Your Act-On account is licensed for a certain monthly number of maximum Active Contacts. Your total is visible on the Act-On home page, in the Account box.
How it works
- In a calendar month, the first message you send to a contact marks that contact as "active."
- No matter how many messages you send to that contact during the same calendar month, it still counts as only one Active Contact.
- Once your number of Active Contacts reaches your monthly limit, email messages will not be sent if they include any new contacts. You can still send as many messages as you would like to your currently active contacts.
- At the beginning of each new month, your Active Contacts count resets to 0.
Example: If your account is contracted for 10,000 active contacts but your contact list contains 50,000 email addresses...
- You can send as many messages as you like to 10,000 of your contacts per month.
- Once you reach 10,000 contacts in a month, you cannot send to any new users until the next month starts.
- You can rotate which 10,000 users you send to each month.
- If your send-limit will be exceeded by an email send (for example, if your send-limit is 10,000 & your email send is for 50,000), then none of the emails from that email send will be sent.
Contacts that have opted out, hard bounced, or are in your suppression lists before the current month will not count toward your active contact limit.
To increase your Active Contact limit, contact your designated account manager or customer success manager.
Check Your Current Usage
If using Act-On Contacts:
- Go to Audience Center > All Contacts.
- The first datacard shows the current month's usage:
If using Marketing Lists:
- Go to Lists > Marketing Lists.
- Click Active Contacts:
- A window appears showing your monthly limit, the active contacts used this month, and the total remaining active contacts.
You can also check your available active contacts while previewing an email message.
Check Your Past Usage
You may want to see how many total contacts you have sent messages to during a specific time period.
If using Act-On Contacts:
- Go to Audience Center > All Contacts.
- Click the Active contacts datacard (pictured above), & in the dialog that appears, select the time period at the top right to see a graph of Active Contacts Usage:
- If you want to download this as an image, a PDF, or a CSV file, click at the top right of the graph.
If using Marketing Lists, you can check past usage by creating a list that tracks message recipients:
- Go to Lists > Marketing Lists.
- Click New List.
- Name your list (for example 'Active Contacts for February').
- Under 'Set up New List Contents,' select Locate contacts with Specific Response Behaviors.
- In the 'Behavior' section, select the desired time period and choose Received Messages from the 'Add behavior' dropdown.
- Click Create.