Bulk re-activating users in Marketing Cloud

Question

Is there any way to bulk re-subscribe users in Marketing Cloud?

I currently have lots of users who are held, undeliverable or bounced in their _listsubscribers status but whose email addresses have subsequently been changed on Sales Cloud vs. Marketing Cloud.

From this article it seems I need to update to unsubscribed then to active: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=000322262&type=1&mode=1

But I obviously don't want to do this manually so have a data export and import set up with a query that identifies everyone who:

[1] has a _ListSubscribers status of 'held' or 'bounced' [2] has a different email address in Sales Cloud vs. Marketing Cloud based on our synchronised data extension (linked to the more accurate/up to date Sales Cloud database) [3] has not opted out of email on Sales Cloud

Everything seems to work as expected except the _ListSubsribers statuses for the relevant contacts aren't actually updated following the automated .csv import.

The automation currently goes:

SQL query - verification target data extension isn't empty - data extract - file transfer to FTP - data import from FTP to Marketing Cloud.

Does anyone know if there are limitations I'm not aware of that are stopping this from working or if there is a better way of achieving this?

I have tried updating the subscriber status to both 'unsubscribed' and 'held' using the import.

Thanks, Josh

Answer 1

You can use SSJS to bulk update your subscriber status. First you need to initiate your All subscribers list, and use Subscribers.Update on each record. The below example is done with hardcoded values, but you can easily expand it to iterate through all rows in a data extension and do this in bulk:

var myList = List.Init("All Subscribers - 778012");
var status = myList.Subscribers.Update({EmailAddress:"[email protected]", SubscriberKey:"12345"},"Active");

Keep in mind, that this process needs to run in your ENT BU