Exceeded Your Marketing Cloud Contact Allowance?
For Salesforce customers who use Marketing Cloud, you may be aware that as part of your contract, you have a certain number of contacts included. Once you exceed this contact limit, you’ll either need to purchase more contacts or consider a contact archiving strategy.
A common question we receive is why in the CRM, do we only have a certain number of contacts, but in Marketing Cloud, we are showing many more than this. A few reasons we’ve found include:
1/ Manual import of subscriber lists without a consistent subscriber key – We strongly recommend using the CRM as your source of truth and subscriber keys as CRM identifiers. If you don’t follow this approach, not only will you have contact count issues, but you may also face potential spam compliance issues if you have two subscribers with the same email address that is not managed appropriately.
2/ Orphaned contacts – Due to data merging or perhaps an accidental import of contacts into your CRM, if you clean up these records, don’t forget to do the same in Marketing Cloud.
3/ Checking the data that is being synced into Marketing Cloud, as you may find that unnecessary records are being synced. Keep in mind that even if you haven’t sent an email to a contact yet, once the records are synced into Contact Builder, they count towards your contact limit.
If you need to reduce your contact count after investigating other possible causes, it’s time to consider a re-engagement journey. If a customer hasn’t purchased from you in a while and hasn’t engaged with recent emails you’ve sent, these subscribers are ready for re-engagement. An effective strategy is to send them on a re-engagement journey. If there is no further response when checking their interest in receiving your emails, you can then consider automatically archiving them in your Marketing Cloud environment.
Big Data Digital has helped many of our clients navigate and monitor their Marketing Cloud contact limit. If you need assistance in this area, please reach out to us. We would be happy to discuss further.
