I am about to take the MB2-719 certification, this certification covers the Dynamics 365 for Marketing Application. I plan to create a series of blog posts that collectively should help anyone else preparing for this exam. In this post I will look at Marketing Pages.

You can see in the skills measured statement that upto 15% of the exam will focus on marketing forms and marketing pages. In this post I will focus marketing pages.

I am going to cover forms and pages in separate posts, but you should understand that a marketing page is a web page hosted by Dynamics 365 for Marketing. A marketing page typically includes a marketing form. For this reason, the two topics are closely related. The uses of marketing pages include;

Landing Page
Using marketing pages as a landing page allows you to host a data capture form. Visitors to the page might sign up for offers or maintain their contact details.

Subscription Center
I will cover subscription centers in a separate post. Marketing pages are used as part of the subscription center to allow contacts to maintain their contact preferences.

Forward to a Friend
The forward to a friend feature allows us to enable recipients of emails to forward them to friends. (Who might also be interested in your offer!) Recipients could “just” forward the email message but encouraging them to use the forward a friend feature helps you to collect more email addresses. Additionally, the “friend” will not see any personal information that might be included in the original email.

I will cover subscription center and forward to a friend in separate posts. As both of these have additional “special” logic. Therefore, in this post I will focus on the landing page concept.

You can access marketing pages with Dynamics 365 for Marketing from the Marketing Pages option that you will find in the Internet Marketing section of the navigation. Additionally, like marketing forms, you can create (and re-use) templates for Marketing Pages.

When you create a new marketing page you will first be prompted to select a template. (Or select the blank option and start from scratch.) Dynamics 365 for Marketing does ship with a number of sample templates and you can obviously create your own to reflect your inhouse style / branding.

Each marketing page will have a type. (Of Landing Page, Subscription Center or Forward to a Friend.) You might need to keep this in mind when selecting a template as the template will need to match your intended type. Additionally Marketing Forms have a type, meaning any forms you add to the page will also need to be of this same type.

In addition to the page type another mandatory field is the partial URL. This will be appended to the URL of your portal to create the URL to access this page.

 

Additionally, you can set several other options on the summary and portal integration tabs. Including things like the purpose of the page, its visual style and so on.

The Content tab allows us to access the designer create the page content. As with marketing forms we have three sub tabs Designer (drop & drag interface), HTML (edit the page code directly), preview (view how the page will show in various form factors).

The toolbox in the deisgn allows us to add text, images, dividers, buttons, forms, content blocks and video into the marketing page.

Most marketing pages will include a marketing form, having added your form to a page you will need to check its properties. Setting an error message for a failed submit is a mandatory field. Additionally, you will probably want to define a redirect URL. After a successful commit this page will be displayed. Redirecting gives the visitor a sense that the submit has worked and might allow you to direct them to important content. (For example, joining instructions if they have just registered for an event.)

The styles tab can be used to control overall design elements, such as background colours etc.

Having created your marketing page you will need to check it for errors and make it live.

Once your page is live you will see a full-page URL on the summary tab. One tip I have, is that you can load the marketing page directly from the “internet” icon on this page. The preview tab in the designer will be useful to see how the page will look before you go live. Accessing this link will be a useful “double check” once the page is live.

Note:
You cannot edit a live page. To make any changes you will need to use the “stop” option. And then make live again once the changes have been completed.

Using Marketing Pages

Having created your marketing page and made it live you can include it into marketing emails, customer journeys, lead scoring models and more. I will touch on the details of each of these as I cover those topics.

With emails, for example, you will have a link in the email which will load the marketing email. As it will be loaded from a marketing email any form fields can be pre-filled. Pre-fill assumes you have enabled any marketing forms for pre-fill and the contact’s preferences support “remember me” logic. (FYI, I describe the pre-fill logic in more detail in my post on Marketing Forms.)

Insights

We saw with the marketing form that an insights form allows us to view the “success” of our form. Viewing the performance of a marketing page follows a similar approach. Once the page is live you can change to the insights tab to review statistics on submissions, visits etc.

As part of your revision I suggest you create several pages, include them in marketing emails and customer journeys. You can then return to this insights tab to see how visitor interactions in those journeys are represented.

Marketing pages (and forms) are a significant topic that you should revise in detail whilst preparing for the MB2-719 exam. I hope with this post I have given you some pointers about the topics I expect we will need to revise. But as always, do not rely on just this theory. Hands on practice is the key to doing well in any of the Microsoft exams. (This is just a revision guide!)