Microsoft MB-260 is an exam offered by Microsoft that tests a candidate’s knowledge of the Dynamics 365 Marketing application. The exam measures the candidate’s ability to design, implement, and manage marketing campaigns in Dynamics 365 Marketing. Candidates who pass the exam earn the Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Marketing Functional Consultant Associate certification. The exam covers topics such as lead management, segmentation, customer journeys, email marketing, event management, analytics, and reporting. Candidates are expected to have a working knowledge of Dynamics 365 Sales, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI.
Microsoft MB-260 Glossary
- Dynamics 365 Marketing: This is a marketing automation tool that helps organizations create and manage marketing campaigns, track customer behavior, and generate leads.
- Customer journey: This is the process that a customer goes through when interacting with a company’s marketing efforts, from initial contact to conversion and beyond.
- Segmentation: This is the process of dividing a customer base into smaller groups based on specific criteria, such as demographics, behavior, or interests.
- Lead management: This involves the process of capturing, qualifying, and nurturing leads to eventually convert them into customers.
- Email marketing: This is the practice of using email campaigns to communicate with customers and prospects, often used for promoting products or services, nurturing leads, and building relationships.
- Event management: This refers to the planning, coordination, and execution of events, such as trade shows, conferences, and webinars, as part of a marketing strategy.
- Analytics: This is the process of collecting, measuring, and analyzing data related to customer behavior and marketing campaigns, to gain insights and improve decision-making.
- Power Apps: This is a low-code development platform that allows users to build custom business applications.
- Power Automate: This is a workflow automation tool that allows users to automate repetitive tasks and streamline business processes.
- Power BI: This is a business analytics tool that allows users to create interactive visualizations and reports from data.
Microsoft MB-260 E 260 Guide
- Exam MB-260: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing certification exam page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-260
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/
- Microsoft Learn Dynamics 365 Marketing module: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/dynamics–365-marketing/
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing sample data: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/sample-data/
- Dynamics 365 Marketing Community: https://community.dynamics.com/365/marketing
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing Exam MB-260 Study Guide: https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RWu3iL
It’s important to note that Microsoft may update their resources from time to time, so it’s recommended to check for the latest information on their website. Additionally, it’s always a good idea to supplement official resources with other study materials, such as practice exams, study guides, and video tutorials, to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the exam topics.
Microsoft MB-260 E 260 Guide tips & tricks
- Understand the exam objectives: Before starting your preparation, make sure you understand the exam objectives outlined on the Microsoft certification page. This will help you to focus your efforts on the most relevant topics.
- Use official resources: As mentioned earlier, use official Microsoft resources such as documentation, sample data, and study guides. This will help you to get a better understanding of the concepts and ensure that you are studying the correct topics.
- Practice with sample questions: Microsoft provides sample questions that are similar to what you will encounter on the exam. Practice answering these questions to get familiar with the format and style of the questions.
- Take practice exams: In addition to the sample questions, take practice exams to evaluate your knowledge and identify areas where you need more practice. There are several online resources that offer practice exams for the MB-260 exam.
- Get hands-on experience: Try to get hands-on experience with Dynamics 365 Marketing by creating campaigns, customer journeys, and reports. This will help you to gain practical knowledge and understand how the concepts you have studied are applied in real-world scenarios.
- Manage your time: The MB-260 exam has a time limit, so make sure you manage your time effectively during the exam. Don’t spend too much time on difficult questions, and make sure you answer all the questions before time runs out.
- Read the questions carefully: Make sure you read each question carefully and understand what is being asked. Don’t rush through the questions and take time to analyze the information provided.
- Stay calm and focused: Finally, stay calm and focused during the exam. Don’t get discouraged if you encounter difficult questions, and don’t panic if you don’t know the answer to a question. Keep a clear head and use your knowledge and experience to make the best guess.
Preparation Guide for the Microsoft MB-260 Exam
Refer to these steps for passing the exam with flying colors –
Step 1 – Refer to the exam syllabus
Microsoft provides a course outline that covers the important components to help you prepare for the MB-260 exam. These are some examples:
1. Design Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data (5–10%)
Describe Customer Insights – Data functionality
- Describe Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data components
- Describe support for near real-time updates
- Describe the differences between individual consumer and business account profiles.
- Describe support for Microsoft Fabric
- Describe the tables and relationships in Customer Insights – Data
- Describe real-time ingestion capabilities and limitations
- Describe benefits of pre-unification data enrichment
- Identify when to use the managed data lake or an organization’s own data lake
Describe use cases for Customer Insights – Data
- Describe use cases for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data (Microsoft Documentation: Audience insights for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights)
- Describe use cases for Customer Insights – Data APIs (Microsoft Documentation: Work with Customer Insights APIs)
- Describe the integration between Customers Insights – Data and Customer Insights – Journeys
- Describe use cases for machine learning
2. Ingest data (10–15%)
Connect to data sources
- Attach to Microsoft Dataverse
- Attach to Azure Data Lake Storage
- Ingest and transform data using Power Query connectors
- Attach to Azure Synapse Analytics
- Update Unified Customer Profile fields in near real-time
- Troubleshoot common ingestion errors
- Attach to data stored in Delta Lake format
- Configure incremental refresh
Transform, cleanse, and load data
- select tables and columns (Microsoft Documentation: Tables)
- resolve data inconsistencies, unexpected or null values, and data quality issues (Microsoft Documentation: Clean, transform, and load data in Power BI)
- evaluate and transform column data types (Microsoft Documentation: Data types in Power BI Desktop)
- Transform data from Dataverse
3. Create customer profiles through data unification (35-40%)
Select source fields
- Select Customer Insights tables and attributes for unification
- select attribute types (Microsoft Documentation: Manage attributes and attribute groups)
- Describe the requirements for a primary key
Remove duplicate records
- Deduplicate enriched tables
- Define deduplication rules, including exceptions, winner, and alternate records
- Manage merged preferences
Match conditions
- Specify a match order for tables
- Define match rules
- Define exceptions
- Include enriched tables in matching
- Configure normalization options
- Differentiate between basic and custom precision methods
- Configure custom match conditions
Unify customer fields
- Specify the order of fields for merged tables
- Combine fields into a merged field
- Combine a group of fields
- Separate fields from a merged field
- Exclude fields from a merge
- Change the order of fields
- Rename fields
- Group profiles into Clusters
- Configure customer ID generation
- Describe B2B unification
Implement business data separation
- Understand business unit separation prerequisites
- Access business data in Dataverse
- Implement Customer Insights – Data business unit integrations
Review data unification
- Review and create customer profiles
- View the results of data unification
- Verify output tables from data unification
- Update the unification settings
Configure relationships and activities
- create and manage relationships (Microsoft Documentation: Create and manage relationships in Power BI Desktop)
- Create and manage activities (Microsoft Documentation: Track and manage activities)
- Combine customer profiles with activity data from unknown users
- Describe how to use customer consent
- Describe how to use web data for personalization
- Describe relationship paths
- Set the B2B account relationship with contacts
Configure search and filter indexes
- Define which fields should be searchable
- Define filter options for fields
- Define indexed fields
4. Implement AI predictions (5–10%)
Configure built-in prediction models
- configure and evaluate the customer churn models, including the transactional churn and subscription churn models (Microsoft Documentation: Transactional churn prediction)
- configuring and evaluating the product recommendation model (Microsoft Documentation: Product recommendations overview)
- configure and evaluate the customer lifetime value model (Microsoft Documentation: Customer lifetime value (CLV) prediction)
- Configure and manage sentiment analysis
Implement machine learning models
- describe prerequisites for using custom Azure Machine Learning models in Customer Insights – Data (Microsoft Documentation: Custom machine learning models)
- Create and manage workflows that consume machine learning models (Microsoft Documentation: Deploy machine learning models to Azure)
- Describe prerequisites for using custom models from Azure Synapse Analytics in Customer Insights – Data
5. Configure measures and segments (15–20%)
Create and manage measures
- Create and manage tags
- describe the different types of measures (Microsoft Documentation: Create measures for data analysis in Power BI Desktop)
- create a measure (Microsoft Documentation: Create Measures)
- configure measure calculations (Microsoft Documentation: Create measures for data analysis in Power BI Desktop)
- modify dimensions (Microsoft Documentation: Modify or Delete a Database Dimension in Solution Explorer)
- Schedule Measures
Create and manage segments
- Describe methods for creating segments, including segment builder and quick segments (Microsoft Documentation: Working with segments)
- create a segment from customer profiles or measures (Microsoft Documentation: Suggested segments)
- Create a segment based on a prediction model
- Project attributes
- Schedule segments
Find suggested segments
- describe how the system suggests segments for use (Microsoft Documentation: Segments overview)
- create a segment based on a measure (Microsoft Documentation: Suggested segments based on activity data)
- Create a suggested segment based on activity
Create segment insights
- configure overlap segments (Microsoft Documentation: Segment insights)
- configure differentiated segments (Microsoft Documentation: Customer segmentation and targeting)
- Review the overlap or differentiator analysis
- Find similar customers by using AI
6. Configure third-party connections (5–10%)
Configure connections and exports
- configuring a connection for exporting data (Microsoft Documentation: Data export service)
- create a data export (Microsoft Documentation: Export case data in eDiscovery)
- define types of exports (Microsoft Documentation: Exports)
- configure on demand and scheduled data exports (Microsoft Documentation: Exports)
- define the limitations of segment exports
Implement Data Enrichment
- enrich customer profiles (Microsoft Documentation: enrich customer profiles)
- configure and manage enrichments (Microsoft Documentation: Data enrichment)
- enrich data sources before unification (Microsoft Documentation: Enrichment for data sources)
7. Administer Customer Insights – Data (5–10%)
Create and configure environments
- identify who can create environments (Microsoft Documentation: Create and manage environments in the Power Platform admin center)
- differentiate trial and production environments (Microsoft Documentation: Environments overview)
- Connect Customer Insights – Data to Dataverse
- Connect Customer Insights – Data with Azure Data Lake Storage Account
- Manage environment
- Assign user permissions (Microsoft Documentation: Assign user permissions)
- Create an environment in Customer Insights – Data
- Manage keys in Azure key vault
Manage system refreshes
- differentiate between system refreshes and data source refreshes (Microsoft Documentation: Refresh database)
- describe system refresh policies (Microsoft Documentation: Overview of the Office cloud policy service for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise)
- configure a system refresh schedule (Microsoft Documentation: Configure update settings for Microsoft 365 Apps)
- monitor and troubleshoot refreshes (Microsoft Documentation: Performance troubleshooting plan for Office 365)
Step 2 – Refer to Exam Format
The Microsoft MB-260 exam contains 40-60 questions. Exam questions include scenario-based single-answer questions, multiple-choice questions, arrange in the correct order type questions, drag & drop questions, and mark review, drag, and drop type questions. To pass the exam, a candidate must obtain a score of 700 or higher. In addition, the Microsoft MB-260 exam is only available in English and costs $165 USD.
Step 3 – Devise a Study Strategy
The next step is to devise a study strategy for your preparations. Keep the course topics and the time remaining for the real exam in mind as you plan. Remember to start with your weaker areas. Pay close attention to exam topics that have a higher weightage. Following your plan will help you stay consistent and avoid distractions. The key to success is to start early, so get started and stay motivated.
Step 4 – Refer to the best learning resources
There are numerous Learning Resources on the market to assist you in preparing for the Microsoft MB-500 exam. Furthermore, Microsoft also offers the following Learning Resources to assist you in studying for the exam.
Microsoft Learning Platform
Microsoft provides access to learning platforms with a variety of tools to assist you in exam preparation. Visit the Microsoft website to learn everything there is to know about the Microsoft MB-260 exam and how to prepare for it. As a result, candidates will benefit in terms of better studying subjects and passing the test.
Microsoft Docs
The Microsoft documentation is a knowledge base that provides in-depth information on the Microsoft MB-260 exam test subjects. You can also learn about the various scales of different Azure services by consulting Microsoft documentation. This is made up of courses that will help you learn a lot about the various services and ideas covered in the test.
Online Study Groups
Candidates may benefit from online study groups when studying for exams. Joining study groups, in other words, will keep you in touch with experts and professionals who are already on this path. This group can also be used to discuss your test-related question or concern, as well as to study for the Microsoft MB-260 exam.
Practice Tests
Taking practice exams is critical for improving your preparation. You will learn about your weak and strong points by assessing yourself with Microsoft MB-260 practice exams. You will also be able to improve your response skills, allowing you to save significant time during the exam. Taking the Microsoft MB-260 exam practice tests after completing a subject is the best way to progress. This will also help with revision. So, to prepare for the Microsoft MB-260 exam, go online and look for the best practice exam tests.
