Episode 5. Salesforce Marketing Cloud tips to remember

The idea is just to share my personal experience on few small but important things i learnt down the track and share with new learners on track, nothing fancy but just tips.

Table of Content:

Diff btw Contact and subscriber

Custom supression list — 2 basic things to remember

List-unsubcribe header

Difference between Contact & a subscriber

• A contact is a person you send messages to through any marketing channel. A contact appears in the All Contacts section.
• A subscriber is a person who opted to receive communications or belongs to a particular channel. A subscriber lives in the individual studios. Subscribers can be imported or created manually and are stored in data extensions.appears under all subscribers list.

Also remember : Contact information synchronized from Sales or Service Cloud appears in All Contacts, even if you don’t send a message to them.

Also as a best practise: Use the SF cloud record Id (15 digit) as subscriber key if you have an Salesforce CRM integrated with Marketing cloud using mc connect.

Marketing cloud custom supression list using data extension, 2 golden rules to remember

• When any Contact (call it a person for ease) is added to a data extension and then the extension is used to send an email, The guys on list (DE) will automatically be added to the →All subscribers list post sent and will start appearing under all subs.
• This is for suppression : In general when you have any person who you want to be excluded always from the send, You can just add them to a separate data extension (called suppression list), attach it to send && platform will respect to ensure no email is sent

Important: these guys in the supression list do not necessarily needs to exist in all subscribers list.

Again to emphasize → you don’t need to have people in suppression list to be also included in all subscribers.

Marketing Cloud list-unsubscribe option: This is an additional feature you might have noticed with a unsubscribe link appearing in emails in header at top sometimes. This is somthing email clients automatically renders from the headers and gets tricky sometimes., Because it does a slient e-mail (Mailto) back to your salesforce marketing platform asking to unsusbcribe which inturns platform changes the subscriber status to list-unsubscribed.

Situation: Usually, At times brands have their own custom subscription center (imagine this like a webpage offering them a way to opt-out from theitr publications) which is not using Sf marketing cloud subscription model. And in all emails they trigger from the marketing platform they would have this custom unsibscription link which would take their customrs to their inhouse unsubcription page.

How your business feels: Now having this feature along with standard list-unsubscribe often leads to long business discussion & resistance as most of the email clients render this as well along with their brand implemented unsubscription which further creates inconsistency from how you handle the unsubscriptions.

And business often ask you to get rid of this feature which 1) either is NOT simple enough & possible, & 2) even if you did that after contacting Salesforce support, it can impact your brand reputation & goes against the principles of CAN-SPAM.

Also on a side note: just for interest → however in some marketing platforms ( say Adobe Experience cloud (marketing platform) it is possible to set or define the list-unsubscribe header with custom ‘http’ link (unsubscribe URL) but salesforce marketing cloud at the moment only support “Mailto” option which you cannot customize.

Also, worth to see which email clients supports list-unsubscribe header and (http option)

Solution: so what to do..? what i did in one of my business clients was end up implementing an automation job which runs on nightly basis, → Query your subscriber status from a Unsubscribe data view to delta which have unsubscribed using list-unsubscribe feature (status)and → Sync them to the master database by making an http callout (rest api) which is not bad , but it costs me on automation :)

Thanks — Mohit