Subscription management for purposeful duplicates

[Jeff_Smith3]

Our instance is set up with partitions divided out by business unit. Because of this, we have purposeful duplicates that act like separate leads (if they have overlapping interest) among the different BUs. My question is, even though we dedupe off two fields (email and business unit), a record that unsubscribes from emails for one business unit will have the duplicate(s) in other units also be unsubscribed, correct? I guess another follow up question is, COULD we potentially email them still from the other business unit, or is this illegal/unethical if the different brands all roll up to one company? Thanks for any insight here!

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

My understanding is that once a lead unsubs, it is recorded to a Master Table behind the scenes. In theory, then if a lead matches that email again, it will not be sent. However, this was intended for deletion of records.

I know from dupe processing that if one lead is unsubbed, but another is not, the lead will still get sent an email under several circumstances. I believe in your case, you could definitely send them another email, especially since you have dupes in different LPs.

I would TEST this with your own records to see how it works.

As for the legal issues, that is for a lawyer. I suspect the company could be held liable as a whole, not just the BU. You could argue that a separate corporate division/wholly owned sub can have a separate relationship and since they subscribed to the others, this was ok. But I wouldn't stake my job on that w/o speaking with a lawyer.

As for ethics, I would say it is only unethical if your unsub page implied the lead could unsubscribe from ALL company emails, not just the one BU. So you should make that clear if you have separate unsub pages.

Also, this depends greatly on how you have structured your sub mgmt system and the ability for the Default to see all/none of the leads.

[Jeff_Smith3]

We did a recent import of customers from BU1 into BU2 for the purpose of having an exclusion list. That way these customers wouldn't be sent emails from our other business unit that may create conflict. What I discovered, though, was that new leads were created upon import since it was a separate partition; however, many of the new leads were already unable to receive email communications. That makes me think that you are right about a Master Table because Marketo already recognized many of them as having unsubscribed, despite the fact that they were separate leads in a separate business unit LP. 

I'll have to look more into the issue of whether or not the different units can have different subscription preferences. Thanks for your analysis here!