The Dynamics 365 Marketing 2019 release wave 2 update is rolling out starting now! As usual, this release provides many performance improvements, reliability improvements, and bug fixes. It also includes the final versions of all features that were released for early access in August and September, plus a few new ones.

We’ll be rolling out the update on a region-by-region basis, and we expect them to be available to all regions by the last week of October 2019.

For ongoing information about recently released and planned new features, keep an eye on the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Release Plan.

How to get the update

Dynamics 365 Marketing 2019 release wave 2 update is ready for use on all types of environments. We recommend updating all Marketing instances, including production instances, as soon as you can. As soon as the update is available in your region, you’ll be able to see and apply it as described in Keep Marketing up to date. You must manually update each instance.

For instances previously enabled for early access, this update will remove the early-access flag (thereby reverting them to standard instances) and apply the final versions of all available features.

New features added for October

In addition to finalizing all early-access features, Dynamics 365 Marketing 2019 release wave 2 also introduces a few new features.

New product branding

Starting now, we’ve shortened the name of Dynamics 365 for Marketing to Dynamics 365 Marketing. You’ll also notice new app icons and a unified graphical identity across all Dynamics 365 apps.

Full support for business units in Marketing

Large organizations with multiple customer bases often use multiple business units to manage their marketing data sets and campaigns. On top of these, a parent business unit often manages centralized reporting or creates templates to be propagated across all the child business units. The Common Data Service platform supports this model, and the Marketing app now supports this during all aspects of marketing execution, including: access to contact records, display of segment members, access to contact insights, availability of email templates, and more.

For more information, see Use business units to control access to Marketing records in the online help.

New “save as segment” buttons for blocked emails and stopped contacts

You could already generate segments that find contacts who produced various results on a selected customer journey tile, but now you can also generate segments that find contacts that were stopped or blocked during a specific journey.

To use this new feature, open a journey, go to its Insights tab and then select Incomplete journeys from the side-panel navigator. Select any of the reasons listed under Stopped contacts or Blocked emails and then select the Save as segment button . This generates a dynamic segment that finds all contacts who were stopped or blocked on that journey for that reason.

For more information, see Generate dynamic interaction segments from customer journey results in the online help.

View milestones in the customer journey life cycle

Customer journeys pass through many states while you create, edit, and run them. You can now view a full history of these milestones for any customer journey. To see them, open any live or previously live journey, go to its Designer tab, make sure no tile is selected, and then view the Data panel.

For more information, see Use customer journeys to create automated campaigns.

New design and design options for form-submission feedback dialog boxes

Marketing forms provide feedback to let your contacts know whether they have successfully submitted the form or if a submission error has occurred. Though this basic feature was already part of the product, we have improved the overall design and added a few new design options for the 2019 release wave 2 update. With the new version:

• Users can now specify custom images for the submission-success and submission-failure dialog boxes.
• Submission dialog boxes now use a single-window (CSS-based) mechanism rather than a browser pop-up window. The new dialog boxes work more smoothly and are more attractive than in the previous version.

The following image shows the new success dialog, where users can customize both the graphic (the green circle shown here is the default) and the message.

For more information, see The form element for marketing pages.

Improved instance management and administration

We’ve made it much easier to work with Marketing instances by removing the need to stop live records and manually uninstall Marketing when doing many instance operations. However, some special steps are still necessary for other types of operations, so be sure to review the updated documentation.

For more information, see Manage your Dynamics 365 Marketing instances in the online help.

New email language setting to control the language displayed for option sets in dynamic content

Option-set fields in the Dynamics 365 database can store display values in multiple languages. You can now define the language for each email message to ensure that dynamic data drawn from option-set fields will show the same language as the rest of the email.

For more information, see Set the email language in the online help.

Previous early-access features are now generally available

The features listed in this section were released for early access in August and September but are now generally available to all updated instances. If you never joined early access, then these are the great new features that you can expect to see when you apply the 2019 release wave 2 update. We already blogged about these in August and September, so we’ll just summarize the features here, provide links, and point out any updates that we’ve added since early access:

• Customer Insights integration
  The Customer Insights app for Dynamics 365 applies artificial intelligence to analyze rich pools of customer data collected from across other apps like Dynamics 365 for Sales, Service, and Marketing. Now you can export segments created in Customer Insights to create matching segments in Dynamics 365 for Marketing. Since the early-access release, we’ve improved the way segments in Dynamics 365 Marketing show details for segments exported from Customer Insights. For more information, see Use segments from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with Dynamics 365 Marketing in the online help and the August release blog post.
• Email A/B testing
  Use email A/B testing to test two slightly different email designs on a small part of a target segment to find out which design is more successful, and then automatically send the winning design to the rest of the segment. Since releasing the early-access version in August, we’ve added the ability to test all body elements, track the lifecycle of each test, and replace version A with version B after a test is over. We’ve also improved the test-result display and introduced many functional improvements. For more information, see Design and run A/B tests on your email designs in the online help, the August release blog post and the September release blog post.
• Multi-column layouts and formatting for all content designers
  Create multi-column layouts for emails, marketing pages, and marketing forms simply by dragging section elements onto your design. Each section element can now take on any of several different column layouts, plus set formatting options like border, padding, marketing, and background color. In early access, only emails were supported by this feature, and fewer formatting options were available. For more information, see Design your digital content and Section (layout) elements in the online help, the August release blog post and the September release blog post.
• Easy subscription lists
  Create marketing lists that are preconfigured to work as subscription lists for Dynamics 365 Marketing with just a few clicks, right inside the Marketing app. This feature hasn’t changed since the early access release. For more information, see Create a subscription list in the online help and the August release blog post.
• Improved segmentation experience
  The early-access release introduced a new and much more intuitive segmentation designer. Since the early-access release, we’ve enabled the new UI to display legacy segments in the graphical designer, which means the designer also now supports the TRAVERSE operator. We’ve also added a new display option so users can choose to view the segment designer in tree view or the new natural-language view. For more information, see Working with segments, and its related topics, in the online help and the August release blog post.
• Support for adding a custom approvals feature
  Dynamics 365 Marketing provides an infrastructure with extensibility features that offer new possibilities for developers, and one way to take advantage of this new extensibility is to create an approvals feature, possibly including integration with Microsoft Flow. This feature hasn’t changed since the early access release. For more information, see Build an approvals feature in the online help and the August release blog post.
• View details about failed form submissions
  Every now and then, errors in form design or changes to system settings can cause form submissions to fail some or all of the time. Previously, failed submission were usually lost, but now the system will store what it can of erroneous submissions so you can examine them later and possibly recover key information from them. This feature hasn’t changed since the early access release. For more information, see View and recover from failed form submissions in the online help and the August release blog post.

Bug fixes included with the 2019 release wave 2 update

The Dynamics 365 Marketing 2019 release wave 2 update fixes the following bugs on all instances:

• In customer journey tiles, the default tile name now updates to match new email, page, or activity names for these and other records created using the New button on the tile’s Properties
• A label for one of the fields that helps identify templates in the template gallery for marketing pages was changed from Market type to Type.
• All email, page, and form templates now include default height and width settings for all images
• Confirmation emails are no longer sent to contacts who join a subscription list they already belong to.
• The form-capture feature now correctly captures forms on pages that include multiple whitespace characters in the <body> tag of the page.
• Leads generated by a captured form now correctly store values for option-set fields.
• Previews for live emails with A/B testing enabled can now display both version B and version A.
• Email A/B tests that are in-progress or finished can now display both version B and version A.
• The form-capture feature now correctly receives submissions from forms that use a jQuery “submit” command to submit the form.
• The form-capture feature now captures form fields with <input type = hidden>.
• The form-capture feature now handles drop-down fields more reliably. When a Dynamics 365 Marketing user is setting up the form, the user is prompted to map each drop-down list option to a specific option-set value in the Dynamics 365 Marketing database, thus ensuring all possible input values are valid.
• We fixed a minor issue that prevented a small number of organizations from upgrading successfully.
• A/B testing now works for a test with a 20%/20% distribution of versions delivered to a segment of 5 contacts.