Prerequisites of Dynamics 365 Marketing

Before we start using the system, we need to make sure you can access Dynamics 365 Marketing, so the first thing we need to go through is how to get access to the system.

The first thing you should check is that Dynamics 365 Marketing is available in your region. The easiest way to do that is by going to https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/availability-reports/georeport/ and checking if it’s listed as generally available in your region.

In this section, we’ll go through Microsoft 365 tenants and which licensing you need to use the system.

Microsoft 365 tenants

The first thing you need is an existing Microsoft 365 (M365) tenant. An M365 tenant is a location where all your organization’s data is stored. If you’re located in Europe, you will most likely have a tenant localized in the European data centers. To create an environment for Dynamics 365 Marketing, you’ll need to have your M365 tenant already set up. If this is not something your company has already done, it will need to be created before you can continue creating your Dynamics 365 Marketing environment. To learn more about administrating Microsoft 365, I highly recommend the book Microsoft Office 365 Administration Cookbook by Nate Chamberlain, available at https://www.packtpub.com/product/microsoft-office-365-administration-cookbook/9781838551230.

License

Once you have your tenant in place, you need a license. If you’re familiar with the world of Microsoft licensing, you might know that this isn’t always the easiest area to explain, but let’s see if we can make sense of it.

The first thing you need to check is if you have 10 or more licenses for other Dynamics 365 applications such as Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Supply Chain Management, Finance, or Commerce. If you have 10 or more of these licenses, then you qualify for an attach license, which is half the price of the normal full-price Marketing license. Marketing isn’t licensed per user, but per app, so you don’t have to buy multiple licenses because you have multiple users.

When you’ve purchased the base license, you get 10,000 marketing contacts and 100,000 marketing interactions included in the price. Now, let’s dig deeper into what this means.

A marketing interaction is a personalized message sent through a customer journey (where all messages from the system are sent from). No matter what channel you send this information through, it’s a marketing interaction.

A marketing contact is anyone with at least one marketing interaction registered in the past 12 months.

If you need more marketing contacts or marketing interactions than those included in the base license, you can buy additional packs for both. If you want to have more than one production environment or a sandbox or development environment, you can buy additional licenses for that as well.

The world of licensing is always changing. You can read all about pricing on the pricing page at https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/ or the licensing guide at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=866544&clcid=0x409.

Now, you’re ready to start installing Dynamics 365 Marketing!