For Microsoft partners, marketing automation decisions are rarely about features alone. They are about architectural intent, long-term account health, and avoiding cost or complexity surprises after go-live.
Customer Insights and marketing execution platforms like emfluence solve overlapping problems, but they are designed for different architectural goals.
Understanding that distinction is essential.
Customer Insights as a CDP
Microsoft Customer Insights is well suited for organizations intentionally building a centralized customer data platform. Its Dataverse-native architecture supports identity resolution, unified analytics, and cross-system intelligence.
In this model, retaining large volumes of behavioral and interaction data in Dataverse is intentional, not accidental.
This approach works best when:
- Dataverse is expected to act as a long-term behavioral store
- IT and finance actively manage capacity and retention
- Long-term storage growth is budgeted and accepted
Where Cost Conversations Are Often Missed
In many marketing-led implementations, profile capacity is well understood. Interaction data growth is often not forecast with the same rigor.
Marketing activity generates high volumes of small records. Those records accumulate quickly. When ownership of capacity planning is unclear, storage costs can feel unexpected even though they are behaving exactly as designed.
This is less a product issue and more an organizational planning gap.
A Practical Cost Illustration
At smaller scales (for example, roughly 10,000 contacts), Customer Insights typically operates comfortably from a technical standpoint. However, licensing remains tenant-priced, meaning clients often pay enterprise CDP pricing even for modest marketing execution.
At larger scales (for example, roughly 500,000 contacts), two cost drivers come into play:
- Profile capacity add-ons increase licensing
- Dataverse storage growth accelerates as activity data accumulates
Over time, storage costs can rival or exceed platform licensing if retention is not actively managed.
emfluence as a Marketing Execution Alternative
emfluence is designed for organizations whose primary goal is marketing execution — campaigns, journeys, automation, and insight — without turning Dataverse into a high-volume event repository.
From a partner standpoint, emfluence offers several advantages:
- Direct Dataverse integration without middleware
- Explicit control over what data is written to Dataverse
- Predictable costs as engagement increases
- Reduced long-term support and capacity-planning risk
Activity data remains fully usable inside the marketing platform while Dataverse remains focused on customer records and outcomes.
Functional Fit
For day-to-day marketing execution, emfluence delivers near parity with Customer Insights Journeys, including segmentation, orchestration, personalization, and reporting.
It also includes native capabilities that Customer Insights does not provide out of the box, such as:
- Social media publishing and scheduling
- Native landing pages and forms
- Unified cross-channel campaign execution
Importantly, emfluence does not attempt to replace a full CDP. It complements the Microsoft ecosystem by allowing partners to right-size architecture based on client intent.
How Partners Can Frame the Recommendation
From an advisory perspective:
- Recommend Customer Insights when the client is intentionally building a CDP and budgeting for long-term Dataverse data retention.
- Recommend emfluence when the client needs strong marketing execution with Microsoft integration, but does not require Dataverse to function as a behavioral event warehouse.
This framing allows partners to deliver value without over-architecting or introducing unnecessary cost risk.
Closing Perspective
The cost of data in marketing automation is rarely hidden.
It is often overlooked because it sits between marketing, IT, and finance.
Partners who help clients make that cost visible — and align tools to intent — create better outcomes and healthier long-term relationships.
emfluence gives partners another credible, Microsoft-aligned option to do exactly that.
Supporting clients evaluating Customer Insights or Dynamics-based marketing?
Review an architecture that keeps data manageable without sacrificing segmentation, automation, or insight. Schedule a demo of emfluence today.
Looking for the marketing leader perspective? Read the companion article.
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