Keep Your Contacts Clean
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Maintain accurate contact records.
- Decide when to delete contacts.
- Sync information from other sources correctly.
Don’t Delete… Just Yet
You’ve rounded up your contacts and figured out who was where and why. So now, what do you do with that information? Your first instinct might be to just delete all of the offending records, but that step alone is only a temporary solution. After all, you need to know how you ended up with duplicate records in the first place (and how you plan to prevent more duplicates in the future).
How’d That Get There?
Marketing Cloud Engagement accounts can store duplicate contact records for several reasons:
- Incorrect data models allow for multiple records stored in different data extensions.
- Different channels use different IDs (such as a mobile number or an email address) for the same contact.
- Incorrect data causes records to sync from other clouds.
- Processes reimport contacts even after you imported them once or deleted them.
Address Contact Record Pitfalls
This is the perfect time to introduce you to Pia Larson, Northern Trail Outfitter’s Enterprise Architect. As the person in charge of all things data, she’s tasked with reducing the number of contact records and making the data model more efficient.
Pia’s already performed the segmenting activities from the previous unit to determine which contact records need to be addressed. So let’s take a look at her reasoning as she goes through the results and decides what to do.
Determine a Unique Identifier
First, Pia notices that there’s crossover between some contact records used to subscribe to SMS messages and email messages. She decides the main issue is that these records don’t use an individual, unique identifier. It’s going to take some work, but she decides to assign each contact record a unique ID that follows these best practices.
- Data Type of text (to prevent problems when importing information from other sources, such as Sales Cloud)
- A globally unique identifier (GUID) instead of an email address or mobile number (in case the contact changes this information down the road)
- Same value for contact key and subscriber key (ensures compatibility across all channels)
Align with Synchronized Data Sources
Pia also needs to make sure that the new value aligns with information coming from NTO’s Sales Cloud via Synchronized Data Sources. Otherwise, this process could lead to a single contact having one record based on Marketing Cloud Engagement information and one record based on Sales Cloud information.
Synchronize Only Necessary Data
She also takes some time to make sure the synchronization process only brings in information that’s absolutely necessary for sends. That way, the account is less likely to deal with duplicate contact records and extra, unnecessary data.
Implement the Solution
Pia decides on a unique identifier that shares the same format as the Sales Cloud records to ensure compatibility. Again, it takes some time to combine the contact records into a single source with a unique identifier, but it saves Pia a lot of trouble down the road.
Pia also decides to put in a safeguard that ensures that email sends only go to the most recent email address for a contact record. In Automation Studio, she creates an automation that runs before all email sends. This automation imports updated EmailAddress and SubscriberKey values from source data extensions to the All Subscribers list.
Finally, Pia asks Isabella (NTO’s marketing manager) to review content that seems to lead to a high number of unsubscribed contacts. Pia wants Isabella to look at reducing the number of unsubscribed contacts so that NTO doesn’t have to maintain a large number of records for these contacts.
What Should You Delete?
It’s tempting to go in and delete all the records that you think you don’t need, but that’s not the best solution. In fact, it can lead to problems down the road. CAN-SPAM regulations require you to maintain a list of contacts who unsubscribed from email messages to prevent any further sends. You also have to maintain the same records for SMS subscribers who unsubscribe, and it’s a best practice to do the same for push and OTT channels as well.
Eliminating duplicate contact records can help you reduce the number of contact records you need to maintain. But you can’t just delete all contacts who unsubscribed, in case that contact information somehow gets reimported into your Marketing Cloud Engagement account. If you really must delete a contact record, we recommend that you add the bare minimum of necessary information to an auto-suppression list. This list prevents unsubscribed contacts from joining any further sends. Pia recommends it as well, which is why she keeps just such a list in case contact records must be deleted. This list is also a good place for contacts who constantly bounce or are unsubscribed.
The exception to this are regulations like GDPR that contain “right-to-be-forgotten” language. If your company receives a regulatory notification to remove all information about a contact, you need to go ahead and delete everything about that contact according to the regulation. A contact can later reintroduce themselves (and their information) to you, but that’s their decision.
Obviously, these strategies may need adjustment to fit your own specific situation. And remember, it’s easier to start on the right path than it is to try and shift your strategy halfway through a send. We hope you use this module as guidance to get your contact management strategy in place and help maintain only the contact records you need.
