As my team recently did a successful implementation of Dynamics Marketing, I want to share with you some tips and tricks on this topic. This time we will be talking about how to send an e-mail from dynamics marketing immediately and without the customer journey. This feature highly requested by our customer, and even more, there should be the possibility to use workflows for this. Currently, Microsoft has planned this feature for October release, and you can check the status of this request here: Email marketing features. Our customer doesn’t want to wait, and it was not possible to finalize the project without this feature so that we’ve implemented it and you can learn how.
This is an unsupported way to implement this functionality, and you should think twice before applying this for your customers as Microsoft will not provide support in case something does not work.
Now let’s discuss the idea. As you know, it is possible to test how e-mails look like using so-called “Test Send” functionality, and if you send e-mail using this functionality, it will arrive in your mailbox quite fast comparing to the customer journey which might take several hours. So my idea was to understand how does it work and try to reuse this functionality, which is already available in the system.
First of all, I did an analysis of the plugins we have in the system and quickly found a plugin which is responsible for this operation.
As you see, this plugin works for entity msdyncrm_marketingemailtestsend, so I quickly realized that the next step would be to create a workflow which will create this entity with some mandatory parameters. Let’s see how does it look like:
As you see, you just need to configure several fields.
Email ID – ID of your e-mail template. Guid as Text.
Test contact – To whom you want to send this e-mail. Will be used to replace dynamic logic in your e-mail template.
Test Content Settings – Content Settings. You always have at least one record of this entity. From address will be taken from here.
Test-send email address – E-mail address of the person to whom you want to send the e-mail.
So as you see it is quite simple and even doesn’t require development.
The workflow looks as follows:
