Understand quota limits in Customer Insights - Journeys
Customer Insights - Journeys includes quota limits that determine how many people you can interact with and how many marketing interactions you can generate. The default capacity allows you to interact with 10,000 records annually. You can review your organization's capacity by going to Settings > Quota Limit. The dashboard provides charts that help you monitor your current usage.
Know the two parts of your quota
Your overall quota consists of two components:
- Interacted people
- Monthly interactions
An interacted person is a Dataverse record, typically a lead or contact, that has had a qualifying marketing interaction. If you've been using Dynamics 365 marketing tools for several years, this concept is similar to what was previously called a marketable contact. With the default capacity of 10,000 interacted people, your monthly interaction quota is 100,000 interactions because the monthly allowance is calculated at 10 times the number of interacted people in your tenant.
Understand what counts as an interaction
Outbound marketing activities can contribute to your quota. These include:
- Email deliveries
- SMS messages
- Push notifications sent through a customer journey
Inbound activities also count. Examples include submitting a marketing form or checking into an event managed through Customer Insights - Journeys.
Know how bounces and blocks affect your quota
It's important to understand the difference between a bounced email and a blocked delivery. If you send an email and it ultimately bounces, the initial send still counts as an interaction. If the address repeatedly produces a hard bounce, Dynamics 365 can suppress the address and block additional delivery attempts. Because those subsequent messages are blocked by the system instead of actually being sent, those blocked attempts don't count toward future interaction quotas. Cleaning bounced addresses from your audiences can therefore contribute to better list quality and help reduce unnecessary delivery issues.
Understand monthly versus rolling limits
The two parts of your quota use different timeframes. Your monthly interaction quota resets on the first day of each month. Interacted people, however, are calculated on a rolling 12-month basis. Once a contact hasn't received an interaction for 12 months, that contact is no longer counted as an interacted person and drops out of your interacted people total. This rolling model is important when planning future marketing because your interacted people count won't simply reset at the beginning of the calendar year.
Remember that the quota applies across your tenant
The interacted people calculation isn't limited to a single production environment. Dataverse records across your tenant can contribute to your quota, including records associated with trials, sandboxes, and developer environments. If your tenant contains several environments, those environments can affect the total number of interacted people you're seeing.
What happens when you reach your limit?
If you reach your interacted people or monthly interaction limit, emails or other journey communications may be blocked or fail to send. If you're already experiencing higher-than-normal blocks, one short-term strategy is to focus on retargeting people you've already engaged with within the past 12 months instead of continuing to introduce new contacts into your interacted audience.
Plan around your future audience size
Before deciding how to manage your quota, consider what your marketing strategy will require over the next year. Questions to discuss with your marketing team include:
- Do you expect your audience size to remain relatively predictable?
- Is your organization currently growing?
- If you're growing, how quickly could your marketing database expand?
- Do you regularly import lists of contacts?
- How large are those imports?
- How often do you import new lists?
- Are there seasonal periods when your audience grows significantly?
- Do trade shows, conferences, holidays, school-year schedules, or buying seasons cause sudden increases in your database?
These considerations can help you determine whether you should focus on maintaining roughly your current population of interacted people or plan for an increase in capacity.
Target people you've already interacted with
If your priority is staying close to your current interacted people count, consider adding behavioral conditions to your segments. One strategy is to target people who have received at least one email during the past 365 days. In the segment builder, use:
- Behavioral > Email > Delivered
- Set the behavior to at least once in the last 365 days
- Use Email Contains Data when it doesn't matter which specific email was delivered
This helps focus your audience on contacts who already fall within your interacted population.
Focus even further on engaged contacts
You may want to go beyond people who have simply received your marketing and identify those who are actively engaging with it. Instead of Email Delivered, consider using behaviors such as:
For example, you could configure Email Opened for at least once during the past 365 days and use Email Contains Data if you want to capture engagement with any marketing email. This creates a narrower audience consisting of people already represented in your interacted population who are also engaging with your communications.
Account for newly imported contacts
Recently imported contacts present a special case because they may not have received an email yet. You can account for those records by adding a Created On attribute to your segment and using an OR condition alongside your interaction criteria. Customer Insights - Journeys gives you several options for defining the date:
- A specific date
- A relative date
- A partial date
Relative dates are based on the current date, allowing conditions such as one day, month, or year before or after today. Partial dates give you additional flexibility, such as identifying a particular month regardless of year or an entire calendar year without specifying individual dates.
Use this opportunity to improve segment quality
While refining your segment criteria, consider filtering out records that shouldn't be part of your marketing audience in the first place. That can include contacts or leads:
- Without the appropriate consent configuration
- With a history of hard bounces
- With a history of soft bounces
Keeping your segments clean can contribute to a lower block rate while ensuring your marketing efforts remain focused on relevant recipients.
Purchase additional Interacted People capacity
Segment refinements can help you manage your existing audience, but some organizations simply need more capacity. Microsoft offers Interacted People capacity packs at different tiers based on your target audience size:
- Tier 1: Capacity in 5,000-person increments for organizations staying below 50,000 interacted contacts.
- Tier 2: Capacity in 10,000-person increments for organizations with more than 50,000 and up to 250,000 interacted contacts.
- Tier 3: Capacity in 50,000-person increments for organizations planning to exceed 250,000 interacted contacts.
These capacity packs are purchased like other Microsoft licenses.
Monitor your quota from the dashboard
Return to the Quota Limit dashboard to keep an eye on your usage over time. The dashboard lets you monitor both monthly interactions and the people contributing to your interacted people limit. Because tenant-wide environments contribute to your numbers, reviewing this dashboard is particularly important when your organization has production, sandbox, trial, or development environments containing marketing records.
Use segments to monitor interaction-based audiences
Email interaction data isn't stored directly in Dataverse, which means you can't simply use standard CRM filtering to create views based on email interaction history. You can, however, see interaction information for an individual contact through the contact's Insights tab. For a broader view, consider using segments as an alternative. For example, you could create a segment that identifies contacts or leads who haven't received a marketing email or submitted a form. This can function as a running list of records that aren't yet included in your interaction limit.
Consider Power BI for additional monitoring
Another option is to use Power BI to create a dashboard for monitoring interacted contacts and leads on a rolling basis. This can provide another way for your marketing team to keep track of the records influencing your capacity without checking individual contacts one at a time.
Build your quota strategy around your marketing goals
There isn't one quota-management strategy that's right for every organization. If your audience is relatively stable, you might focus on refining segments around people you've already interacted with and prioritizing recipients who continue to engage. If your database is growing, or you regularly introduce large numbers of new contacts through imports, trade shows, seasonal campaigns, or other acquisition efforts, additional capacity may make more sense. The important thing is to understand what counts toward your quota, monitor your usage, and plan your segments and capacity around the audience your marketing strategy actually requires.
