Build and manage real-time marketing journeys and triggers
Trigger-driven journeys
Real-time marketing inverts the outbound model: instead of pushing a segment through a journey, a trigger fires when something happens to a person and the journey reacts within seconds.
Trigger sources: record created or updated on Dataverse tables (contact, custom tables), interaction events (email opened, link clicked, form submitted, event registered), and custom triggers invoked by Power Automate or the API. A trigger must be scoped - which entity, which conditions, and whether a person may re-enter.
Journey tiles: trigger, segment filter, wait (duration or until a date/time), branch on conditions, channel actions (email, text, push), activity steps, goal, and exit criteria. A goal records success and can end participation; exit criteria removes someone as soon as the condition becomes true. Questions frequently confuse the two.
Governance settings that appear in scenarios: frequency caps per channel per period, quiet hours or business hours, journey scheduling windows, and consent checked at send time.
Traps:
- A trigger firing repeatedly for the same person creates duplicate runs unless re-entry is restricted.
- Structural edits to a live journey generally require stopping it; content edits to the email apply to future sends.
- Real-time journeys pair with real-time segments; outbound segments behave differently.
- Text and push each need their own consent and channel configuration.
Rule of thumb: look for a cause in the scenario (something happened) → trigger-based real-time journey; look for a schedule or batch push → segment-based or outbound approach.