Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Emarsys
Integration Agency & Consultants
Marketing teams lose the ability to prove ROI when customer segments in Emarsys drift from the transactional reality in Microsoft Dynamics 365. At scale, this disconnect leads to irrelevant campaign triggers and missed sales opportunities because marketing is operating on outdated attributes. We connect these systems to ensure your promotional activity is grounded in verified sales and order data from your ERP.
Auditing data gaps and ERP inefficiencies
We connect Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Emarsys, integrating your ERP and ESP platforms for efficient operations. Our consulting services are invaluable, with system audit services that uncover inefficiencies and integration gaps across Microsoft Dynamics 365, Emarsys, ERP, and ESP systems. These audits empower both our consultants and your team to take decisive action, ensuring your technology ecosystem runs smoothly and efficiently. This enables you to deliver an outstanding customer experience, with every system working in harmony to support your business goals.
Solution Design
For a Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Emarsys integration, we typically establish Dynamics 365 as the source of truth for customer identity and transactional history. Integration design focuses on synchronising sales data to ensure accurate segmentation within Emarsys. In many implementations, we choose to batch process transactional updates on a defined schedule rather than pushing real-time events. This trade-off reduces technical load on Dynamics 365 and simplifies reconciliation, even if campaign segments lag behind live sales by a short interval. The operating impact is balanced: finance reconciles revenue from a stable ERP record, while the ecommerce team targets segments based on verified purchase behaviour. This approach ensures marketing efforts are aligned with actual sales data and inventory status.
Defining ownership for transactional data sync
Dynamics 365 typically acts as the source of truth for customer identities and transactional history. This integration ensures that when an order posts or a customer record is updated in the ERP, that data flows to Emarsys to update segmentation and trigger automated journeys. We establish clear ownership boundaries for customer attributes to prevent data conflicts. This ensures marketing remains synchronised with live sales data, reducing the risk of irrelevant customer communication.
Enterprise security for your integration platform
Leveraging IPaaS with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and above security accreditations enables secure, efficient integration between Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Emarsys, connecting ERP and ESP systems. IPaaS simplifies connecting Microsoft Dynamics 365 with Emarsys, ensuring ERP and ESP data flows securely and reliably. The platform’s compliance with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and above is essential for protecting sensitive business data and supporting robust, scalable integrations.
Monitoring record level discrepancies and gaps
Standard monitoring often misses cases where customer attributes gradually desynchronise between systems. We surface the actual gaps between Dynamics 365 sales history and Emarsys contact fields, identifying where purchase triggers or loyalty tiers have failed to update. By monitoring these exceptions at the record level, we help teams address data discrepancies before they distort your marketing attribution and reporting.
Practical handover to finance and marketing
Handover focuses on the finance, ecommerce, and marketing teams who manage the daily operations between Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Emarsys. We focus on practical ownership: where customer records originate, how to verify that transactional data has reached marketing segments, and how to interpret sync alerts. Documentation is provided as an operational manual for the people running the business, detailing what to check on a regular schedule to maintain data integrity. We define clear exception ownership so that marketing teams can address segment mismatches while finance monitors transactional consistency. This approach ensures the team maintains the integration confidently, focusing on operational health rather than technical maintenance.
Preventing operational drift after go live
Our support model focuses on preventing operational drift before it impacts campaign performance. We monitor the flow of customer records and transactional events between Dynamics 365 and Emarsys to catch failures that standard dashboards often miss. When a sync fails or a data mapping breaks, we manage the technical resolution, ensuring your marketing team is not building campaigns on stale sales data.
Common failures
Inaccurate customer record synchronisation
Operational impact: When customer records are merged or updated in Dynamics 365, a failure to synchronise this to Emarsys creates orphan or duplicate contacts. This prevents the creation of a single customer view, meaning segmentation for marketing campaigns is based on incomplete data. It also means the customer service team looking at Dynamics 365 may not see the same contact history that Emarsys is using, leading to disjointed conversations.
Prevention / Action: The integration must be explicitly designed to handle 'merge' and 'archive' events on the Dynamics 365 customer record. A stable, unique key should be used to link the D365 customer entity with the Emarsys contact ID. This ensures updates modify the correct record, and that events like an account merge in D365 result in the correct corresponding action in Emarsys, preserving data integrity.
Delayed or missed transactional email triggers
Operational impact: If Emarsys is used for transactional emails like order and dispatch confirmations, these rely on timely status updates from Dynamics 365 Sales Orders. Integration failures or delays mean customers receive shipping notifications long after a parcel has dispatched, or not at all. This increases 'where is my order?' (WISMO) tickets for the customer service team and undermines confidence during the post-purchase experience.
Prevention / Action: Base the integration trigger on the specific, agreed-upon event in the Dynamics 365 order-to-cash process, such as the creation of an Item Fulfilment record with a valid tracking number. Prioritise event-driven triggers over batch processing for time-sensitive updates like dispatch. Implement monitoring and exception handling to flag and retry any API calls to Emarsys that fail, ensuring the communication is not lost.
Marketing campaigns using incorrect inventory data
Operational impact: When stale inventory data from Dynamics 365 is used in Emarsys, the marketing team can launch campaigns for out-of-stock SKUs. This results in wasted campaign budget and a poor customer experience. Conversely, premature 'low stock' alerts based on incorrect data can create false urgency and erode brand trust over time, while 'back in stock' notifications that fire incorrectly cause significant frustration.
Prevention / Action: The integration's logic must use a clear definition of 'sellable stock', agreed between commercial and operations teams, reflecting the correct 'Available Physical' or equivalent field from the item record in Dynamics 365. This logic must explicitly exclude reserved, quarantined, or otherwise unsellable stock units. The synchronisation schedule must be frequent enough to support campaign agility, with robust monitoring to alert teams to any sync failures.
Marketing consent de-synchronisation
Operational impact: If a customer's marketing opt-in or opt-out status is not synchronised correctly between Dynamics 365 and Emarsys, significant compliance issues can arise. For example, a customer unsubscribes via an Emarsys email, but this is not passed back to their master record in D365. This can lead to them being re-subscribed on a subsequent data sync or manually by a CX agent, creating a risk of sending marketing material against their stated preference.
Prevention / Action: Establish a single source of truth for marketing consent, or design a bi-directional sync with clear rules to handle updates from either system (for instance, the most recent update always wins). The integration must reliably sync the opt-in flag on the customer record. This process should be monitored closely, as any failure directly impacts both customer experience and legal compliance with privacy regulations.
Frequently asked questions
How does this integration help us attribute actual sales revenue in Dynamics 365 to specific Emarsys campaigns?
The integration synchronises customer and sales order data from Dynamics 365 to Emarsys, creating a rich profile for segmentation. When a customer purchases, this sales order data, including revenue, can be tied back to their Emarsys contact record. This allows marketing teams to accurately measure campaign ROI against transactional ERP data, not just front-end analytics.
We use Emarsys for 'back in stock' alerts. What happens if our Dynamics 365 stock levels are complex?
This is a common failure point, as basic integrations can fail if they only sync the 'Available physical' quantity from Dynamics 365 without considering 'Reserved' stock. A correctly configured integration ensures Emarsys only receives the truly available-to-sell inventory level. This prevents sending premature 'back in stock' alerts for SKUs that are already allocated to other sales orders.
What happens to Emarsys contact data if we merge duplicate customer accounts in Dynamics 365?
If not handled correctly, merging a customer record in Dynamics 365 can de-synchronise or orphan the corresponding contact in Emarsys, losing valuable engagement history. The integration logic must be built to handle these merge events from the ERP. This ensures the primary customer record in Dynamics 365 maps to a single, consolidated contact in Emarsys, preserving the complete customer history.
Our Dynamics 365 data is the final source of truth. How can we trust the segments we build in Emarsys?
This integration establishes Dynamics 365 as the master for core customer and transactional data, with Emarsys acting on that information. It synchronises key data like customer records and sales order history on a defined schedule, so segmentation in Emarsys is based on verified ERP data. This prevents targeting customers with irrelevant promotions, such as offering a product they have just purchased or returned.