Durable Unsubscribe in Marketo Engage
Maintaining a clean and compliant email list is crucial for both legal and operational reasons. The Durable Unsubscribe is one of the most critical features in Marketo Engage for ensuring this compliance.
What is Durable Unsubscribe?
Durable Unsubscribe is a built-in feature in Marketo Engage that ensures a person's unsubscribe status is retained and propagated across all records with the same email address. This feature comes into play, especially when a person is deleted from the Marketo database and later re-created. The Durable Unsubscribe functionality backfills the Unsubscribed field to its previous state, thereby consistently maintaining Marketo database’s integrity and honoring unsubscribe requests.
The Technical Workflow
Here’s how Durable Unsubscribe ensures the unsubscribe status is consistently maintained:
Unsubscribe via Email: When someone clicks the unsubscribe button in their email client, the List-Unsubscribe SMTP header updates the system Unsubscribed field in Marketo.
Database Sync: This status is then propagated to all records with the same email address within the database.
Backfill: If a record is deleted and later re-created, Durable Unsubscribe backfills the Unsubscribed field to its prior value, ensuring continuous compliance.
The Consequences of Not Using Durable Unsubscribe
Legal Implications
Failing to honor unsubscribe requests can have serious legal consequences. For instance, under regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM, companies must respect a user’s unsubscribe request. If the system fails to recognize and honor these requests due to the absence of Durable Unsubscribe, the company could face substantial fines and reputational damage.
Operational Risks
Without Durable Unsubscribe, an empty Unsubscribed field might be misinterpreted as the person not being unsubscribed. This can lead to:
Sending Unwanted Emails: Sending emails to people who have previously unsubscribed can increase the email bounce rates and spam complaints, ultimately damaging the sender reputation.
Data Inconsistencies: If unsubscribe statuses are not consistently maintained, it can lead to data integrity issues, making it challenging to manage email lists effectively.
Marketo stores the Unsubscribe info for a person in its database forever, which means that even if an Unsubscribed record is created after several years, it’ll be marked as unsubscribed as it gets recreated in the database.
Suppose you updated the Unsubscribed field of people erroneously (due to a wrong list import, etc.). In that case, you should ideally run updates to fix the Unsubscribed field value to its desired state for the records that were updated erroneously before you delete them. Merely deleting the email from your database temporarily does not change the user’s unsubscribe request, which has legal implications.
Happy Marketo’ing! 💜
I want Marketo to remove my email for ANY mail. If it always stores email addresses, it can also use that to NEVER subscribe or email me to something I never asked for any.