As organizations continue delivering personalized customer experiences, they face an equally important responsibility: honoring customer privacy and communication preferences. In Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, consent management helps preserve client trust by sending messages according to recipients’ preferences.
Marketers understand that consent must be honored based on the customer’s region. Organizations working with individuals in regions with more restrictive laws, such as California, Canada, and Europe, must capture explicit opt-in consent before sending marketing communications.
This article does not aim to provide legal guidance about these regulations. Instead, it will highlight how Microsoft 365 Customer Insights can help you collect, honor, and review marketing consent and preferences.
Understanding the Consent Model
To understand the consent model, it’s important to first know that in Customer Insights, consent is honored at the email address (or phone number) level. For this article, we will focus on email to make the underlying concept easier to understand.
Consent records are not directly related to contact or lead records using Dataverse relationships. For example, if you have multiple records with the same email address, a single opt-out record for that email address would prevent you from messaging any contact or lead with that email address. This approach honors consent holistically, but it is quite different from legacy methods, where consent was captured at the contact/lead record level.
Legacy consent was black and white; many will remember the “Do Not Allow Bulk Emails” field, which required a simple “Yes/No.” Subscription preferences are now captured with multiple layers using Purposes and Topics. These purposes and topics are exposed to customers in Compliance Profiles and Preference Centers. The consent records themselves are captured and honored with Contact Point Consents and Enforcement Models. Enforcement models are technically assigned at the Purpose level, but they are most functionally aligned with Contact Point Consents.
Three Standard Purposes
Think of Purposes as high-level communication classifications. The three standard Purposes are Commercial, Transactional, and Tracking.
- Commercial messages are traditional marketing content, including product announcements or special offers.
- Transactional messages are non-commercial in nature, such as order confirmations, legal/financial disclosures, and other communication required by your business relationship with the recipient.
- Tracking purpose refers to the monitoring of website behaviors and profiling individuals based on those activities.
Topics reside within Purposes. They generally represent granular preferences/interests within the Purposes. For example, you may offer discrete Topics for “New Product Announcements” and “Press Releases.” This is a great way to capture and honor messages and may dissuade people from opting out fully.
Recipients can opt in or out at the Purpose or Topic level. An opt-out at the Purpose level would prevent them from receiving messages for that Purpose or any Topic underneath it.
Unlike physical mail campaigns, where lists are often exported to third-party vendors, Dynamics provides built-in protection for digital communications. Each message must be assigned a Purpose and can optionally be assigned a Topic. During Journey email send processing, if an individual does not have the requisite consent to receive that message, Customer Insights - Journeys will prevent the message from being sent.
This send-time behavior of deciding “will send” or “will not send” is where the Enforcement Model comes into play. Regions like Europe require explicit opt-in before a commercial message can be sent. In Dynamics, the associated Purpose for this desired behavior would be assigned the “Restrictive” Enforcement Model. In this model, a message is assumed under “will not send” unless the recipient’s email address has an “Opt-In” for the associated Purpose/Topic.
Conversely, if the Purpose was set to the “Non-Restrictive” enforcement model, it will assume “will send” unless the recipient email has an “Opt-Out” record for the email’s Purpose/Topic. This level of protection helps organizations consistently honor customer preferences, but it can be confusing at first.
Another component in the consent model is Compliance Profiles, which correspond with legal entities/regions or lines of business. For example, you may have a Compliance Profile for your European operations that includes only Restrictive Purposes. You may have another Compliance Profile for U.S. operations that includes Non-Restrictive Purposes. Compliance Profiles must include a legal address and company name. Each compliance profile is associated with a single, dedicated Preferences Page. If you have a need to use more than one variation of your preferences page, you need to have more than one Compliance Profile.
That preference page can include any combination of Purposes/Topics associated with the Compliance Profile, but it doesn’t necessarily have to include all of them.
Another way to think of it is that Purposes are included in Compliance Profiles, but they can be associated with more than one. Since some organizations need to use Purposes across Compliance Profiles, Microsoft provides a way to add existing purposes to other compliance profiles. New users of Journeys need to plan their consent model in advance, because there are many ways to cause yourself headaches if your model is not tailored to your intended use.
With more regions moving to the Opt-In model, more organizations are requiring consent before sending. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights makes consent capture easier by allowing Purposes and Topics to be added directly to forms. For customers who have opted out, organizations can no longer reach them via phone/email, but natural interaction points, such as completing a purchase, filling out a form, or engaging through a website can offer them a way to opt back in.
Consent records tell a story; they are not just legal compliance data points. You can use them strategically to find out what customers want to learn about. For example, you may want to know whether your prospects prefer case studies versus webinars. Those could be different Topics. In addition, unique Topics could relate to if you offer different product/service categories or serve specific vertical markets.
Communication preferences are visible on Contact and Lead records via a Communication tab (technically a ‘component’ available to add to a Dynamics 365 Form). This tab is automatically included in the standard Contact/Lead forms and can be easily added to your custom forms. This tab shows your available Purposes and Topics alongside details of whether messages “will send” or “will not send” for that particular communication type.
How Forvis Mazars Can Help
Organizations risk damaging customer trust and violating regional regulations if consent is not handled with care. Even loyal customers can become irritated when marketing consent is violated. Legal consequences vary by region, but customers everywhere get irritated when they feel their consent has been compromised.
Effective consent management is about more than compliance. It is about respecting customer choices, improving the relevance of messaging, and creating a foundation for trust that supports stronger, longer-lasting customer relationships.
As a certified Microsoft Partner, our experienced team of technology consultants can help you strengthen your customer relationship management (CRM) strategy, enhance business workflows, and advance your organization’s digital transformation journey. If you have any questions or need assistance, please reach out to a professional at Forvis Mazars.