and match on email address, especially as contacts can also share email addresses.

   Interested to hear your view.

   Reply

   1. Hi Richard, you are right, Contacts and Leads do not have a direct link to the Contact Point Consent (CPC) records, but it is based on the Email Address. It doesn’t matter if the record has multiple email addresses, for Contacts it currently only looks at the emailaddress1 field. For Leads, you can configure to use additional email fields in which case there could end up being a CPC record for each email address on a Lead’s record.

3. Hi Megan,

   Thanks for this article. I’m wondering since it’s possible to create segments based on topics, is it also possible somehow to see on a contact or a lead which topics they have subscribed to? Just like in outbound you could see which subscription lists a contact was part of.

   Reply

   1. Hi Megan (great name, AND correct spelling 😉) – not yet… but hopefully it comes in to the product soon!!!

   2. Agree, this is something quite crucial missing from RTM. Our business users not only want to see who has received what, but also what they have opted in or out of AND the ability to manually opt them in or out. Hopefully soon!

   3. EXACTLY!!! Agree 100000% Richard. 😊

4. Hi Megan,

   Thanks for this article.
   I am not sure about the part regarding the enforcement model. It seems that even with a non-restrictive model, only the customers that explicitly opted in are included in the segment. Or am I missing something ?

   Reply

   1. Hi Maxence, you are correct. This is mentioned in the article:

      The approach you take will likely depend upon the enforcement model your Compliance Profile uses for Commercial. Consider the right approach for your requirements and organisation.

      • Restrictive: Customer opt-in is required for sending messages (emails, text messages, etc.) associated with this Purpose. – the Will send option would return ONLY those with a Contact Point Consent record with the status of Opted In
      • Non-restrictive: Unless they explicitly opt-out, customers will receive messages – the Will send option would exclude all those with a Contact Point Consent record with the status of Opted Out, and include all others

5. Hi, this is really useful – thanks! But when I create my segment exactly as you have done above, after I choose my compliance profile it’s not letting me actually choose a topic attribute to add. So mine says ‘Topic name (topics and purposes) – will send’ but then where I should be able to add my topic name there, I can’t do so. Instead I see the red exclamation mark and it says I need to add a topic name…. but I can’t see how to?

   Reply

   1. Hi Lou, I would just make sure you have picked the correct purpose as you might have additional ones that have been created and not linked to Topics. If you have checked that and you still can’t get to the Topics, check with another user to see if the issue is for others too. Ultimately if you have checked everything and still can’t get to the Topics, I would suggest opening a support ticket with Microsoft.

6. Hi Megan,

   Thanks for this article. Are you using real time marketing or outbound marketing for your own newsletter? Still not sure about moving to real time marketing.

   In your example in the article, does it mean that if I send an email to that segment with that compliance profile, that any contacts that chose the topic ‘Newsletter’ will be in the segment and receive the email?

   Reply

   1. Hi Amelia, I am using neither, I use something called Mailerlite, but that is only because I can’t afford D365 Marketing 😊 – if I could, I would definitely be using Realtime Marketing for it and have everything in D365! As per the article, the approach you take will likely depend upon the enforcement model your Compliance Profile uses for Commercial. Consider the right approach for your requirements and organisation.

      • Restrictive: Customer opt-in is required for sending messages (emails, text messages, etc.) associated with this Purpose. – the Will send option would return ONLY those with a Contact Point Consent record with the status of Opted In
      • Non-restrictive: Unless they explicitly opt-out, customers will receive messages – the Will send option would exclude all those with a Contact Point Consent record with the status of Opted Out, and include all others

   2. Hi Megan,
      Thank you for your reply. Can I ask why you would prefer using real time marketing for newsletter signups/distribution instead of outbound marketing? Also, do you think subscription lists will be moved over the real time marketing in the future?

      Thanks

   3. Hi Amelia, because Outbound is going away (see more here if you weren’t aware – https://meganvwalker.com/customer-insights-journeys-or-d365-marketing/) so all organisations should be actively working towards moving off of Outbound Marketing. Subscription lists will NOT be moved over, which is why Purposes and Topics should be used. Subscription Lists are for Contacts only, not Leads, and Purposes/Topics are for both. Once you have your Compliance Profile(s) set up with Purposes and Topics, you can use the out of the box feature to move the subscription list information across – https://meganvwalker.com/moving-consent-from-subscription-lists-topics/

   4. Thanks Megan! One last question – is there any way I can send an email to a static list of contacts without using advance look up to add them one by one or creating duplications with a segmentid column?

   5. Hi Amelia, if there is no common thread to use, meaning you don’t have fields that you can use to build a segment, then you would need to be adding them one by one unfortunately. Amey Holden has written a post about how to do this with Power Automate, but it really depends on your level of knowledge in that area as to if it would seem feasible to do: https://www.ameyholden.com/articles/create-segment-power-automate-dynamics-365-realtime-marketing

7. Hi,
   We have created the segment in the same way as you have and we get a result on that on exciting contacts in the system. But when testing and adding new contacts to dynamics though a from we experience that new contacts with a new topic consent or an updated topic consent is not added to the segment. Any ideas why?
   We have the consent purpose set as non-restrictive.

   Reply

   1. Hi Madelein, although I am sure your Contacts ARE exciting, did you mean existing? 😊

      If you have Contacts that are new coming through (and they are indeed new Contacts and not Leads), and your segment is for Contacts, and they meet all the requirements and filtering logic in the Segment, they should get added to it. How long that might take, I don’t know. I would expect within an hour they should show. If not, or you’ve waited more than a day and they are still not there, I would open a ticket with Microsoft to investigate for you!

   2. Thanks for that Megan 🙂

      We are in the process of going live with customer insights journeys and want to make a journey that sends a “thanks for signing up” email to contacts that opts in for topic newsletter after we have gone live.

      Before going live we will have imported contacts and contact point consent, but we want to make sure that the imported contacts that has a consent for newsletters will not get the email “thanks for signing up”.

      By making the segment based on topic I will get all the contacts in the system that has this topic as send. I was thinking that i can make a suppression segment on contacts that was created on a date before going live. But then i will miss the imported contacts that possibly modified their consent after the import.

      Any suggestion on how to solve that?

   3. Hi Madelein, I would probably just set up a Journey based on that specific Realtime Marketing form being filled in – https://meganvwalker.com/triggering-journeys-real-time-marketing-form/ that would only send out to people that fill out your form moving fowards.

8. Thank you Megan, I couldn’t figure out which blog covers my problem. I notes an interesting issue today. IN our environment we do not have Outbound marketing but one if the users were able to create a couple of Segments which shows source as ‘D365 Marketing (outbound)’. Now whenever I try to open any of those, it gives an error –

   Exception ‘InvalidPluginExecutionException’ occured: Entity msdyncrm_marketingconfiguration with id 05a2dd29-e8be-ee11-9079-6045bd8f9f6c doesn’t contain attribute msdyncrm_mktsvcdiscoveryendpointurl., CorrelationId: 651c16c7-b31a-438c-ad2a-25cffa8ad34d

   Interestingly, in the classic advanced find there are 4 Segment tables listed but does not have option to delete the record.

   Any idea what am I missing here?

   Reply

   1. Hi Mohit, I’m not sure, it’s not an issue I have run across. Best step would be to open a support ticket (if you haven’t already) and see if Microsoft can review for you directly. I don’t think you are missing anything specifically!

9. I have list of 10 topics and the 11th option is to subscribe to all the Topics. How can I do that ?

   Reply

   1. Hi Jinali, you would need to use javascript on the form to have a custom checkbox that when selected opts in all of the other ones. Definitely not out of the box, and would require someone to write that script.

10. Hi Megan,
    I am trying to set up an automated E-Mail that confirms the optin of a certain topic in a preference profile. The first time reply is easy using a segment that queries “will send” of the topic as entry point.

    For the scenario where the subscriber removes himself from the topic (meaning already went through the welcoming journey) and resubscribes to the topic I am not seeing a solution since I am limited to the following entry frequency settings:

    1. One-time journey with static audience – not useful as the entry is “triggered” on entering the Segment.
    2. One-time journey where newly added audience members can start any time – does not work as the journey knows that the person already ran through the journey (before it unsubscribed and resubscribed)
    3. Repeating Journey where all audience members repeat the journey

    I was therefore trying to solve it with a trigger that triggers on create or update of a contact point consent record. Naturally the table does not exist for defining a trigger and adding the table in the dataset configuration did nothing unfortunately. Do you have an idea how I can set it up?

    Reply

    1. Hi Mu-Chyun, this is a good question, unfortunately not an easy solution without creating a custom trigger, and then using Power Automate to generate putting the person in to the Journey. The flow would need to fire on creation or update of a Contact Point Consent record, and send when the Consent Status is Opted In. It might be a few weeks but I will see if I can write this one up as a blog to show how it can be achieved.

    2. Actually, I’ve written this one in the past Mu-Chyun, which would run when someone has submitted a specific form and shares the topics they have opted in to. Is this the kind of thing you had wanted?
       https://meganvwalker.com/email-confirmation-subscription-form-submitted/

11. Hi Megan,
    picking up Richard Comment from 13.10.2023. We are now able to target more than Emailadress1 field from Contact entity (finally!).

    Do you know how the JOIN between CPC and Contact is done? Does the Marketing Service respect the configured Record in the entity “msdynmkt_contactpointsettings” for the join? Or is it still only joining over Emailaddress1.

    Reply

    1. Hi Sven – If a contact has the same email address value for emailaddress1, emailaddress2 and emailaddress3, the system would really only rely on a single contact point consent record for all three of these fields. If you did add emailaddress2 and emailaddress3 to a form, it would create CPC records for those email address values when the form is submitted.

12. It seems like channel is a pretty glaring omission from Microsoft here. The Consent center supports email addresses and mobile phone numbers for use as the contact point, with email, text message and custom supported for the channel. From your reply above it’s only using the email address to match the contact point consent records to the contacts.

    Do you know what channel/s it is picking up from the Contact point consents to determine the segment members? Is there any way to create a segment of supporters who have opted out of Text Messages for a purpose and/or topic?

    Reply

    1. Hi Simone, you are right, it is a really big omission! I don’t know of a way to do this other than having specifically named topics that you only use for SMS, and when someone opts in, it only opts them in to that Topic for SMS.

13. Hi Megan,

    In your last newsletter this post was featured https://marketing-lab.nl/purpose-and-topic-in-email-or-segment which suggests adding purpose and topic in a segment. I recently loaded consent from newsletter lists in outbound and followed this documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-insights/journeys/real-time-marketing-migrate-consent#loading-contact-and-subscription-list-consent-records-into-customer-insights—journeys however when I create a segment with purpose and the topic I get “0” members as the result. If I create segments separately with either topic or purpose I see the right number of members. I’m running out of ideas of what I might have done incorrectly. Do you have any ideas?

    Reply

    1. Do you have Purposes with the same name? Or Topics with the same name? Perhaps there is a mismatch between the two?