Does unsubscribe apply to a person or an email address?

[Anonymous]

Our contact owners have come up with an interesting question for us. If a contact previously unsubscribed from receiving any email communications from our company, then moves companies and so has a new email address, can the contact owner opt them back in to receiving our emails?

Basically - does the opt out apply to the email address the person opted out, or does it apply to the person regardless of their email address?

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Rachel, Marketo has a 1:1 relationship for email addresses, so it only looks at one email address for each record. For this reason, the unsubscribe is based on the email address. 

[Dory_Viscoglio]

But, an owner opting someone into emails is a poor practice -- one that I'd discontinue immediately if possible. You always want to have a record of a person opting themself into your emails. 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

If you are asking how Marketo works,
Unsubscribe applies to a Marketo lead record with email address. If the person moves company and a brand new separate lead with different email address is created for that same person, as per as Marketo is concerned, its a different lead and it would not be unsubscribed automatically.

But I think your question might be a functional one.
Are you asking, in the case we have a lead which is unsubscribed in Marketo and the contact owener finds out that the person moved to another company, shall we change the email address of this lead and re-subscribe it?

I would say, a different lead with the new email address should be created and included in emails till unsubscribed. Do not undate the current lead which is unsubscribed.

It would be prudent to check with legal department of your company though. Any views community?

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the quick responses! I am indeed asking about actual best practice, not mechanics of how Marketo works.

And no, contact owners cannot opt in. They're asking the system admins to do it and the admins would like to ensure they're not breaking any spam rules or general best practices by doing this.

Creating a new lead is an interesting option. I think the sales team likes to keep all the contact's previous company info so we know their previous activity. But I'm sure there's a way to link the contact records to each other. I'll see if this works for them!

[Josh_Hill13]

Rachel,

If a lead transfers to a new firm, then that person should have a new record in SFDC. ...they are effectively new and to change their old record might break some of the reporting for previous clients, etc.

I treat each email as separate, however, if someone were to create three email addresses and only 1 is unsubscribed, then I would merge the 3 records and maintain the unsubscribe.

Never let Sales directly change subscription options.

[Anonymous]

An additional point, just so folks are aware. We actually have a feature, "Durable Unsubscribe" so that if a lead unsubscribes once and either gets deleted or a duplicate lead with the same email address comes back into the system we will still treat it as unsubscribed.

[Anonymous]

I'd like to learn more about this "Durable Unsubscribe" is there any documentation on how to implement this feature? Erik Rehn​

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Jayson, this isn't something that needs to be "implemented", it's an automatic feature that is applied if you reimport/readd an email address to your database that was previously listed as unsubscribed.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Dory...how does the system know though if the lead was deleted? Is there a shadow copy of that email subscription status that does not appear in the lead database?