Merging dupes & subscriptions

[Olya_Zenchenko]

Hi Marketo community,

I'm after some best practice advice please…. 

I have noticed whilst merging duplicate records, people have previously been subscribed to our newsletters on their old account (email address), however on the duplicate account (new workplace) they are not subscribed.

Given the person was receiving our content previously, in merging is it ok for me to add the subscriptions back on to their correct record?

Thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman]

This is ultimately a legal question, so one that no one here (even if some of us went to law school!) can answer definitively.

If by "not subscribed" you mean "deliberately unsubscribed", then the latest timestamp for that unsubscribe action is clearly the most authoritative. That is, if I have 2 records in your system with the same email address, and I go to your unsubscribe page, that needs to be propagated to all matching records immediately, regardless of whether other fields on those matching records should "win" in a merge.

If by "not subscribed" you mean "not yet subscribed" then it's going to depend on your local/applicable regulations -- but most likely, if you can prove that someone subscribed, and the other matching leads simply took no action, you're fine to propagate the subscribe.

This is point #whatever about why you should always timestamp changes to legally interesting fields. You want to go beyond Booleans and have Datetimes (timestamps) as well (or instead).