Customer Insights – Journeys gives marketing teams powerful tools to reach the right people at the right time, but those tools are subject to quota limits that can directly affect whether your outreach is delivered. If your team is not actively monitoring monthly interactions and “interacted people” usage, you may not realize there is a problem until a campaign fails, a send is blocked, or your planned outreach must pause unexpectedly.
Everything has its limits, and it’s best to learn and understand them so you can plan accordingly and get back to what you do best: connecting with your audience.
Quota limits are caps on the amount of marketing outreach you can send and the number of potential contacts you can connect with, on a monthly and yearly basis. Once you reach these limits, any further outreach will be prohibited and could slow the progress of your marketing efforts. Marketing administrators and managers need to be aware of these limits, manage them effectively, and keep operations running smoothly. So, let’s dive right in and discuss these limits in more depth and how to avoid them.
Quota limits
To start, let’s discuss the different types of quota limits and where to find them. Quota limits are in your Customer Insights – Journeys system. You’ll find this in the settings area under Overview. Select “Quota limit”.
On this page, you will find several tiles, each containing information and data to track your monthly interaction quota limits, “interacted people” limit, interaction usage on a month-to-month basis, annual total interacted people usage, and other quota sections. The information in this dashboard is useful for managing these limits and for reviewing usage history. For now, let’s start with “interacted people”.
Interacted people
The “interacted people” limit refers to any contact, lead, or account that has been interacted with in the past 12 months. After 12 months have passed, contacts you have not interacted with during that period will be released from your “interacted people” usage, freeing up space.
Exceeding the “interacted people” limit can lead to failed sends or dropped interactions, leaving your marketing outreach vulnerable if not planned accordingly. We will discuss a few best practices and workarounds to avoid exceeding your limits in later sections of this blog, but for now, let’s move on to your interaction limits.
Interaction quotas
Next up, your monthly interaction quota is the limit on the amount of outreach you are allowed in Customer Insights – Journeys on a month-to-month basis for clients, contacts, leads, or anyone you may be trying to market to or contact. Each time you send out a marketing email, SMS message, or other form of contact, it will count toward your interaction limit. On the 1st of each month, interactions will reset, and you will have your full usage available again.
Again, it is key to stay aware of your interactions as you approach your monthly limit. Similar to the “interacted people,” once your limit is met, you risk being unable to send outbound messaging to your clients. If not planned properly, it can throw a wrench into any campaigns or important outreach and updates you had planned.
Limitations
Once you start in Customer Insights – Journeys, you are given a base limit of 10,000 “interacted people” and 100,000 monthly interactions. Your interaction limit is automatically set to be 10 times the maximum number of people you can interact with. You can think of it as for every individual you are looking to connect with on a month-to-month basis, you can make contact 10 times.
Managing these limits
The monthly interactions and yearly “interacted people” limitations can disrupt your campaigns, outreach strategy, or client updates if not managed properly. Let’s discuss a few ways to ensure you don’t exceed these limits and that your outreach operates as planned.
Contact packs
The first way is by choosing the appropriate contact pack and budget for your needs. As mentioned previously in this blog, the base Customer Insights – Journeys application grants you 10,000 interacted people, which then automatically gives you 10 interactions per interacted person—a total amount of 100,000 monthly interactions.
You can purchase up to three different tier packs to expand these limitations and give you more flexibility.
Each tier pack will add additional capacity to the base 10k people. Tier 1 packs are best suited for companies that plan to keep their “interacted people” capacity below 50k. The tier 2 package will be best for companies that require a minimum capacity of 50k but don’t plan to exceed 250k. Finally, tier 3 is best for companies that need a minimum capacity of 250k. Tiers 2 and 3 require meeting the minimum capacity to remain in those tiers.
Your interaction limit will automatically be 10 times your “interacted people” limit. Choosing the tier that best fits your needs helps you avoid exceeding your limits in Customer Insights – Journeys. You can explore the prices for these tiers and budget accordingly.
Strategic content planning
There are a few other tactics to manage your limits effectively, such as creating a strategic plan and content calendar. By creating a content calendar, you would have all your marketing outreach content planned month to month, allowing you to see exactly when outreach will go out and to whom. The content calendar can help you plan around monthly interaction limits and give you the extra push to look ahead and plan accordingly if you know of peak seasons when you will be sending out more outreach than usual.
Along with the content calendar, creating an audience segment that includes anyone not contacted in the past 6 months is another way to track users who have and haven’t interacted. As mentioned, in Customer Insights – Journeys, after 12 months have passed, contacts you have not interacted with during that period will be released from your “interacted people” usage, freeing up space.
If you are looking to re-engage, rather than by sending marketing outreach to people who have not interacted with you, it may be best to do it in smaller increments over time so that you don’t reach your cap. You either have to increase your tier or wait 12 months to regain space.
By creating a view or segment, you can clearly see how many users will count toward your limit once you make contact, allowing you to pick and choose who you want to interact with more strategically.
Customer Insights- Journeys offers many capabilities that enable very effective marketing, but those capabilities also come with limitations. Understanding these limitations and figuring out how to work with them rather than letting them work against you is what separates good marketing from great marketing.
If you have further questions on these limitations or would like to explore the Contact packs, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our consultants.
The post Managing your Quota Limits in Customer Insights – Journeys appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.