Building Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Journeys campaigns outside the native editor

Yes, you can build campaigns for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Journeys without using its built-in email designer. Your team builds, reviews and approves the campaign in a separate tool, and it arrives in Dynamics as a draft email ready for a journey. Journeys, segments, data and sending stay in Dynamics.

Most teams we talk to moved to Customer Insights Journeys for the right reasons: better data, and a CRM that fits the rest of their Microsoft setup. The email designer is where it falls short.

Where the native editor falls short

The email designer in Customer Insights Journeys is a drag-and-drop builder. You drag elements into the email and fill them in. That works for one person building a simple campaign, but large teams run into the same problems:

• The brand is hard to lock down. Keeping a template consistent while many people edit it is difficult, so campaigns drift from the design.
• The HTML gets heavy. Each element the designer adds brings its own markup. Campaigns can grow past 102 KB, and Gmail clips them.
• Templates multiply. Teams end up with many templates that are hard to keep working, instead of one design system that every campaign builds on.
• Everything goes through the Dynamics specialist. Because the builder is hard to use well, the person who knows Dynamics ends up building the campaigns, on top of journeys, segments and data.
• Feedback happens somewhere else. Comments from brand, legal and local markets end up in email threads and screenshots, away from the campaign they are about.

What we hear from Dynamics teams

We hear a similar story from many teams. A company moves to Dynamics to upgrade its CRM, and part of the plan is that local teams, whether brands, markets or locations, will finally build their own campaigns. In practice, their marketers can't work in the designer, and campaign production stays with a few specialists.

Agencies tell us the same about their clients on Dynamics: too many people editing the same campaigns, no clear approval flow, and templates nobody can get to work properly.

What these teams have in common: they want to keep Dynamics for data, journeys and sending, and move campaign production somewhere their marketers can use.

How it works with Better Email

Better Email connects to the Dataverse environment behind Customer Insights Journeys. Campaign production happens in Better Email, and the finished campaign is exported to Dynamics.

1. A design system replaces the templates. Approved modules, brand tokens and rules on every input, so every brand, market or team builds on-brand campaigns. Read more in What is an email design system?
2. Personalisation comes from Dynamics. Better Email syncs the fields on the contact table from Dataverse, so marketers can personalise the subject line, preheader and body. On export, each field becomes a placeholder that the Journeys designer recognises.
3. Content can vary by audience. Modules can show different variants for different recipients, and the team can preview each version before export.
4. Reviewers approve in the campaign. Comments, required approvers and pre-flight checks happen before export, including a check on the size of the HTML.
5. The campaign is exported as a draft. Better Email creates a draft email in Dataverse with the HTML, subject line and preview text. When the campaign changes, exporting again updates the same draft instead of creating a new one.

The Dynamics team then picks up the draft and uses it in a journey, as they would with any other email.

What setup involves

Connecting Better Email takes a Microsoft admin and a Better Email admin. On the Microsoft side, it needs:

• an app registration in Microsoft Entra, with a client secret
• an application user in the Power Platform environment, with a role that can create and update marketing emails and read the contact table
• the Dataverse organisation URL for the environment

The steps are in our setup guide for Customer Insights Journeys.

What stays in Dynamics

Better Email does not create journeys, segments or send times. The exported email stays a draft in Dataverse until your Dynamics team has reviewed it and added it to a journey, so nothing is sent from Dynamics without them.

See how the integration works on our Customer Insights Journeys page.