If your marketing automation costs keep climbing but performance doesn’t, there’s a good chance your contact data is the culprit. Many organizations using Microsoft Dynamics 365 accumulate thousands of contacts that should never be marketed to again: former employees, inactive leads, outdated records. When those contacts flow into marketing automation or data platforms priced by volume, bad data turns into a recurring expense.
Why Contact Counts Get Out of Control in Dynamics 365
Contact sprawl in Microsoft Dynamics 365 is rarely the result of carelessness. In most cases, it’s the byproduct of good intentions layered on top of a flexible system.
Dynamics is designed to support sales, marketing, service, and operations—all using the same contact record. Over time, that means contacts are added from everywhere: form fills, list imports, event scans, integrations, manual entry, and CRM syncs from other tools. Very few of those entry points include strong guardrails around long-term marketing eligibility.
Common contributors include:
- Duplicate records created through multiple form tools or integrations
- Leads imported for one-time campaigns or events and never revisited
- Contacts tied to closed-lost opportunities that remain indefinitely
- Former employees and role-based inboxes that were never flagged
- Records created for sales or support context, not ongoing marketing
None of this is unusual. In fact, it’s what happens when CRM governance doesn’t keep pace with growth.
The bigger issue is what doesn’t happen after those contacts are created. Most teams never formally decide which contacts should remain marketable, which should be suppressed, and which should exist in CRM strictly for historical or operational reasons. As a result, every record continues downstream by default regardless of relevance.
And when downstream systems price based on contact volume, that default behavior becomes expensive.
The Real Cost of “All Contacts Are Marketable”
Most teams don’t actively decide that every contact in their database should be marketable. It simply becomes the default.
The problem is that many modern marketing and data platforms price based on total contact volume, not how many people you actually engage. Once a contact exists and is counted, suppressing it from campaigns doesn’t necessarily reduce what you’re billed for.
This is where platforms like HubSpot and Microsoft Customer Insights tend to catch teams off guard.
In practice, that means:
- Contacts you haven’t emailed in years still count
- Former employees and dead leads still count
- One-time imports still count
- Records created for sales or service context still count
Even if marketing never touches them again.
Suppression helps with deliverability and engagement metrics, but in many platforms it does nothing to reduce cost unless records are fully excluded from the billable database. The pricing model quietly penalizes teams for weak data discipline while offering little incentive to clean things up.
The result is a growing gap between contact count and marketing value. Databases expand, costs rise, and teams are left explaining why they’re paying more to reach fewer people.
That isn’t a tooling problem. It’s a data management problem and it starts in CRM.
Why This Shows Up Differently in HubSpot and Customer Insights
Although they serve different use cases, HubSpot and Customer Insights expose the same underlying issue when CRM governance is weak.
With HubSpot, contact-based pricing means inactive, historical, or irrelevant contacts directly increase subscription tiers—even when those contacts are suppressed or never used in campaigns.
With Customer Insights, the cost pressure often comes from profile capacity and Dataverse storage growth. As interaction data accumulates over time, organizations can find themselves paying more for storage and capacity long after implementation.
In both cases, the common thread is the same:
Contact existence is treated as billable value, regardless of whether those contacts are actively contributing to marketing outcomes.
How Dynamics 365 Should Actually Be Used for Contact Management
One of the biggest mistakes teams make is treating their CRM as a marketing database. In Microsoft Dynamics 365, contacts exist for many reasons beyond email campaigns, like sales tracking, account history, customer support, compliance, and reporting.
Not every contact is supposed to be marketable. And forcing them all into that role creates downstream problems.
Dynamics gives teams the flexibility to manage contacts based on purpose, not just presence. The issue is that flexibility often goes unused. Without clear rules, every contact looks the same, and marketing automation tools are left to sort it out after the fact when it’s already expensive.
The more effective approach is to separate contact existence from marketing eligibility.
That means:
- Allowing contacts to live in CRM for historical or operational reasons
- Explicitly defining which contacts are eligible for marketing
- Preventing ineligible records from flowing into marketing automation and data platforms by default
When this distinction is made at the CRM level, downstream systems become easier to manage, less bloated, and more cost-effective. Marketing teams gain clarity. Sales and service teams keep the records they need. And contact-based pricing stops working against you.
Dynamics isn’t the problem. Used correctly, it’s the control point.
A Practical Framework for Managing Contacts in Dynamics 365
Effective contact management doesn’t require deleting data or locking down CRM. It requires clear rules that separate who exists in CRM from who should be marketed to.
Here’s a practical framework teams can implement in Microsoft Dynamics 365 without disrupting sales or service workflows.
1. Define Marketing Eligibility at the CRM Level
Marketing eligibility should never be implied. It should be explicit.
At a minimum, define criteria such as:
- Opt-in or consent status
- Role or account relevance
- Engagement within a defined timeframe
- Active customer or opportunity status
This can be handled through a dedicated field (for example, “Marketing Eligible”) or a combination of journey stage and status values. What matters is that marketing eligibility is intentional, not assumed.
2. Use Status and Journey Stages Instead of Deletion
Deleting contacts to control costs is risky and unnecessary.
Dynamics supports multiple ways to retain records without treating them as active marketing prospects, including:
- Status and status reason
- Journey stage fields
- Custom suppression or hold flags
This preserves historical context for sales and service while preventing outdated or irrelevant records from inflating marketing systems.
3. Control What Syncs and When
Not every contact needs to flow into marketing automation or data platforms.
Use sync rules to:
- Include only contacts that meet defined marketing criteria
- Exclude internal users, competitors, vendors, and former employees
- Prevent one-time imports from automatically entering ongoing campaigns
The earlier you apply these rules, the more effective and less expensive they are.
4. Build Cleanup into Ongoing Operations
Contact management is not a one-time project.
Establish regular review points to:
- Identify contacts with no engagement over time
- Flag records that no longer meet eligibility criteria
- Reclassify or suppress contacts as roles and relationships change
This turns data hygiene into a process, not a fire drill.
Why Marketing Automation Pricing Should Reward Clean Data
Strong contact governance only works if downstream systems respect it.
Many platforms continue to charge based on total contact volume, even when teams have intentionally suppressed or held records out of marketing. That undermines the effort and turns good data discipline into a sunk cost.
Unlike platforms that count every synced record equally, emfluence separates contact existence from marketing eligibility. Held or suppressed contacts are not included when calculating contact volume, allowing teams to clean data without being penalized for it.
With emfluence, teams get:
- More granular control over CRM syncs, so only eligible contacts flow into marketing
- Clear separation between active, held, and suppressed contacts
- Contact volume calculations that exclude held or suppressed records, ensuring teams aren’t billed for contacts they’ve intentionally removed from marketing
This allows organizations to maintain a complete CRM in Dynamics while keeping their marketing database smaller, cleaner, and aligned to real engagement.
Clean data isn’t just supported. It’s reflected in how volume is calculated.
The Bottom Line: Control Contact Volume Before It Controls Your Budget
Rising marketing automation costs are often chalked up to growth. More often, they’re the result of unmanaged contact records flowing unchecked into systems priced by volume. When CRM governance is weak, every downstream tool gets more expensive without delivering more value.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 gives teams the flexibility to manage contacts intentionally. The difference comes down to whether that flexibility is paired with clear rules, and whether your marketing platform supports those rules instead of working against them.
If your contact count keeps growing while engagement stalls, it’s worth taking a closer look at how contacts are being managed, synced, and counted.
Want to see how tighter CRM controls and smarter sync rules could reduce your marketing automation costs? Request a walkthrough.
