Microsoft Cloud · Microsoft Dynamics 365
As your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights partner, we deliver marketing automation and journeys that react to real behavior — not just list membership. We build trigger logic to fit your sales and service model, and ensure a data foundation that doesn't fall apart into silos.
30 days free
We set up the trial tenant in 48 hours, train your key users (2 hours), hold weekly office hours with the architect, and prototype your target use case. After 30 days you receive an architecture recommendation — you decide on adoption or shutdown.
Clear note upfront
Microsoft split the former Marketing module: customer journey orchestration now lives in Customer Insights Journeys; 360° customer profiles in Customer Insights Data. Anyone reading "Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing" in old documentation or older search results today practically always means Customer Insights Journeys. The old Outbound Marketing function will be deprecated in mid-2025 — all real-time journeys run on a new, more performant engine.
Capacity terms have also changed: what used to be "Active Contacts" is now Interacted People. What used to be "Profiles" is now Unified People. The old terms still appear in training material and third-party content — we align with the current Microsoft terminology from the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide, May 2026.
License metrics — what you need to understand
Customer Insights is licensed per tenant and includes rights to two apps: Customer Insights Journeys for journey orchestration and Customer Insights Data for profile unification. Capacity sizing runs across two metrics — understanding both honestly is the prerequisite for a realistic license calculation.
Each Dataverse record — Contact, Lead, Account, or Insights Profile — addressed within the last 12 months via a channel: email, SMS, push notification, form submission, custom channel. Anyone without interaction for 12 months falls out of the count. Records that sit in Dataverse but were never contacted don't count.
Uniquely identified individuals merged from multiple data sources into a 360° profile — the central metric of the Customer Insights Data app. Anonymous profiles the system builds from cookies don't count.
Source: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide, May 2026.
| Tier | Pack size | Capacity threshold | Min/max quantity |
|---|---|---|---|
| T1 | 5K | 10K – 50K | 1 – 8 |
| T2 | 10K | 50K – 250K | 4 – 24 |
| T3 | 50K | 250K+ | 5+ |
| Tier | Pack size | Capacity threshold | Min/max quantity |
|---|---|---|---|
| T1 | 100K | 100K – 500K | 1 – 4 |
| T2 | 100K | 500K – 2M | 4 – 19 |
| T3 | 100K | 2M+ | 19+ |
Attach pricing is available for organizations with at least 10 licenses of one of the following apps: Customer Service, Sales, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, or Commerce. The Customer Insights Attach license retains its own capacity entitlements — an exception to the otherwise standard rule that default capacities are granted only once per tenant. Source: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide, May 2026.
Phone numbers and messaging services are not part of the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license. Sending SMS from journeys requires a separate provider subscription — either Microsoft Azure Communication Services (ACS) or a third-party SMS provider, integrated via Journeys. We factor this into the capacity calculation so provider costs don't surface only after go-live.
Capabilities
Six functional areas that make the difference in B2B marketing operations between newsletter blasting and real marketing automation.
Event-based journeys that react in real time to customer behavior: web visit, form submit, email click, CRM status change. Conditional branching, wait times, re-entry points. The engine is significantly faster than the old outbound logic.
Multi-tier scoring models with demographic and behavioral criteria. Threshold-based handover to Sales with justification. We build scoring models that don't just deliver a score but also explain why.
Webinars, on-site events, hybrid events. Registration pages, confirmations, reminders, attendance capture, follow-up journey. Pitfall: webinar platform integration (Teams, Zoom, ON24) needs clean configuration — otherwise registrations don't arrive in the right tool.
Drag-and-drop editor with responsive templates, A/B testing for subject and content, personalization tokens, conditional content. Brand profile with standard footer, compliance tags, multilingual versions.
Subject lines, send times, content variants, call-to-action. Statistical evaluation with significance test, automatic selection of the winning variant for follow-up sends.
Dynamic segments based on demographics, behavior, and custom fields. Segments are recalculated on each activity — no nightly batch run like in older tools. Connection to Customer Insights Data for enriched profiles.
Typical use cases
Three constellations from our practice where the implementation effort pays off in the first year.
Example: an industrial software vendor with five marketing staff, a multi-stage lead funnel from webinar to demo request. Lead scoring by activity and company size, automatic handover to the right sales region.
Example: a conference organizer with three major conferences per year, 1,500 attendees each. Registration pages, confirmations, reminders, attendance capture, follow-up communication for repeat bookings.
Example: a B2B software vendor with a long sales cycle. Automated drip sequence with whitepaper, webinar invitation, case study, demo offer over 12 weeks. The lead moves on interaction, not calendar.
For pure newsletter sending to a few thousand recipients without a lead funnel, Mailchimp, Brevo, or CleverReach are faster to deploy and significantly cheaper. Customer Insights Journeys pays off when you want to connect Sales and Marketing in one data model.
Our approach
Four work packages we cleanly process in every Customer Insights Journeys project — adapted to your marketing maturity and your sales funnel.
Welcome journey for new sign-ups, nurturing journey for stalled leads, reactivation journey for inactive contacts. With branching, wait times, and trigger points — modeled in workshops with marketing and sales leadership.
Responsive HTML templates with your brand profile, standard footer with privacy and unsubscribe notice, multilingual variants. Building blocks for recurring block types — so marketing staff can assemble emails quickly.
Points model for demographic and behavioral criteria, thresholds for "MQL" and "SQL", automatic handover to Sales with score rationale. Test phase with real leads before going live.
Lead handover to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales with activity history and score. Reverse sync: when Sales disqualifies a lead, that flows back into marketing reporting. One data-model logic, no interface jungle.
License costs & configuration
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is licensed not per user but per tenant. The standard license costs €1,473/tenant/month, with a qualifying app (Customer Service, Sales, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, or Commerce, from 10 licenses) as attach pricing €866.50/tenant/month. The base license contains the default capacity described above (10K Interacted People, 100K Unified People); beyond that, the license scales via the add-on packs in tiers T1, T2, and T3. Marketing staff working in the tenant don't need an additional full-user license if they are already in the Microsoft 365 stack. Source: microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-365/products/customer-insights/pricing — as of May 2026.
What makes the tenant license expensive is the two capacity metrics — Interacted People and Unified People. In configuration we make sure bots, spam sign-ups, and test records don't become part of the basis, that anonymous cookie profiles are cleanly separated from Unified People, and that contacts without engagement for 12 months drop out correctly. Our License Cost Calculator calculates this.
Configuration note from practice: the temptation is great to build all journeys from a whiteboard workshop immediately. We recommend the opposite — do two journeys well, then expand. Marketing automation lives from learning, not from a big bang.
Frequently asked questions
Lean entry with two standard journeys, lead scoring, and email templates starts at €22,000 net. With event management, A/B testing, audience segmentation, and sales handover logic, mid-market engagements range between €45,000 and €110,000.
Lean start with lead capture and a welcome journey: 6–9 weeks. With complex lead scoring, multiple journeys, and sales integration: 12–18 weeks. With event management and marketing operations model: 18–26 weeks. We recommend starting small and expanding journeys stepwise.
Yes. Contacts, segments, email templates, lead scoring models, and running journeys we have migrated from HubSpot, Mailchimp, Marketo, Adobe Campaign, and Klaviyo. Active drip campaigns we pause before the migration and restart in the new tool — a mid-flight switch is risky and usually not advisable.
B2B marketing teams in IT, industry, consulting and education providers, associations and chambers with member communication, event-centric businesses (conference organizers, trade shows). Generally: anyone needing lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead handover to a B2B sales team.
Yes. Real-time journeys, email studio, lead scoring, and event management are all usable with standard configuration. Code customization is rarely needed — what takes configuration work is triggers, audience definitions, and handover rules to Sales.
Sales receives qualified leads from journeys, handed over automatically with lead score and activity history. Customer Insights Data (the sister product) enriches contacts with behavior from multiple sources. Microsoft Teams for marketing operations workflows, Power BI for marketing performance dashboards. SharePoint and Microsoft 365 for asset management.
In 2024, Microsoft split the former "Dynamics 365 Marketing" into two products: "Customer Insights Journeys" for customer journey orchestration and "Customer Insights Data" for 360° customer profiles. The real-time journey engine is new, significantly more performant, and can process triggers from any data source — not just from marketing lists like the old outbound mode.
Interacted People (formerly "Active Contacts") are all Dataverse records — Contact, Lead, Account, or Insights Profile — addressed via a channel like email, SMS, or form submission within 12 months. Engagement metric of the Customer Insights Journeys app. Unified People (formerly "Profiles") are uniquely identified individuals merged from multiple data sources into one profile in Customer Insights Data. The default license includes 10K Interacted People and 100K Unified People per tenant per month. Source: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide, May 2026.
Customer Insights tiers add-on capacity in three bands: T1 with 5K packs (threshold 10K–50K, 1–8 packs), T2 with 10K packs (50K–250K, 4–24 packs), T3 with 50K packs (250K+, 5+ packs). For Unified People analogously: T1 100K packs (100K–500K), T2 (500K–2M), T3 (2M+). List prices via your Microsoft reseller. We calculate the realistic capacity need in the discovery phase instead of scaling to the highest tier across the board — and check whether the Customer Insights Attach license (available with at least 10 licenses from Customer Service, Sales, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, or Commerce) fits economically.
60-min demo · your concrete lead funnel
Bring a typical customer journey. We rebuild it in the tool — from form submit to sales handover. That way you see what Customer Insights Journeys delivers from your perspective.
Accompanying services
Engineering projects rarely stand alone — license logic, architecture clarification, quality gates, knowledge transfer, and follow-up operations usually run in parallel. Here are the most common accompanying services we add via Discovery Spike, sprint fixed price, or Application Care contracts.
Before · Architecture
Before implementation begins: tenant structure, data model, security concept, integration mapping. The result is an architecture document any engineering team can build on — including one other than us.
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Before · CSP
Which license bundles for which users, which add-on SKUs are required, where you are over- or under-licensed. Sourced as a Microsoft Licensing Partner — with the option to use CSP purely as control without margin maximization.
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During · Quality gate
An independent second opinion during a running implementation project — whether we run it ourselves or another partner does. CMMI-based quality gates, risk reviews, fixed price per gate.
During · Adoption
Not the classic two-day workshop that's forgotten a week later — but a dynamic learning program over 4–6 weeks with initial training, application phases, and follow-up sessions. Training matrix across roles and topics.
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After · Operations
After go-live: a predictable Application Care contract with a monthly flat fee, SLA-based. Includes releases, hotfixes, enhancements, tenant hardening — and continuous guidance rather than ticket-only response.
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After · Knowledge
When the original developers are gone, the predecessor partner is no longer reachable, or documentation is outdated — reverse engineering of the existing solution with a documented result: code map, data model, customization inventory.
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More on Microsoft CRM? Find the full overview of the Dynamics 365 CRM family in our Insights area — knowledge content, not a sales pitch. To the CRM knowledge area →
Strategy background · arades topic page
Why we consistently build all our apps and recommendations on a single data foundation — and when the isolated solution is still the better answer. 2,500 words on architecture, migration paths, and honest boundaries.
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