Delete all Contacts - Export all Contacts

Question

The problem: We want to reset our contact database ==> we have to delete all contacts. Unfortunately that does not work as intended with the relatively new deletion tool of salesforce.

To achieve this i created an SQL-Activity on the _Subscribers list that exports them into a sendable data extension. But the numbers between AllSubscribers and All Contacts differs by around 2000 Contacts at our side.

I then deleted all Contacts that were in the Sendable DataExtension of Salesforce. The Result is that i have 2000 Contacts still in All Contacts that i cannot delete because i do not find any solution to select all of them.

All of the contacts look like this:

And when you try to manually delete subscribers you can only delete ONE contact at a time. Doing this 2000 times is not what i want to do, rather i do wanna use an API atm.

Is there a table/structure/data_view that i could query through a SQL-Activity which can return All Contacts? I did not find any model that represents all Contacts in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Does anybody have a solution to this case?

Answer 1

Problem was the implementation of salesforce. We got orphaned subscribers where only the backend team of salesforce was able to delete them.

Answer 2

If these contacts are mobile connect subscribers, then they may exist in one of these system data views _MobileAddress or _MobileSubscription. The post here contains more details on these data view.

Another option would be to use the REST API to either delete the contacts or retrieve the contacts and import the results into a data extension.

Answer 3

I suggest you automate the deletion of these orphaned subscribers.

Here is how :

1. Create a MobilePush List with these filtrers : Device ID (Mobile Push Demographics) is null AND Mobile Phone (Mobile Connect Demographics) is null AND Email Address (Email Demographics) is null AND Contact Key (System Data) is not null.
2. Create an automation that runs everyday with : Refresh Mobile Push List activity + Script Activity that deletes these subscribers by API (cf. https://gist.github.com/wvpv/b6ccea822efc424fbad2739a53308fbc amazing script by @Adam Spriggs)