Configure email marketing and marketing automation options
Applies To: Dynamics Marketing
Important
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing has been discontinued and is no longer available. All customer data related to this product has been permanently deleted from all Microsoft servers and is no longer available for extraction. This documentation is being provided for historical purposes only.
Use the Marketing Automation page to set up your email marketing and track your message usage. To see this page, go to Settings > Campaign Management > Marketing Automation.
Prerequisites
You must be an administrator to see and update Marketing Automation settings.
Automatic scoring
To save resources and improve performance, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing analyzes and scores behavior data periodically, not constantly. This results in a small amount of latency between when a contact’s activity is imported into the database and when that activity is reflected in that user’s lead score. Enter a value in the Scoring Latency field to establish how often lead scores are calculated (in hours). We recommend once an hour.
Email marketing
Field |
Description |
|---|---|
Default Subscription Center |
Set a default subscription-center plug-in for marketing emails. More information: Create a subscription center |
Default Forward to a Friend |
Set a default Forward to a Friend plug-in for marketing emails. More information: Create a Forward-to-a-Friend plug-in |
Log Purges |
Hard bounces result when you send an email to an address that doesn’t exist. When hard bounces occur, Dynamics Marketing permanently deletes the bounced email address from the contact's record because it’s not valid and has no use. Select this check box to log all purge events. Clear it to keep these events out of your log. Important You must also enable Logging for your site to use this feature. More information: Configure site settings |
Performance KPIs |
Dynamics Marketing tracks and reports several key performance indicators (KPIs) for evaluating the performance of marketing email messages. These include both absolute KPIs (such as the total number of opens) and relative KPIs (such as the open rate, which might compute the percentage of opened messages in relation to the total number of messages sent). Dynamics Marketing supports two methods for calculating the performance KPIs. Use this drop-down list to choose the method you prefer by selecting one of the following values:
The raw data (absolute quantities) does not change based on your selection of KPIs to use; only the calculated rates change. For more information, including a comparison chart of how standardized and legacy KPIs differ, see Analyze the performance of email marketing. |
Total Messages |
The total number of messages your organization has purchased for the current time period (for example, this month). |
Sent Messages |
The total number of messages sent by all users during the current time period. |
Available Messages |
The total number of messages that can be sent during the remainder of the current time period (for example, the number of messages purchased and not yet used or scheduled). |
Bounce Handling |
This setting establishes the default bounce-handling setting for all new marketing email messages. Users can override this default for individual messages as needed, but it will be most convenient for them if you choose your organization's preferred setting here. A hard bounce indicates that a given email address is not valid (typically because the server and/or user account do not exist). Choose one of the following:
Important If you allow too many hard bounces to occur, your reputation for sending email may suffer. This could eventually reduce your ability to deliver messages, as more of your messages get flagged by spam filters. If you decide to retain hard-bouncing addresses, you should keep an eye on your performance statistics and manually remove the bad addresses (see also Analyze the performance of email marketing). |
Allowed domains for email addresses in the From field |
Use this setting to limit the set of email-address domains permitted in the From field for marketing email messages. This can help to improve security, prevent typos, and increase deliverability by ensuring that from-addresses always match your DNS registrations (More information: Get ready for email marketing). Note This setting only applies to the From field, not the Reply To field. To enable this feature, enter a list of allowed domain names separated by semicolons (such as "microsoft.com; contoso.com") in the Allowed Domains field. Leave this setting blank to allow all domains. Email messages that get blocked as a result of this setting are counted as blocked due to invalid sender email in performance results (More information: Analyze the performance of email marketing). Important Dynamics Marketing first checks the from-address when it tries to send the message, not as a user enters the value, validates the message or schedules it for future delivery. This means that the domain check will apply even when using a Razor expression to define the from-address, but also that users may not realize that they have used a blocked from-address until after the performance results are returned. |
Outgoing email filter
Outgoing email filters are specialized, custom filters based on lists of suppressed email addresses or message topics. They require custom programming to work correctly, so don't enable either of these features unless your organization has developed the required back-end support using the Dynamics Marketing SDK (for details, see the developer documentation included with the SDK download).
Dynamics Marketing provides two types of outgoing email filters, each of which applies to all outgoing marketing emails:
Global suppression: Applies a suppression list of email addresses to which Dynamics Marketing will never send any marketing emails. This filter is based on email address only, not contact ID.
Contact permissions: Prevents emails of specific topics from being sent to specific email addresses. It lets contacts opt out of receiving emails with specific topics. The topic is assigned as part of the marketing email setup, and can be seen under the Details fold-down (see also Create or view email marketing messages). This filter is based on email address and message topics only, not contact ID. Also, don't confuse the email topic (which is metadata visible only in Dynamics Marketing), with the email subject (which recipients can see in their email client).
Select the check box for each type of filter you want Dynamics Marketing to apply.
You can't edit the lists required by these outgoing filters using the Dynamics Marketing user interface; they must be loaded programmatically through the API.
Important
When one or both outgoing email filters are enabled, they block all marketing email messages to all contacts by default until contact permissions are set for each contact. Both filters require a custom, external solution to set contact permissions explicitly for each contact in your database, and new contacts are blocked until your system has had time to set contact permissions for them. The required contact permission settings are only accessible through the SDK, but after you’ve set them you can read the contact permission status on the Contact maintenance page for each contact. More information: Manage contacts
Important
Outgoing email filters affect all marketing email messages. This includes messages created or listed under Marketing Execution > Email Marketing > Email Marketing Messages, regardless of their designation—including marketing email messages configured with a designation of "transactional." However, the outgoing mail filters don't affect internal emails (of the type listed under Projects > Emails > Emails) or alerts. More information: Email marketing
Behavioral analysis
Behavioral data (such as records of email clicks, website visits, and so on) are collected by the bulk messaging server on an ongoing basis, but are only imported from there to your Dynamics Marketing database periodically. The Last Result Import value shown here tells you the date and time of the last import.
Email marketing usage for this month
This table organizes your email usage by message, so you can see how your quota is being spent. Click any message listed here to go to its maintenance page, where you can view its content, performance records, recipients, and other details. You can also export the full list to a Microsoft Excel document.
See Also
Email marketing
[xDEL] SMS Marketing
Automate campaigns with the campaign canvas
View and set up plug-ins