Checking Contact Attributes Or Contact Point Consent Records In Realtime Marketing

*** NOTE: ALL INFORMATION IS ACCURATE AT DATE OF PUBLISHING ***

If you aren’t already aware, it’s good to understand the difference between how consent is handled in Outbound Marketing vs. Realtime Marketing specifically for Contacts. Outbound looks at three different fields on the Contact record. You have a an Email field, Bulk Email field and Allow Tracking field. All are set to either Allow or Do Not Allow. For Realtime Marketing we now have Contact Point Consent records that indicate if someone has opted in or opted out of Commercial, Transactional or Tracking purposes (along with Topics) if set up. If you are using Realtime, it still will look at those three Contact fields, but did you know you can turn that off? Let’s take a look to understand how it works.

First, there is a feature switch in the Settings area that will be turned on by default. This makes sure that Realtime Journeys and the message sent out will still look at those three values on the Contact and determine what can and can’t happen. I’ll leave this on for now.

If I navigate to a Contact and look at the Communication tab, I can see there is a red banner along the top that indicates sending email to them is blocked by settings.

We can see that all aspects of communication for the Contact are blocked. Nothing will be tracked, and no communication at all will be sent which includes both Commercial and Transactional messages.

Clicking on the Manage button provides more information and also provides the ability to change the values for the three fields from Do Not Allow to Allow. It also explains what each field controls the ability to do. Even if you are sending out communications via Realtime Journeys and someone has Opted In via a form or you’ve manually imported or added a Contact Point Consent for them, these three fields below would override that.

Now if I leave all of these set to Do Not Allow, but go back to the feature switch and turn it off, we are stating that we don’t care about these fields, and instead want to make sure it is ONLY the Contact Point Consent records that are looked at, let’s see what happens.

Ok, immediately we see that there is no red, and communication can be sent, and tracking will be allowed. It’s important not to just turn this switch off without really considering your data. If for example, your Compliance Profiles are set up as Non-Restrictive, meaning you will be able to send email to people who haven’t actually Opted In yet (and only exclude those who have Opted Out), and you haven’t yet migrated any Contact Point Consent setting records in, you are running the risk of emailing people who previous opted out via Outbound Marketing. So turn it off only if you 100% CERTAIN you will remain compliant and not send unwanted emails.

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