Unsubscribe not working - and these are not Operational e-mails

[Anonymous]

I saw an unsolved discussion on this elsewhere in the forum and am now having the same issue as the original poster.

We've had a few complaints from people who have unsubscribed, but they're not unsubscribing. Also, I thought that Marketo automatically feeds this back to SalesForce and checks the "do not mail" box.

When we set up filters, we choose the "Don't Mail" and "MKTO Don't Mail" fields to filter those marked in SFDC as not wanting to receive e-mail.

What is happening, why, and how do you fix it? These are standard e-mail blasts, not Operationals.

[Anonymous]

I would start by digging in to a few questions.

Have you had Marketo verify that the unsubscribe form fields are correctly mapped to salesforce fields?  Is Marketo able to Read and Write to all of Salesforces unsubscribe fields?  It sounds like you have a few custom ones so I would have your salesforce admin check on that.

How is your duplicate situation?  Also, are you sure that somehow the unsubscribe is not being overwritten by a false value by salesforce? Salesforce tends to win data battles when there is a conflict, so something could be happening there whenever leads are merged or deduplicated.  Also, are you using any services to deduplicate web leads?  Are they set up to properly pass the unsubscribe field or any other custom fields to SFDC?  If you have duplicates, it may still be possible for one record to be subscribed while the other is not.  If both do not qualify for a campaign, but one does, you may still email the unsubsccriber.

How's your deleted in sales list looking? Other salesforce users may sometimes delete a lead and recreate the lead on another account rather than moving it so you will lose campaign history.  This creates both duplicates as well as issues if there is an unsubscribe on the record.  Could that be happening?

Could lead conversion be an issue?  Is unsubscribe information is passed on from lead records to converted lead records? 

To figure out what happened and fix it, I would download the list of people who filled out the unsubscribe form and  the list of those who are actually unsubscribed to compare.  I would save these documents and label them properly taking special note of the list of those who didn't get unsubscribed for further investigation. 

Next, I would either have my salesforce admin update the unsubscribe value in salesforce for those leads that are in salesforce or I would just change the unsubscribe data value to false and then back to true again for those with bad unsubscribe values using a Marketo smart campaign. If doing the latter, I would start for just a small group of records to see if you get a correct updated value. If that worked, I would then do it for all of them using a smart campaign. 

Take note of how many unsubscribers total there should be when you begin and double check the final count of unsubscribers upon completion to ensure it matches when it's all said and done.  

Moving forward, you may want to start adding your unsubscribers to a non-smart list each time they unsubscribe or re-subscribe (it does happen) so that you can compare to your system list for a quality check. 

Good luck.