Are you using Dynamics 365 Marketing to manage your email marketing?
Then you’ll want to be conscientious of your email bounce and block rates. If too many of your emails are undelivered or sent to spam, it could lead to your account to suspension.
Like other email marketing platforms, Dynamics 365 Marketing has an email deliverability protection system and defined limits to warn or suspend your email sending capabilities. Their system detects excessive hard bounces, spam reports, block listings, and abuse complaints.
Luckily, before you get suspended, Dynamics 365 Marketing will send a warning notification and your account will be reviewed. However, this can also vary case-to-case, and your account may be suspended regardless.
But wait…
Why not take preventative measures to ensure that you never even get a warning in the first place?
In this blog we’re going to guide you through the exact steps that have helped us to keep our bounce and block rates as low as possible.
Even if you’re new to Dynamics 365 Marketing, our simple 4 step guide will help you send better emails and avoid account suspension. We will cover everything from setting up your Customer Segments, to creating Workflows and Customer Journeys, and finally how to test your new email campaigns.
So, without wasting any time let’s dive in.
Step # 01: Setup The Segment in Dynamics 365 Marketing
Go to Outbound Marketing > Customers > Segments > Create a New Dynamic Segment
Name your Dynamic Segment then click on “Add Behavior Block” and select “Email hard bounced.”
You don’t need to add a clause so you can delete it.
Click “Save” and then “Go Live.”
Once you go live, the number of members will appear in the heading bar. It will display zero members initially so you may need to refresh the page.
The segment we’ve created will analyze all of the contacts that have received emails from Dynamics 365 Marketing and will add the ones to the segment which were undelivered due to a hard bounces.
We’ve set 3 different segments: Email hard bounced, Email soft bounced, and Email block bounced.
What’s the difference in hard, soft and blocked email bounces?
- A hard bounce is a permanent bounce, and no emails will be received by that email address either because of a typo in the email address or because the account has been deactivated.
- A soft bounce is only a temporary bounce meaning that you may be able to successfully deliver an email to that address at a later date. You may receive a soft bounce because too many recipients have marked your emails as spam, your recipient’s inbox is full, the email account has been temporarily suspended, or they’re experiencing email server issues or outages.
- Blocked emails are ones which occur when your recipient has intentionally blocked all future emails from you. Similar to hard bounces, these are permanent unless the recipient unblocks your account.
You can follow the screenshots below to setup segments for all 3 cases.
Setup segment for Email soft bounced:
Create a segment for Email hard bounced:
Setup segment for Email block bounced:
Dynamics 365 Marketing will block some emails due to activity expiration or for missing related data. To prevent those contacts from falling in this segment we have to add a few more behavior blocks as shown in the screenshot below.
Once you’ve setup all 3 segments and pushed them live successfully, you can use them in Customer Journey.
But first, we need to create a Workflow.
Step # 02: Create A Workflow
The purpose for creating a Workflow is to deactivate the contact once it’s been added to the segments we’ve created.
To create a Workflow, click on the settings “Gear icon” on the top bar. Then select “Advanced Settings”.
This will open Business Management. Now click on the dropdown arrow next to “Settings” on the top bar. Click on “Processes” under “Process Center.”
Click “New” and a pop-up window to create a process will open.
Enter the process name and select “Workflow” from the “Category” dropdown.
Then open the “Entity” dropdown and select “Contact”. Next click “Ok”.
Another popup window will open, where you’ll be redirected to Power Apps.
First, check “As an on-demand process” under the “Available to Run” options and uncheck “Record is created” under “Start when:”.
Then open the “Scope” dropdown and select “organization”.
Now to add a step, click “Add Step” to open a dropdown, then scroll down to click “Update Record”.
Click on the “Set Properties” button. This will open a new window to update the contact. Also, be sure to add a description to the step for your reference.
Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and change “Status” to “Inactive”. Then click “Save and Close” on the top left.
Click the “Save Icon” on the Power Apps window. After saving the process, click on “Activate”.
A popup will appear for “Process Activate Confirmation”, click “Activate”. After process activation you can close the window.
You’ve successfully setup a Workflow to deactivate the contact and it’s now available to use in Customer Journeys.
NOTE: Microsoft has introduced Microsoft Flow and will soon depreciate background workflow. However, the new Microsoft Flow lacks certain features and hasn’t defined a clear time that they will deactivate the background flow. That’s why you can still use background flow for this purpose. Once Microsoft Flow is capable to do this job, we’ll update this section for the blog.
Step # 03: Create a New Customer Journey in Dynamics 365 Marketing
Now that we’ve successfully created our Customer Segments and Workflow, it’s time to setup our Customer Journey.
Our goal here is to execute the workflow on segments.
Go to Outbound Marketing > Marketing Execution > Customer Journeys > Create a New Customer Journey
First, set your audience. The source type will be “Segment” then select one of your segments. If you’re using multiple segments, then click on “Add condition” and select your second segment. Make sure that you use the “OR” logic to include contacts that belong to any of your selected segments.
Then add a tile, “Run Workflow”.
Check out the screenshot from Dynamics 365 Marketing below to see what our Customer Journey looks like.
Be sure to name your Customer Journey and save it.
After that, go to the “General” tab and add a “Start date and time.” We’ll typically use yesterday’s date as our start date.
Next, select an “End date and time.” Since we’ll want this journey to be live as long as possible, we’ve selected the last date of the year, but you can choose to keep your journey live for as long as it’s relevant.
Finally, select your organizations “Content settings.”
And that’s all there is to it. Go ahead and click “Go Live”.
Now that we’ve successfully setup our Customer Journey, let’s move forward with testing.
Step # 04: Testing The Process in Dynamics 365 Marketing
If you recall when we set up our Customer Segment with behavior blocks and it displayed our number of members, we’re going to return to that section in order to verify that our new Workflow and Customer Journeys are working properly.
Go to the “Members” tab in your segment and click on a member to check their record status.
If you don’t have any members in your segment, try sending an email to a nonexistent email.
To do this, create contact with a nonexistent email and then send an email to it from Dynamics 365 Marketing. As the email bounces, the record will be added to the segment.
Go again to the “Members” tab in your segment and click on the member to check the record status.
If your record did not deactivate, make sure that you followed all the previous steps correctly.
Conclusion
Dynamics 365 Marketing’s robust email features are designed for businesses of any size to be able to manage and automate their email marketing quickly and easily. As you begin to build out your email marketing campaigns, don’t forget to take preventative steps to track your bounce rates and avoid possible account suspension.
But these steps are half the battle. Consider the type of content you’re sending to your customers. Is it something that someone would consider spammy? The best practice to keep your spam rates low is to consistently deliver valuable content and emails to your customers.
We hope that this guide has helped and if you have any additional Dynamics 365 Marketing questions or would like to request a free demo, our talented experts are standing by to help.
