MB-280 cheat sheet

Outbound marketing and real-time marketing can coexist in one Dataverse environment; new feature investment is in real-time marketing, so greenfield deployments should build in real-time marketing.

Installation requires a Dataverse environment (production or sandbox) plus a Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys license; the app is installed from the Power Platform admin center.

The Settings area of the app holds environment-wide defaults: default sender and sending domain, consent/compliance configuration, and the hosting domains used by marketing forms and pages.

Authenticate the sending domain (SPF and DKIM records) before sending to production audiences; unauthenticated domains degrade deliverability and are flagged by mailbox providers.

Assign marketing users marketing security roles (for example Marketing Manager or Marketing Professional) instead of System Administrator; these roles scope access to emails, segments, journeys, and settings.

Brand profiles (logo, colors, typography) are configured centrally and consumed by the email, form, and page designers so all assets stay on-brand.

Keep the environment's solution and app versions aligned across sandbox and production; marketing features deploy via solutions, so unmanaged customizations must be promoted deliberately.

Interaction data retention is an environment setting; older interaction records age out and therefore change historical insight totals.

Segment types differ by marketing style: outbound marketing offers static (snapshot), dynamic (query), and compound segments; real-time marketing segments are defined visually over Dataverse tables and re-evaluate continuously.

Static segment membership is fixed at resolution time and must be re-resolved to pick up newly qualifying records; dynamic segments add and remove members automatically.

Consent is stored per contact point (email address, phone number), not per contact record, so opting out one address does not opt out the contact's other addresses.

Real-time consent purposes categorize communication (for example commercial versus transactional) and hold a state of opted in, opted out, or not set for each contact point.

Attach an exclusion (suppression) segment to a journey to guarantee its members never receive that journey's messages, covering employees, competitors, and blocked domains.

A segment referenced by a live journey cannot be deleted; stop or deactivate the dependent journey first.

Consent is evaluated at send time, so a recipient who withdraws consent mid-journey receives no further messages from that journey.

Segment insights report the current membership count and how membership changed over time, which validates targeting before a journey goes live.

The email designer is drag-and-drop and supports reusable content blocks, conditional (dynamic) content, and a personalization pane with per-field fallback values.

Personalization tokens resolve from the target entity of the message at send time; define a fallback so empty fields do not render blank or broken text.

Every marketing email must include a working unsubscribe/subscription link that routes to the consent or subscription center; omitting it breaks compliance settings.

Marketing forms can be hosted on a marketing page or embedded on an external site; each submission can create or update a contact or lead and can start a journey.

Content blocks are stored centrally: editing a block updates every email, form, or page that references it, so shared content should not be hard-typed per asset.

Brand profiles define the palette, fonts, and logo the designers apply, ensuring consistency across all assets built by different makers.

Before publishing, send test emails, run the inbox preview (Litmus-based rendering across clients and devices), and clear the accessibility checker warnings.

In outbound marketing, emails are saved as marketing email records and reused across journeys; templates act as reusable starting points for new emails.

A marketing campaign record groups related marketing emails, customer journeys, events, forms, and leads for a single initiative so results report together.

Outbound customer journeys are built along a timeline; tiles include segment/audience, email, wait, if/then branch, A/B split, scheduler, LinkedIn, custom channel, and telemetry.

Stop a running (in progress) journey before making structural changes; a live journey timeline is not editable while participants are flowing through it.

The A/B split tile sends variants to a test percentage of the audience, then delivers the variant with the better winning metric (for example clicks) to the remainder.

Lead scoring combines demographic scoring with interaction scoring into a score plus a grade, which sellers use to prioritize follow-up.

The scheduler tile enables recurring journey execution with a start date, recurrence pattern, and end date rather than a one-time send.

Every journey is tied to a goal (for example number of clicks), which drives the success measures shown in journey insights.

Suppression lists and exclusion segments are the mechanism that keeps opted-out or blocked contacts out of outbound sends.

A real-time journey starts either from a segment (audience-based) or from a trigger (event-based); trigger-based journeys enrol one participant per event occurrence.

Supported triggers include form submission, email open or click, Dataverse record created or updated, and custom triggers fired from external applications.

Real-time journey tiles include send email, send text message (SMS), wait, wait until, if/then branch, split, create or update record, and custom action (Power Automate flow or plug-in).

A custom trigger is registered with a published event schema and fired through the Customer Insights - Journeys API by an external system.

Journey settings define exit criteria, suppression/exclusion behavior, and frequency caps that limit how many messages a contact receives in a period.

The wait until tile pauses a participant until a date/time or until a condition becomes true; design a timeout path when the condition may never be met.

Consent for the message's purpose is checked at send time, so a participant who opts out mid-journey is skipped rather than messaged.

Real-time segments evaluated continuously mean new members enter the journey in near real time without a manual segment re-resolve step.

An event record contains sessions, session tracks, speakers, passes, registrations, and check-ins; a webinar is an event connected to a webinar provider.

An event must be published (live) before the event portal displays it and accepts registrations.

Registrations arrive from the event portal or from marketing forms and journeys that create event registration records.

Webinar hosting integrations include Microsoft Teams for real-time marketing events and providers such as ON24 or Zoom for outbound marketing events.

Passes carry an allocated quantity and control which sessions or benefits a registrant can access.

When capacity is reached, waitlist handling lets prospects queue for a session or event instead of being rejected.

Check-in and check-out records attendance, which feeds event insights such as registration-to-attendance rate.

Registration confirmations, reminders, and follow-ups are delivered by journeys that respond to event registration activity.

Open rate = unique opens ÷ delivered emails; using delivered as the denominator excludes bounced messages from the measure.

Click-through rate = unique clicks ÷ delivered emails, while click-to-open rate = unique clicks ÷ unique opens and isolates content engagement.

Bounce rate = bounced messages ÷ delivered messages; a hard bounce is a permanent invalid address, a soft bounce is a temporary delivery failure.

Unsubscribe rate = unsubscribes ÷ delivered messages and is a leading indicator of audience fatigue or frequency-cap problems.

Email insights break performance down by link, by device/client, and over time, so the worst-performing link can be identified directly.

Journey insights show participants entering and leaving each tile, exposing the drop-off point and whether the journey goal was met.

Attribution assigns conversion credit across the journeys and touchpoints a customer experienced, using selectable models.

Segment insights (membership trend) and event insights (registration and attendance rates) explain why campaign volumes changed period over period.