Durable unsubscribe on custom field

[Micaela_Wright]

We have a unique use case we're wondering if you could help with. We have two products using the same marketo instance without a partition. Our engineering team has done work to separate the unsubscribe job to feed two custom fields - but we're worried about durable unsubscribes with these new fields. Is there a way to change these new fields to operate the same as the global "unsubscribe" field does as far as durable unsubscribes?

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

No.

Durable Unsubscribe is tied to the main Unsubscribed field in Marketo. You should adjust your workflow to flag Unsubscribed.

If you are essentially running a subscription center, and someone no longer wants email for Product A, but is ok with Product B, that is not the same as entirely Unsubscribing.

i'd be worried that you are telling people they are unsubscribed, when in fact, they only stopped emails from one Product. Can you share more about your entire process?

[Micaela_Wright]

Both products require their own sign-up process - so when someone registers for Product 1, they rarely register for Product 2 (although there is some overlap). We do have separate subscription management pages for each product that would feed these fields.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well, some overlap isn't no overlap. The devil is in those edge (or not-so-edgy) cases.

But as Josh says, only the system Unsubscribed field persists in the way you want. So you would have to sync to that field at some point before purging a lead, otherwise Marketo won't remember their last status.

[SanfordWhiteman]

The other thing we do is offboard leads to a suppression list using a webhook.  In other words, just before deleting a lead, call a webhook to save its salient data values to an offline file (could be a Google Sheet or some other source). Then when creating a new lead, as part of the onboarding process call the webhook again to get the lead's last values back.