Real-time Marketing entered the Dynamics 365 Marketing app during the summer of 2021. The power of the new Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO) was apparent to Dynamics 365 Marketing users but learning how to apply this new feature to current marketing practices was challenging. Almost a year later, however, marketing teams all over the world are beginning to leverage the true power of CJO and Real-time Marketing in Dynamics. Let’s take a closer look...

One of the most anticipated and requested features coming to Real-time Marketing is the ability to create pre-defined tokens to make personalization easier. Many companies have complicated data structures that include custom tables with data points on them that marketing would like to access when personalizing content. This poses two difficult issues for marketing teams that use Dynamics 365 Marketing.

• The first is that all data points must have a one-to-one relationship with the Contact. One-to-many relationships to the Contact would not allow variables to be inserted dynamically without using custom code in the email.
• The second is that marketing teams oftentimes do not know or understand the data structure of their company. This makes finding the data points difficult, and many teams need to create a “cheat sheet” of sorts to keep track of which related entities particular data points are located on.

Pre-defined tokens solve both of those issues. Now marketing teams can work with their system administrator once to determine where those data points live and create a pre-defined token to be saved and used in any future communications. There is no longer a need to know precisely where the data lives.

To create a pre-defined token, you’ll first want to go into the Settings of the Marketing app and enable any custom entities you’d like to access in the Dataset Configuration settings section and publish your changes.

You will also need to go into the Other Settings > Feature switches and enable the use of pre-defined tokens.

Once you’ve enabled your custom entities in the Marketing app and enabled pre-defined tokens, you’re ready to create your tokens. To create a pre-defined token, open the email or text message editor and click on the Personalize tab on the right side of the editor.

The top 10 tokens are displayed by organization-wide usage and then by alphabetical order. As you create new tokens, you’ll also set a default value so that if the field you’re accessing has no data, a default value will display. This feature is especially exciting, because using dynamic content in emails previously did not allow a default value without editing the HTML code.

In addition to creating new tokens, you can edit the default value of existing tokens for either this message only or for future uses. You can also remove tokens you will no longer use.

Pre-defined tokens can also be used to identify data points that are connected to a trigger used in your customer journey. This is especially helpful for things like sending an email from the owner of a Lead or Opportunity, which was previously not possible out of the box.

Overall, the addition of pre-defined tokens has increased the usability of the email and text editors as well as improved the efficiency of marketers when creating messages. For more detailed information about this new feature and how to use it, check out the official documentation provided by Microsoft.