How are unsubscribed Leads counted?

[Anonymous]

If our company has a pre-purchased amound of total contacts within Marketo; do unsubscribed Leads count in that total pool of leads even if they're unsubscribed? 

I'll give an example. 

Say we we're paying for a total of 10,000 leads storage with Marketo. And 5,000 of them are unsubscribed. Does that mean we're really only paying for a total of 5,000 leads? The others are just junk we have in the system?

The easy solution would be to just delete the 5,000 unsubscribed out of the system but i'm wondering if we might run into some CAN-SPAM issues. 

Thoughts? Best practices? 

[Anonymous]

Thanks so much guys! Very helpful! I'm new to Marketo with a Pardot background. Figuring it all out! 

[Josh_Hill13]

Second Dory.

Anonymous are not counted.

Marketo really only checks that around renewal time.

What you can do is delete the unsubscribed from Marketo, but not in CRM.

[Grant_Booth]

Also, Marketo has a built-in feature called "durable unsubscribe". If someone was unsubscribed at the time they were deleted, a new lead created with that email address will be automatically set to unsubscribed.

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hi Stephen, they will count against your total number of records. If you delete them, I'd be sure to have a new field that records when and how they register for mailings (a best practice anyway), and then you will be safer on the CAN-SPAM side since you'll have proof of registration.