SFDC email sequences stopped by HasOptedOutOfEmail

[RaulEr]

Hi community,

We have a business issue with the Unsubscribed sync fields between Marketo and Salesforce.

Since Marketo's unsubscribed field is synced/mapped to HasOptedOutOfEmail in Salesforce. If a prospect or customer unsubscribes from our marketing emails, the field will be set to TRUE on both platforms. This is stopping our Sales email cadences in Salesforce, so our sales reps have to manually force these sends one by one.

Have any of you with a Marketo<>SalesForce integration and using SF sequences found a workaround for this?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well, if somebody clicks the Unsubscribe button in their email client in response to a marketing or sales email, do they mean “please don’t send me non-operational emails of any sort” or “... of this sort”?

That is, how does the recipient know you classify a send as sales vs. marketing and understand that they’re only opting out of one of those?

[derelict_wombat]

This completely depends on your organization's compliance model and regional footprint, but when it comes to opt/in you might want to consider breaking apart Sales and Marketing email opt/out fields into separate fields?  "Generally" sales reaching out to a current customer shouldn't be blocked by that customer opting out of Marketing emails.  Having a "Marketing Unsubscribe" vs "Sales Unsubscribe" can make a lot of sense.   

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

I agree with both of the comments above. You need to ensure that recipients know what they're opting out of in the first place. If you want to manage the granular opt-ins, you should (if not already) let them selectively manage their preferences broken down by type of email -- marketing, sales, etc. I strongly feel that recipients should know what they're opting out of and what they aren't. There could be a case where a recipient marks your sales email as spam if they've opted out of a marketing email, thinking that they'd not receive any promotional/sales email from your end.

One way to manage the Sales and Marketing preferences independently is by creating a separate custom field in Salesforce (e.g., Marketing Unsubscribed) that syncs with Marketo’s Unsubscribed field while keeping HasOptedOutOfEmail reserved for Sales communications. Then, adjust workflows so only the marketing opt-out affects Marketo campaigns, while sales sequences continue unaffected. This way, you'll have sales and marketing opt-in info for people on both platforms.