Unsubscribe based on Person Id instead of global email-based unsubscribe

[cdang]

We have a business use case that requires us to have contacts with the same email address that belong to different accounts. This allows us to send emails that are unique for each account to these contacts. Currently when a contact unsubscribes from our emails, they have to enter their email address in the form and then it unsubscribes each person in Marketo and each contact in Salesforce with that email address (default behavior).

We are looking to build a custom landing page with a form for contacts to choose which type of email they would like to subscribe or unsubscribe from. When they submit the form, we would like to control which account the contact unsubscribes from so they can remain subscribed for some accounts they belong to while unsubscribed from other accounts they belong to. Is there a way to pass the "Person Id" or some other unique identifier through the form/landing page so that only the person in Marketo with that Id gets updated instead of every person in Marketo with that email address?

[SanfordWhiteman]

I think you're asking the wrong question. 🙂

You see, even if you could attribute a Filled Out Form activity to a specific Person ID of your choosing — as opposed to letting Marketo choose the best-fit person based on the Email Address field — that still wouldn't stop the global Unsubscribed field from propagating to all other people with the same address.

That's how Durable Unsubscribe works. It doesn't matter how you locate the lead that first gets updated, the others get updated anyway.

So what you actually need is a more robust way of setting preferences (i.e. preference center) which allows leads, regardless of whether they share the same email address or not, to subscribe to specific pieces of content only, rather than trying to use the system Unsubscribed which isn't really for that purpose.

Once you have all that in place — not before — you then can ask Marketo Support to set up a compound dedupe key for forms which will locate the person by the combo of [company name + email address]. Naturally, if you're letting them fill in their own info, this means they have to enter the company name correctly, which is far from guaranteed.

Alternately, you can skip the compound key and instead ensure that everybody gets to your preferences page via a Marketo-tracked email link. That link is unique to a particular lead ID, not just email address.

[cdang]

Sanford, thank you for your reply and my apologies in advance for the amateur questions!

We are actually planning on setting up a preference center to replace the current durable unsubscribe-from-everything option. I figure that if we introduce a preference center that is designed to update based on particular lead ID, then it cannot work in conjunction with the email-based durable unsubscribe.

As for the compound dedupe key, this will likely not work for us since as you mentioned, letting them fill in the company name will likely lead to a lot of mismatches due to spelling variables.

If I'm getting this right - if our preference center page is a Marketo-tracked email link such as the current default unsubscribe link, then only the lead ID that the link is unique to will be updated in the database and other leads in the database that may share that same email will not be updated? To follow-up, is every landing page created in the Marketo Design Studio tracked by default or are there additional steps needed to ensure the linked page is tracked?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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I figure that if we introduce a preference center that is designed to update based on particular lead ID, then it cannot work in conjunction with the email-based durable unsubscribe.

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Right. Although an Email Address not being marketing-eligible under any circumstances, including if they are deleted from the system and and reimported, is still a very valid scenario. You might know that you're managing people by Lead ID, but if  the recipient thinks you're not honoring hard unsubscribes, that won't be an excuse.

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If I'm getting this right - if our preference center page is a Marketo-tracked email link such as the current default unsubscribe link, then only the lead ID that the link is unique to will be updated in the database and other leads in the database that may share that same email will not be updated? To follow-up, is every landing page created in the Marketo Design Studio tracked by default or are there additional steps needed to ensure the linked page is tracked?

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It's not about the LP being tracked, although you also do want Munchkin to be enabled on your LPs.  It's about the link to the LP being tracked to the specific lead, i.e. rewritten to include the mkt_tok query param.

You also must make sure that the Email Address field is not on your form. (You can still display their address using a {{lead.token}}.) This ensures that the session association will be dictated solely by the ID that's related to the tracked link.

[cdang]

@SanfordWhiteman - thank you again for your insight! I think everything you mentioned will do the trick here.