Legal designation and Bulk Email

Commercial and Transactional Messages

Most of the messages you send using Dynamics 365 Marketing will probably be commercial messages, which are bulk messages sent to many recipients and once. However, you can also use the solution to send transactional messages.

Transactional messages must relate exclusively to a specific transaction between your organization and another individual or organization (such as a receipt, account statement, or consent request), and must not include advertisements or promotional content.

Transactional messages are typically regulated differently from commercial messages. They are considered personal communications, not promotional communications, and therefore have different content and consent requirements.

In Dynamics 365 Marketing, the main practical different between transactional and commercial messages is that different validation rules apply. Specifically, commercial messages require a subscription-center link while transactional messages do not. Also, Marketing manages consent independently for each of these two types of messages.

By default, all new messages that you create will be commercial messages. To change the legal designation of a message:

• Open the message.
• Go to the Summary tab.
• Set the Legal Designation to Commercial or Transactional, as required.

Take care not include promotional content in messages that you have set as transactional. It is your responsibility to be familiar with, and conform to, all relevant laws that apply in the countries/regions where you deliver commercial and transactional messages.

Bulk Email setting

The contacts entity is common for and shared by most model-driven apps in Dynamics 365, but Dynamics 365 Marketing adds several enhancements to it, including the ability to set and/or capture a contacts preferences for bulk email. Out of the box Dynamics 365 contact preference has an Email field (1), but Dynamics 365 Marketing adds another field to the preferences – a Bulk email field (2)

1. Email: This setting is part of the standard contact entity (it isn’t added specifically for Marketing). It controls whether any Dynamics 365 app (including Marketing) can send any type of email to this contact, including both commercial and transactional messages
2. Bulk Email: Controls whether Dynamics 365 Marketing is permitted to send marketing email messages from customer journeys to this contact. When set to Do not allow, no marketing email messages will be sent to this contact. Contacts can adjust this setting themselves using a subscription center

As mentioned above each contact can enable or disable this option for themselves using any subscription center (all subscription centers provide a check box for controlling this)

So if a contact – Karen – receives an email from me, and decides that she wishes to unsubscribe from all emails going forward, she can click the Subscription Center link (1)

She will be taken to the Subscription Center, and can simply tick the Do not email box to unsubscribe from all mails

Dynamics 365 Marketing will change the Bulk Email field for Karen to Do Not Allow (1)

From here on – Karen will only receive emails of the legal designation Transactional (given that the Email setting for her is set to Allow)