Activation, visualized.
Why a Salesforce Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) segment of 40 people activates to fewer, or sometimes more, and which email each person actually gets.
It's one of the most common questions after go-live. The segment says one number, and the send in Marketing Cloud says a smaller one. Nothing is broken. Between the segment and the send, every person has to clear a series of checks, and each one is a setting somebody chose.
Below is one fictional segment, "Lapsed blender buyers," activated to Marketing Cloud Engagement. Change the settings and watch who makes it through.
The settings
Who makes it through
That's what Data 360 hands to Marketing Cloud. The send can still come out smaller; Marketing Cloud applies its own rules at send time.
Every segment member (select one to see why)
What each setting does
Identity resolution ruleset
The segment counts unified profiles, so identity resolution decides how many there are. Strict rules miss nicknames and changed emails, leaving some people split across two profiles. Both profiles qualify, both activate, and that person gets the message twice. Try the rules yourself →
Activation membership
Choose Unified Individual and Data 360 activates one row per unified profile. Choose Individual and every source record activates on its own, with its own contact points, so one person with three source records can become three rows. Salesforce is firm about this: if you use an identity resolution ruleset, activation membership must be Unified Individual. Individual is shown here only so you can see why.
Contact point channel
Each channel needs its contact point modeled: Contact Point Email or Contact Point Phone, related to the Individual through its Party field. Marketing Cloud Engagement needs a contact point to build the subscriber key, so anyone without one drops out (file storage targets like Amazon S3 don't enforce this). For phone, it needs the number in E.164 format with a two-letter country code, so a phone stored as "555-0187" can't be sent.
Contact point filters
Filters narrow which contact points qualify, using the consent objects: Contact Point Consent (did they opt in to this address) and Contact Point Subscription Consent (are they subscribed to this kind of message, like promotions). Someone who opted out of their main email can still qualify on a second one they opted in with. Filters can also add a Sort By to choose among the contact points that pass; this page leaves it unset.
Source priority order
When a person has more than one email, source priority picks which one is sent. The default for Marketing Cloud Engagement is its own primary email first, then any source, any type. Delete "any source" and only Marketing Cloud's own primary emails count, which Salesforce notes will lower the population.
One value per channel
Whatever qualifies, each row carries exactly one email or one phone number. Every other address the person has stays in Data 360; it just isn't sent.
Which email wins
"Why did it send to my old email?" usually comes down to this order, applied to the contact points that passed the filters:
- Source priority. The first source and type in the list that has a value wins.
- Engagement score. With several addresses from the same source, the one with the highest Einstein engagement score wins.
- Lowest ID. If there's no score, or a tie, the contact point with the lowest ID wins.
Identity resolution isn't on the list. Reconciliation rules pick which name or birthdate the unified profile shows, but they never pick contact points; every address stays attached. Select to see his rarely opened Marketing Cloud address beat the web store address he actually reads. More on why: Data 360 doesn't build a golden record. So what?
A Sort By on the contact point filters, if you add one, also shapes which qualifying address is picked. And Salesforce doesn't document how it breaks a tie between two different sources that both sit under "any source"; this page falls back to engagement score, then ID, in that case.
After Data 360
Activation puts the audience in a data extension in Marketing Cloud Engagement. When an email actually goes out, Marketing Cloud checks every address again, on its own terms, and skips people without logging an error:
- Unsubscribed subscribers don't get commercial email. Transactional sends, like a receipt, can still reach them if the send classification allows it.
- Held subscribers get nothing. An address moves to Held after repeated hard bounces.
- Auto-suppression lists apply across the account, and anyone on one is excluded before the email is built.
So if the activation count looks right and the send count doesn't, look in Marketing Cloud, not Data 360. And keep consent in sync both ways: a consent filter in Data 360 and an unsubscribe in Marketing Cloud should agree about the same person.
Before you blame activation
When the count looks wrong, rule out timing and where you're reading the number, then work backward through the settings:
- Are you comparing the same moment? A segment only changes when it publishes: standard publishes run every 12 or 24 hours (or weekly, or monthly), rapid publishes every 1 or 4 hours. A full refresh from the activation page reuses the last segment run; publishing from the segment reruns it. Incremental activations pick up changed records no more than once every 12 hours.
- Where are you reading the count? Salesforce notes the activation counts shown in Data 360 aren't always accurate yet. Check the activated records themselves: in Data Explorer, the Activation Audience data model object for your target holds the past 30 days, and the data extension in Marketing Cloud holds what actually arrived.
- Is membership Unified Individual? If the count is higher than the segment, it probably isn't.
- Are contact points mapped for this channel? Check that the contact point's Party field maps to the same ID as Individual, and phone formatting for SMS.
- What do the contact point filters remove? Consent filters are usually the biggest, and most correct, drop.
- Does source priority point at emails you actually have? The default prefers Marketing Cloud's own emails. If those were never ingested into Data 360, or someone deleted "any source," add the sources your contact points really come from.
- Are there duplicate people? Two rows for one person usually means identity resolution split them, not that activation duplicated them.
Most of these trace back to earlier steps: harmonization decides whether contact points are modeled at all, and identity resolution decides how many people there are.
All people and contact points are fictional (example.* emails, 555-01xx phones), and the logic is simplified for learning. The activation target is Marketing Cloud Engagement throughout; other targets accept different contact points. An independent tool, not affiliated with Salesforce. More Data 360 tools