The long-awaited double opt-in feature for real-time journeys is available to preview in Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights – Journeys, which Microsoft says will be generally available from October.
In this article, we will examine the key points of the new Dynamics 365 double opt-in feature (also known as confirmed opt-in).
What is double opt-in?
Contacts must confirm their subscription by clicking a link sent to their email, confirming deliberate requests and validating email authenticity.
Double opt-in: comparison with outbound marketing
While the legacy outbound marketing module has well-established double opt-in processes, real-time journeys have lacked an equivalent feature. This release bridges that gap, although several differences exist between the respective features.
Unlike outbound marketing, in real-time journeys, double opt-in is configured for individual compliance profiles rather than globally or on a per-form basis.
Once you activate double opt-in for a compliance profile, related marketing forms that collect consent will automatically be enabled with double opt-in.
How it works
The capture of each double-opt consent is completed through the following steps.
- A contact submits a marketing form, including ticking to provide their subscription consent.
- The notification page directs them to check their email for confirmation.
- The system triggers a real-time journey to send a transactional confirmation email that includes the relevant consent text.
- The contact confirms their opt-in by clicking the email link, triggering lead/contact creation and consent recording in Dynamics 365 Marketing/Customer Insights – Journeys.
- Contacts are directed to a ‘thank-you’ page in their browser upon clicking the confirmation links.
Additional points
Let’s now add more detail. As we highlighted earlier, double opt-in forms in real-time journeys are linked to a compliance profile. Forms that capture consent for an enabled compliance profile will automatically trigger the double-opt process.
However, there are a couple of exceptions.
Firstly, there is flexibility to manually disable double opt-in on specific forms, despite their status in the compliance profile. Also, double opt-in will not automatically apply to existing forms that pre-date this feature’s enablement. Each form will need to be manually enabled.
For each form with double opt-in enabled, you can view additional analytics to see how many people have confirmed their preferences and how many are pending.
Individual marketing forms can only be associated with a single compliance profile, as these cannot be mixed to ensure double opt-in integrity.
Dataverse will not create any lead or contact record until a customer confirms their double opt-in. Familiar personalisations such as ‘first name’ can’t be applied to the confirmation email since no related record exists. Recipients have 28 days to verify their opt-in; after this time, the email link will no longer be valid.
Finally, the system automatically creates the journey for sending confirmation emails. This consists of a double opt-in form submission trigger to send the relevant confirmation email. In the initial release, you cannot edit this journey, so this doesn’t allow for customisation to include automated reminder messages.
Enable double opt-in
To activate this feature in Dynamics 365 real-time journeys, navigate to settings > feature settings to toggle to Double Opt-in to on.
Find out more
We recommend this Microsoft Learn article to learn more about using double opt-in processes for real-time journeys in your environment. Please contact ServerSys if you’d like to discuss how real-time journeys in Dynamics 365 could work for your organisation.
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