Customer Email change and unsubscribe

[Anonymous]

I was curious if anyone is experiencing something similar.
In Marketo a customer has been unsubscribed from email.
If that customer changes his or her email address in our CRM and still has the option set to unsubscribed and that change is send to Marketo via API (including the unsubscribed flag).
After the update that customer unsubscribe flag has been removed in Marketo and now he or she is receiving email.
The only way to reset the unsubscribe flag is to send the record twice.
Please let me know if you are experiencing this and if you have a solution how to deal with this.
 

[Josh_Hill13]

I'm confused about what you want.

If Lead's Email Address changes, do you want their preferences to remain the same or to be reset?

[Anonymous]

I want it to stay the same, since in this case the customer was unsubscribed and wants to remain that way.  In my case the Marketo resets this persons unsubscribed flag and the customer starts receiving emails.  

[Anonymous]

This should not happen.
Double click on the activity in the lead's activity log that changes unsubscribed from True to False. What was the reason/source of that change?

Will

[Anonymous]

the reason:

System flow action sysActionChangeDataValue resetLeadEmailStatus

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

I'm having this issue, as well. Any updates on the cause?

[Anonymous]

we were not able to find out why this is happening, but marketo helped us to create a trigger that monitors the unsubscribe field for changes and if the reason action was sysActionChangeDataValue it reset the value back to what it was.  This is a workaround that was implemented and so far so good, but the problem still exists.

[Anonymous]

Grant Booth​ answered this in a previous thread:

Re: Email Address Change - Automatically Resubscribe?

"This is actually built in to Marketo, as Jenn described.

Think of the behavior as part of Marketo's durable unsubscribe. In each Marketo instance, whether or not an email address is unsubscribed is recorded separately from individual leads, and actually saved on the back-end. For example, if you delete a lead with an email address which is unsubscribed, and then create a new lead with the same email address, it will be automatically unsubscribed:

https://community.marketo.com/MarketoResource?id=kA650000000GxXxCAK

If you look at the lead's activity log and double-click the change data value activity for Unsubscribed, it gives this as a reason: "System flow action sysActionChangeDataValue resetLeadEmailStatus": the same reason it gives when someone is set to true by the durable unsubscribe I described above.

While I can't speak to the legal side of this, as I'm not an attorney, my understanding is that when someone opts out of receiving emails, they are opting out of receiving emails at a particular email address, not out of receiving emails from you in general. Since this is an "opt out" field, not an "opt in" field, there's no reason to keep the lead unsubscribed when their email address changes. If you're using the Unsubscribed field as an opt-in field (setting everyone to true and then setting the field to false if someone opts in), I recommend using a custom field instead." Grant Booth