Business unit support in outbound marketing
Important
This article only applies to outbound marketing, which will be removed from the product on June 30, 2025. To avoid interruptions, transition to real-time journeys before this date. More information: Transition overview
Admins can use business units to control access to records based on who is using the app and who owns each record.
Segment scopes, membership, and member lists
Business units affect outbound marketing segments as follows:
- Users with business-unit level access will only be able to see contacts from their own business unit, even if the segment contains contacts from other business units.
- Advanced and privileged users may also be able see members from child business units, or even all business units (depending on their security roles).
- The segment's member count corresponds to the number of members visible to the individual user. When scoping is enabled for your instance, each segment has a Scope setting, which can be set to "organization" or "business unit." In addition:
- Business unit scoped segments only contain contacts that belong to the same business unit as the segment owner, even if the selection criteria would otherwise find contacts belonging to all business units.
- Organization scoped segments can contain members belonging to all business units.
- Standard and advanced users are limited to creating segments scoped at the business unit level.
- Only users with organization-level create and update permissions are able to choose the organization scope setting.
- When scoping is disabled for your instance, all segments are scoped at the organization level regardless of who created or owns them, which means that they can include contacts belonging to all business units.
Customer journey scopes, design, processing, and content settings
Business units affect customer journeys as follows:
- When scoping is enabled for your instance, each customer journey has a Scope setting that can be set to "organization" or "business unit." In addition:
- Business unit scoped journeys only process contacts from the same business unit as the journey owner, even if the journey targets segments, lists, and/or pages with contacts from different business units.
- Organization scoped journeys process contacts from all business units.
- Standard and advanced users are limited to creating journeys scoped at the business unit level.
- Only users with create/update at the organization-level permissions are able to select the organization scope setting.
- When scoping is disabled for your instance, all journeys are scoped at the organization level, which means they'll process all contacts in the targeted segments, lists, and/or pages, regardless of which business unit each contact belongs to.
Note
Once a journey goes live, the business unit scoping is locked even if the owner of the journey changes or if the business unit of the owner changes.
Lead and contact creation, matching, and scoring
Business units affect contacts and leads as follows:
- Contact and lead records created by a marketing form submission are initially owned by the form’s owner.
- Leads generated by a create-lead tile in a customer journey are initially owned by the journey’s owner.
- When scoping is enabled for your instance, duplicate detection and matching for incoming contacts and leads considers the owning business unit. This means that you could have two or more identical contacts in the database, with each belonging to a different business unit without being considered a duplicate or match for the others.
- When scoping is disabled for your instance, duplicate detection and matching doesn't consider the owning business unit.
- Individual lead scores belong to the same user who owned the lead-scoring model. As with all other types of records, lead score visibility can be affected based on the viewing user's security role and business unit memberships.
Event registration and attendance
Event registration and attendance records belong to the event’s owner. As with all other types of records, this can affect registration and attendance visibility based on the viewing user's security role and business-unit memberships.
Marketing results (insights)
Each insight record is owned by the record (such as an email, marketing page, or journey) that generated it. As a result, the values shown can be affected by viewing user's security role and business unit memberships.
- Aggregated insights (such as the total number of emails opened) will always display their full value, but the related details may be more restricted.
- Specific insights (such as the list of contacts who opened an email) will only display the names of contacts that the viewing user is authorized to see. Other contacts are anonymized on the list.
For example, a user with business level access to email messages could see that a message was opened by five contacts, but on viewing the contact list, only see the names of the three contacts that belong to that user's business unit, plus two anonymized contacts.
LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
Form submissions, leads, and contacts generated from LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms have the same owner as the account's LinkedIn user profile record. You can, however, modify this behavior by customizing a workflow offered with the LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms feature.
Enable or disable business-unit scopes in outbound marketing
Although most business unit functionality is always enabled in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys, business unit scopes for segments and customer journeys are optional (as described previously in this article).
Important
In the current release, static segments are disabled when business unit scopes are enabled. If you require both static segment functionality and business unit scopes, then create static marketing lists and embed them into a dynamic segments. We expect to remove this limitation in a future release.
To enable or disable this feature:
- Go to Settings > Other settings > Feature switches.
- Set the Business Unit Scoping (Outbound marketing) slider to On to turn on the feature, or to Off to turn it off.
- Go to Outbound marketing > Marketing templates > Content settings, then select or create a new content setting specific to the scope of the business unit.
- Set Default for owning business unit to Yes.
Tip
The Default for owning business unit toggle will only appear when the Business unit scoping feature switch is enabled.