Audit the current Outbound assets and usage by your team members, such as emails, journeys, forms, segments, reports, identifying all active features, highlighting all important templates, and evaluating all the customizations, like workflows, form scripts, integrations, etc., you need to save and rebuild in Real-time Marketing.
Real-time Marketing Migration ServiceReal-time Marketing Migration
Discover how to quickly and efficiently transit from Outbound to Real-time Marketing in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys.
Discover how to quickly and efficiently transit from Outbound to Real-time Marketing in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys.
Are You Ready to the End of Outbound Marketing?
The deadline is 30 June 2025
Book a consultation about the smooth transition to Real-time Marketing without losing data, leads, nerve cells, or money. Our experts migrate your data, platforms, and processes with precision. For professional support, contact our UDS team.
Why You Need Real-time Marketing
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys includes two main modes: Outbound Marketing and Real-time Marketing. However, Microsoft will remove Outbound Marketing. All customers still using Outbound marketing must complete their transition to Real-time Marketing before July 2025.
It is a significant change that Microsoft has been gradually rolling out as part of its strategic move toward more personalized, scalable, and real-time engagement.
Soon, all the key components of marketing activities, including social posting, LinkedIn Lead Generation opportunities, outbound customer journeys, marketing emails, forms, pages, segments, and static subscription lists, will be stopped and removed.
Understanding all the nuances and how to complete this migration is essential to avoid disruptions and take advantage of all advanced capabilities for your marketing, lead generation, and sales.
Microsoft encourages migration ASAP, and the UDS team is ready to assist you!
The Main Challenges of Migration
There is no rollback: once the Outbound mode is fully deprecated in your environment, you won't be able to return it. So, ensuring all processes and assets are fully operational in real time before switching is critical. However, there are various technical barriers:
Complicated process
The lack of practical step-by-step guides can become a serious issue and lead to numerous mistakes, including the irreversible loss of data, as there are many differences between outbound and real-time functionalities.
Tight deadlines
The transition requires strategic planning, long, meticulous work by several specialists, and accurate testing to ensure correct data transfer. Only a few months remain until Outbound marketing is disabled.
Lack of feature parity
Some outbound features may not yet be available or fully replicated in Real-time marketing, which is why some complex processes and workflows should be rebuilt manually.
Manual rebuilding
Basic and custom elements, fields, templates, and so on don’t usually migrate 1:1 and must be recreated or built from scratch using new logic and editors.
Non-obvious changes
New features like event-based triggers, real-time segmentation, compliance profiles, and other data models may not be intuitive initially, so their exploration can take a lot of time.
Complicated migration tools
Microsoft provides some basic tools for the smooth transition to help convert emails, segments, journeys, and forms, but all of them are newly created and not easy to install and use.
Zero-stress Migration with UDS
Marketing expertise
We have relevant experience with marketing automation and full-scale implementation of D365 Customer Insights – Journeys module.
Qualified staff
Our specialists have special certifications and skills to successfully fulfill the process from consultation to implementation, custom development, and post-support.
Adequate tech support
We possess extensive tools to make your transition to Real-time Marketing and your system’s further support maximally convenient and successful.
Sensible planning
With a clearly defined plan of sequential actions, we will save you time through process optimization, making the migration as quick and smooth as possible.
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The Migration Checklist
Marketing migration can be time-consuming and operationally heavy. That's why we’ve created a well-structured "From Outbound to Real-time Marketing Action Kit," which is presented below.
Plan for data mapping and further steps related to the transition process, defining migration priorities, and choosing the necessary approach (phased migration is highly recommended). Plus, constantly monitor Microsoft’s roadmap for any upcoming feature parity updates.
Real-time mode offers several extended and new capabilities for comprehensive marketing, including enhanced personalization, event-driven architecture, triggers, automated journeys, improved marketing and customer data synchronization, cross-channel messaging, AI-powered features, and advanced analytics.
Start configuring Real-time Marketing and setting up its environment in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys.
Start a few real-time pilot campaigns to discover the features in detail using parallel running of both outbound and real-time campaigns before full migration.
Update the consent center setting up compliance profiles and consent topics instead of traditional subscription lists. Also, configure the sender profiles and verified domains for your company. The consent management approach is more flexible but requires precise adaptation.
Check your database with the contact data, ensuring the contacts have proper consent and are marked as eligible for future usage and mailing campaigns.
Recreate the dynamic and static segments using a Segment Migration Solution, a special Power Apps solution from Microsoft, built to support the initial migration journey. Also, check and test the new segmentation tools.
Rebuild templates in real-time using the updated design tools. Recreate and save the reusable content blocks, forms for lead capturing, and subscription forms.
Develop the required marketing forms manually, keeping in mind that there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between the outbound and real-time objects. Real-time journeys forms cover all the functionality from outbound marketing forms, and they also take over the publishing part from the marketing pages (there is no equivalent in real-time journeys), event registration forms, and preference centers.
Recreate the journeys and develop new ones using the new trigger logic, real-time actions, event triggers, and conditions. Migrate the branching logic and journey steps.
Set up advanced lead scoring, defining and aligning the required scoring rules with the sales qualification stages for the efficient sales funnel.
Plan for data and reporting transition for correct adaptation to different data models. The existing Power BI dashboards or custom reports built on the Outbound entities won’t work out-of-the-box. Check the built-in tracking and analytics opportunities. Redesign or recalculate the necessary KPIs and other metrics you need.
Educate users and teams on the new process and UI, which is completely different. So, marketing teams may need training.
Plan event workflows and then set up events using the event management tools. Enjoy the benefits of improved event management experience in real-time journeys by testing all the opportunities: event setup, event registration, multi-session registration, event communication, journey orchestration, real-time event tracking, and other options.
Review the existing survey templates because, in real-time, the surveys will be integrated into dynamic customer journeys that are personalized and sent based on customer behavior. For this, define the real-time triggers for survey distribution, customize your templates, check the correctness of synchronization of the survey feedback data with the CRM customer profiles, set up all the related triggers to automate workflows, and integrate Customer Voice data with D365 Customer Insights and Power BI for real-time extensive analytics. New surveys should be aligned with real-time engagement across multiple channels to reach customers at the optimal point in their journey.
Test all the features before going live with new marketing campaigns. Ensure all the existing campaigns and marketing materials pointing to the old outbound elements or pages are updated to point to the new real-time items. This stage also includes extensive updates and improvements based on continuous monitoring.
All the steps should be taken before decommissioning the Outbound Marketing assets.
Related D365 Marketing Migration Articles
READ MORERelated Marketing Service
You can explore our relevant marketing services if you are not looking for migration but for a Real-time Marketing setup.
The UDS service package includes Marketing Quick Start, which provides a quick and effective Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (Marketing) implementation from scratch based on turnkey settings or advanced customization of the existing system.
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