How to reduce contacts to stay under the cap

[LauraR_CSE]

We need to delete some contacts from our database to stay under our cap.

We're debating what to do with unsubscribes.

If we delete them, they don't count against our contact database limit.

Are there reasons why we would not want to delete unsubscribes?

[Dennis_Creagh]

In my opinion there really is no need to keep them around.

We use unsubscribe to manage all of the privacy and compliance regulations. If we don't have evidence of the lead opting-in, then we unsub them and set an unsub reason. We leave them unsubscribed until we have verification of opt-in. This protects our marketers from emailing opt-outs. If the lead record is deleted at the leads request or during a cleanup job, the durable unsubscribe provides us the protection of emailing them. 

I have a set of programs that reviews the unsubscribes and those older than 9 months with no activity are deleted..

If the contact returns, through a form fill or a list import, one of our processing steps enriches the lead record so we get a fresh set of data and don't stress about keeping them around in Marketo or in an external file.

You just need to determine how much prior activity is enough to keep the lead around although we haven't found anyone that unsubscribed with a lot of activity.

Hope that helps,

Dennis

[LauraR_CSE]

Thanks so much, Dennis, for your reply. I hope to make more use of the Marketo community and its wisdom. We'll be reaching out to Marketo support directly on this. The way we have Marketo set up to handle separate and distinct clients (partitions and purposeful duplicates) means, if I understand correctly, that there is no overarching list of durable unsubscribes. I think once we delete unsubscribes, there will be no Marketo memory of that status, making uploading any list of contacts problematic.