With Customer Insights – Data, you can now target customers based on their campaign engagement.
Marketers can now create dynamic audience segments using real-time engagement data from past marketing campaigns and activities – without building complex integrations or data pipelines between systems.
This will help you build richer segmentation from multiple data sources, supporting you to build targeted customer journeys.
Marketing signals for Customer Insights – Data segments is scheduled for a August 2025 release and is enabled automatically with no configuration or installation required.
Use behavioural data to build segments
When building your audience segments in Customer Insights – Data, you will be able to select from a variety of actions that your customers have taken, some of these include:
- Email opens
- Email link clicks
- Email Consent not given
- Marketing event registration
- Marketing event check-in
- Customer Voice Survey Response Submitted.
In addition, it’s not just customer activity but also what they inactivity. We can use the segment builder to set parameters that find customers who aren’t engaging.
Selecting specific records can further refine this on individual campaigns and other activities.
How could marketing signals be used in Customer Insights Data?
There’s many scenarios you could use customer behavioural actions to build your segments, let’s look at just one application:
An investment firm runs a campaign targeting institutional investors with a new fund. After hosting a virtual roundtable, they send a follow-up email offering a detailed performance brief and a link to schedule a portfolio strategy session.
With Customer Insights – Data, the marketing team creates a segment of prospects who opened the email but didn’t click to schedule a session. These contacts have shown interest but haven’t yet engaged further.
Because behavioural signals are connected to a unified customer profile—something not available in Customer Insights – Journeys—they can combine it with broader data. This richer context allows for smarter segmentation.
Using this segment, they launch a retargeting campaign—perhaps offering a tailored investment snapshot or highlighting recent fund performance. Meanwhile, relationship managers are alerted to contacts with consistent engagement across campaigns, helping them prioritise outreach to investors most likely to convert.
Why This Matters: Bring Marketing Signals into Customer Insights – Data
We welcome this feature and think it will help marketers understand their customers with more refined insights into how they interact with your business. Marketers who use real-time journeys will recognise that they’ve always been able to use behavioural actions in their segments when building their journeys.
So why is this important?
Richer Segmentation at the Source
This enables marketers and analysts to build powerful, cross-functional segments directly in Customer Insights – Data—combining behavioural signals (from Journeys) with firmographic, transactional, or predictive data already in your customer profiles.
Improved Data Governance and Unification
Because the interaction data is part of the unified customer profile in Customer Insights – Data, you’re working from a single source of truth. This improves targeting accuracy and ensures that your downstream apps—like advertising, CRM, or analytics—use consistent, up-to-date segmentation.
Enable Non-Marketing Teams with Engagement Insights
Sales, service, and analytics teams using Customer Insights – Data can now access marketing interaction insights without needing access to Journeys. This empowers broader teams to act on campaign behaviour—for example, alerting sales when a high-value prospect engages with a campaign, or enriching predictive models with engagement data.
What do we think?
This feature will undoubtedly be helpful for marketing teams and other roles such as sales and customer service. Using this tool inside a unified customer profile opens up new opportunities to target customers at different steps in campaign journeys. The capability to combine it with multiple data sources across your business is a welcome addition to the platform.
Currently, there’s a good selection of customer behavioural actions to choose from, but we would like to see more actions recorded. This could include:
- Text/SMS engagement
- Push Notification engagement
- Web interactions (form submissions)
This would allow for truly omnichannel segmentation inside Customer Insights – Data.
Additionally, deeper Copilot integration would be excellent. For example, Copilot could analyse recent behavioural trends for suggested segmentation options. For instance, Copilot could recommend retargeting strategies for underperforming campaigns.
Copilot could also highlight anomalies such as “click rate dropped 40% people from a location, age group or service user”.
This would be useful when managing many data sources and potentially millions of customer records. Cutting through large data sets becomes difficult, and we think Copilot could support that with segments with behavioural data.
Smarter Targeting Starts with Smarter Data
This new feature marks a meaningful step in unifying customer understanding across the Microsoft ecosystem. By bringing marketing engagement data directly into Customer Insights – Data, organisations can move beyond siloed campaign metrics and toward a complete, contextual view of every customer.
We recognise that Customer Insights – Data is a powerful but complex platform, and onboarding challenges businesses. As a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner, please get in touch to unlock its full potential. We can help you unify your data, configure intelligent segments, and connect insights to action across your communications.
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