I'm pretty new to Marketing Cloud and am analyzing how to set up a new BU in Marketing Cloud, but would like to handle consent management fully within Marketing Cloud.
Ideally, I would like to fully manage my entire target marketing contacts within Marketing Cloud itself. This would mean that users that subscribe to email lists, etc would be added to the MC All Contacts table and the Subscribers tables. However, over time, if the user chooses to unsubscribe from marketing, I need to honour and maintain that consent change.
My issue that I have identified is how to handle users who want to unsubscribe from ALL marketing material. Essentially, the users no longer want to be targeted at all.
If I try maintain that consent info within MC, then I end up consuming a license seat for the users for which I have no more purpose. So essentially, I end up consuming seats for people that I can no longer target with my marketing campaigns. Rather, I would prefer to delete them from my All Contacts table to reduce my costs and free space for other users.
From what I understand, if I delete them from my All Contacts table, all related data for the users are permanently deleted from MC as well. If another business process subsequently adds one of the deleted emails/contacts back into MC, how can I ensure that I retain that consent information and not target them with email campaigns?
Is there any way to retain consent information/history within Marketing Cloud without needed to consume a seat license each time a user opts-out? Otherwise I can only see exploding license costs over time as I wouldn't ever be able to delete users that opted-out of marketing campaigns.
What kind of solutions exist to handle this? I suspect there must be best-practice designs, but I have been unable to find white-papers or other documentation to help. Is there a recommended approach for maintaining consent/opt-out data?
Thanks,
Eric
You can either filter out to-be-deleted contact in your source system or within your Contact Deletion automation use the archival DE to later cross-match hashes for new subscribers before adding them to All Subscribers.
If your local law allows for it, you can also store unsubscribed emails in non-sendable data extension and leverage that for blocking/upserts to AutoSuppression List after the Contact Deletion Process is completed.
The best way to limit constant deletions would however be creating a filter on the integration with data source to just not import previously deleted data (unless a business rule allows that for truly returning customers for example).
