We've been using Salesforce to send out Email campaigns for a good numbers of years now. When we first started using it, we were using it as the platform intended it, which is, using the publication lists to segment and to associate Data Extensions in an User-initiated Email send to send out campaigns and managing Subscribers' marketing preferences within the platform. However, along the way(before I even joined the company), we have moved the preferences management outside of the platform via an "unsub" link to an external site.
As a result of this, there may be some subscribers' information that get "stuck" within the platform and may never be informed of the updates/changes that may be happening in the external platform so if a subscriber has unsubscribed from the global list before but have since opt-in from the external site means that Salesforce will never send emails to that subscriber. You can assume that the external platform becomes the one central location that manages the subscribers' information and the data extensions that we receive when it gets imported into Salesforce are "washed" based on those information.
Now, I'm looking an overall solution to manage this and if anyone has experience in this can advise on what I should do but otherwise I have a slight idea of what I can do and maybe me asking specific questions might help, so here goes:
- It sounds like the first thing I need to do is to start fresh, deleting all subscribers and receive new data extensions since all new data extensions would presumably be current/recent. This should eliminate the subscribers' data inconsistency.
- Treat all email sends as "Transactional Emails" set in Send classifications, even for Marketing/Commercial emails so as to ensure no one can unsub from the platform.
Please discuss, advise or recommend.
Thanks, Elvin