When marketers talk about using AI for email marketing, they often first think about how it can be used for content. Can it write a subject line? Can it draft an email? Can it suggest a call to action?
While these are useful applications, the success of your campaign depends on something that happens much earlier: choosing who should receive it. You could create an excellent email and still see weak results if it reaches the wrong contacts. Audience selection determines whether your message feels timely and relevant or becomes another email someone scrolls past.
This is where AI audience segmentation becomes valuable. By combining Copilot with the customer information held in Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can begin building audiences through the marketing question you want to answer, rather than starting with a complicated set of CRM filters.
You probably have a clear idea of the people you want to reach. For example, you might want to contact decision-makers at active customer accounts who have recently engaged with your content but aren’t currently involved in an open sales opportunity. The goal makes sense in plain English. Translating it into a working CRM list can be harder.
You need to find the correct records, choose the relevant fields, apply filters in the right order and check that the resulting audience matches your intentions. This personally has always been the most challenging part of building a marketing campaign. If you don’t work in Dynamics 365 every day, you often may need help from a CRM administrator or another technical colleague.
That extra step can slow a campaign down. It can also lead marketing teams to rely on older static lists because they’re easier to access, even when those lists no longer represent the audience they really want.
Copilot gives you a more natural starting point. Rather than immediately working out which entities, fields and filters you need, you can describe the audience you have in mind using everyday language.
A request could look something like this:
“Create a list of contacts at UK customer accounts who have engaged with one of our recent webinars and don’t have an open opportunity”.
With the appropriate Dynamics 365 data, permissions and configuration in place, an agent created in Copilot Studio may help interpret that request and turn it into the logic required for a marketing list. Copilot Studio supports the design of AI-assisted solutions and automations through natural language.
This changes where you spend your time. Instead of concentrating first on the mechanics of building the list, you can focus on whether the audience supports the purpose of your campaign.
A dynamic marketing list uses a set of criteria to decide which contacts should be included. Unlike a static list, you don’t have to add and remove every contact manually. The audience updates as the underlying CRM information changes.
Imagine that your criteria include contacts who:
A contact could join the list when they engage with your content. They could leave it when an opportunity is created or when they no longer meet another part of the criteria. The audience remains connected to your live CRM data, helping the list reflect the situation at the point when you use it.
Your first request may give you a broad starting point. From there, you can refine the audience by describing the changes you want to make.
For example:
This conversational approach encourages you to ask better questions. Should existing customers receive the same message as prospects? Does recent engagement matter more than job title? Should someone with an active sales conversation remain in the campaign? AI can help turn your answers into list criteria. Your marketing strategy decides what those criteria should be.
Imagine you’re promoting a webinar for organisations considering a new CRM system. You could begin with a general list of prospects, but that would tell you very little about their current interest or suitability.
A more meaningful audience might include contacts who:
This creates a campaign around relevance rather than volume. You can then build separate audiences for different follow-up journeys. Someone who attended the webinar could receive supporting resources, while someone who registered but couldn’t attend might benefit from the recording.
We explore this approach further in Cloud9’s guide to using event data for smarter follow-up. It explains how registrations, attendance and repeat engagement can help you decide what should happen after an event.
Once your dynamic marketing list has been created in Dynamics 365, it can provide the audience for a campaign in Click.
The two technologies play different roles:
You can define the audience around a real campaign objective and use it within your existing email marketing process.
AI can only work with the information available to it. If job titles are inconsistent, account details are incomplete or marketing consent hasn’t been recorded correctly, the resulting audience may be smaller or less precise than expected. A thoughtfully written prompt cannot fully compensate for unreliable data.
Before using AI-supported audience segmentation, consider whether:
These checks protect campaign quality and help your team trust the audience being created. They also reduce the risk of treating AI-generated results as automatically correct. Lists should still be reviewed before they’re used, particularly when the criteria are complex or the campaign involves sensitive customer segments.
Copilot can help you build the audience you describe. It cannot decide whether that audience supports the right marketing strategy.
You still need to consider:
This is where marketers add the most value. AI can reduce the work involved in translating an idea into CRM logic, leaving you with more time to examine the idea itself.
Begin with one campaign and a clearly defined audience. Write down the audience as if you were explaining it to a colleague. Include who should qualify, who should be excluded and which pieces of data support those decisions.
Then review whether that information is available and reliable within Dynamics 365. If it is, you can explore how Copilot Studio and your existing marketing technology could help turn the description into a reusable, dynamic audience.
Start with manageable criteria and review the resulting records. As confidence grows, you can introduce more detailed conditions and use engagement information to create increasingly relevant segments.
The aim is to give your marketing team a quicker and more accessible way to work with the customer data you already hold.
If you’d like to explore how Dynamics 365, Copilot Studio and marketing automation could support your campaigns, contact Cloud9 to start the conversation.
