Filtering out deleted Marketo people

[bjohnson]

Is there a way that previously deleted people that are added back to Marketo, get unsubscribed? Or is there a smart filter that can be used to omit them from being delivered emails?

[cookiemonstersa]

Here is some good info on the durable unsubscribe feature in Marketo. 

"If a person is removed and recreated, or if a new record is created with the same email address, the unsubscribe flag will not be overwritten."

You could unsubscribe them all, so when they get added back in they trigger the durable unsubscribe feature, thus not being sent anything. 


Or if the size is small and you have a record of who was deleted...You could also have a list of their email address in a smart campaign that says 

Trigger: Person is created AND Email address is XYZ
THEN
Unsubscribe, or add to a list.

Then you could use that list as an exclusion list from email sends. 

It looks like there is no way to identify previously deleted records, unfortunately. 

[bjohnson]

@cookiemonstersa @Darshil_Shah1 - would you recommend I import everyone that I deleted, unsubscribe them, then delete them again? That way, if they happen to get added again they will be unsubscribed automatically?

[cookiemonstersa]

I think that would work. However, when you upload them I would make sure you have a column on your CSV for unsubscribe that is set to TRUE for all the imported people. 

This will ensure they do not get any operational emails or other emails in the time it takes to run a smart campaign unsubscribing them within Marketo. 

Once this is done, I'd let them sit for a little to make sure the system has time to process the durable subscription before deleting them. Not sure if this is really needed but I always try to give the system a little time to run. 

You can also sync the unsubscribed people to salesforce and before syncing them uncheck 

the value that makes them visible to the salesforce-marketo sync user. This will allow them to live in salesforce but not sync back over to Marketo. Helps keep a record over time. But not needed and disregard if you don't use salesforce. 

And as @Darshil_Shah1 pointed out, make sure it's the standard Unsubscribed field and not another custom field within Marketo. 

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

If people are imported with Unsubscribed field set to True, then I don't think OP needs to run them through the SC to flip the status to False and then to True again. Master email status should get updated when a person gets created with the Unsubscribed field set to True as well, but @bjohnson, you could always test that on a couple of test records to be 100% sure.

[cookiemonstersa]

Agreed! The import with a column designated for unsubscribe should be used instead of a smart campaign, not in tandem with. 

[bjohnson]

@cookiemonstersa very valid point! Thank you everyone for your feedback! Very helpful.

[SanfordWhiteman]

---

It looks like there is no way to identify previously deleted records, unfortunately. 

---

There is one case you can detect. If someone was deleted with Unsubscribed=true, and their new record is the only record with that email address, and they were created with Unsubscribed=false — the Durable Unsubscribe activity that sets them to Unsubscribed=true is explicitly logged.

You can’t identify other cases, however. (Well, you can if you use the API to continuously archive the 14-day Recycle Bin, but that’s a whole development task. Also consider the “offboarding” approach I mention in that other thread.)

[Darshil_Shah1]

@cookiemonstersa covered it well! Just want to add a caution here that durable unsubscribe only looks at the standard Unsubscribed field for updating the master email status. If you're updating product-specific unsubscribe or non-standard unsubscribe fields in your flow, then durable unsubscribe would not update the master email status of people on basis of those non-standard fields.