As I prepare for my Dynamics 365 certification in sales (MB2-717), I am creating blog posts based on my revision. I hope that collectively these posts may prove useful to anyone also preparing for the MB2-717 exam. In this post I will focus on email engagement.

You can see a section of the skills measured statement below. This includes a reference to managing sales relationships with email engagement.

Email Engagement allows tracking of interactions with an email and its attachments.

Before getting started with email engagement you will need to have configured email in Dynamics 365, as you will need a mailbox that can successfully send and receive emails. (I will cover the setup of email mailboxes in another post!)

Once you have a working mailbox you can enable email engagement. In settings you will find an option called “Intelligence Configuration”. Opening this will show the email engagement option.

Note: There is some more setup you might need to be aware of! If you need to track attachments then you will need OneDrive for Business enabled. And to be able to enable one drive for business you must first enable SharePoint integration. Not forgetting to enable document management for the email entity.

Email Form

Once email engagement is enabled you should notice some additional capabilities when sending an email. These show in an extra section that will now show on the email form. Firstly you can see a green mail icon signifying that the email you are creating is going to be followed. At this point you can opt to not follow the email.

Note: Additionally you have a “Send Later” and “Set Reminder” options. I will describe these later in this post.

Your customers may like their privacy! Usefully we can restrict when the follow option is offered. Below you can see that in the contact preferences of the recipients you can set the “Follow Email Activity” option to Allow or Do Not Allow.

If any recipient on your email has their contact preference set to “do not allow”, then instead of a green mail icon you’ll see the red one shown below. Clicking view preferences will show which recipients have email follows blocked. You may wish to revise the contact preferences or maybe remove some of the intended recipients. If you make changes like this the “RETRY FOLLOW” option can be used to see if this email can now be followed.

Having sent my email you can see that my email record shows as below. This screen shot was taken immediately after sending the email. So it hasn’t been opened yet. (As the counters on the email confirm.) Also notice that I have added a couple of attachments. As my OneDrive is enabled I was able to select an option to follow these attachments.

In the social pane I also get a useful prompt that the email hasn’t been opened.

When the customer opens the email or opens any attachments then the counters on the email form will start to update. Below you can see the email and its attachments have been opened several times. Additionally the customer has replied to the email.

Note:
Additionally link clicks can be tracked.

In the social pane of the contact we can see more useful information. Firstly a relationship assistant card has been created to prompt me that the email had been opened. Also the status on the email changed to show it had been opened.

Notice that the reply has been added but it is not yet tracked into Dynamics 365. The operator can simply click the track open and then this reply will become visible in Dynamics 365. (This functionality is only possible because I have Auto Capture enabled. I will cover that in more detail in another post.)

Each email conversation / thread is grouped together on the social pane. And you can use the triangle icon to open and close the entire thread. I find this a really useful feature when working with a contact that might have had multiple past engagements.

Send Later

The recipient of your email may live in a different time zone to you. Or maybe you are creating an email at the weekend. Often it might be useful to delay the send of these emails into working hours. The SEND LATER button gives us the ability to schedule when an email should be sent. (A lot more reliable than holding it in your draft emails and hoping you remember to click send later!)

Also notice that the send later button is linked to a useful message that will warn you when you are creating an email that will potentially be sent outside of the business hours of your contact. It even suggests a good time to send. In this example I was creating an email on Saturday afternoon in the UK. It suggested waiting until Monday morning but the time is early as my contact lives in different time zone to me.

Set Reminder

You might send an email to someone but you want a reminder to check they have read or responded to the information.

The set reminder option allows us to get a reminder if the customer does not open the email or does not reply to the email. We can set when the reminder should be and also add a comment. Maybe the comment could be used to remind us of the next step we should follow!

Reminders show on dashboards or when viewing the contact / account via the relationship assistant. (Additionally you can usefully see reminders from the relationship assistant in the mobile application.)

Below you can see that I have a reminder showing in one of my dashboards. From here I can open the email and decide what action I should take next.

Hopefully I have covered most of the concepts you’ll need to revise around email engagement for the MB2-717. As always I encourage you to test these things out for yourself. I think you will enjoy “playing” with email engagement as it is a really cool feature.