Consent Management In Customer Insights Journeys

Managing bounces, blocked emails and overall consent isn’t my idea of fun, and guessing it isn’t yours either. BUT if you are going to send out emails to your prospects, customers, and subscribers, it’s important and something you need to be aware of. Others (including myself) have written about ways to manage it in the past, but there are always times manual intervention might be needed. If you aren’t already reviewing your emails in Live or Completed Journeys. get started with some of these tips for consent management.

First, what happens when someone you send an email to hard or soft bounces or marks it as spam? This page from Microsoft gives you ALL of the details as a good starting point. It’s good to note that if an email gets added to the suppression list for your organisation, this is how long they stay on. This isn’t so you can sit back and do nothing, but more to give you time to review and ‘fix’ the issue by doing something about it.

First thing to add to your to do list, check the Insights of an email after an email has been sent (or make it a regular thing for ongoing journeys). The delivery and interactions details is what you need. This will show you anything blocked, failures, those marked as spam or unsubscribes. Focusing on the blocked, you can see all of them by default. If you want to filter for specific ones you can do that from the top drop down. Note that Duplicate Address is one of the reasons but not in the list (bug?). Clicking on the name of the person in the Profile column will take you to the Lead or Contact record.

Same with Delivery failed. This will give you all of them, those that were hard bounced or those that were soft bounced, and other. I would focus on the Hard bounces first to resolve. Soft bounces you might want to leave it a few times before you take action. For example, full mailbox could be the reason. Opting the person out isn’t necessary immediately as they could clear their mailbox prior to the next time you send. Just keep an eye on them and be sure to start reviewing the category and details to understand more about the soft bounce.

After opening the record, click on the Communication tab. If you don’t have this it’s going to be due to custom forms and your System Administrator not knowing how important this is. You can share this link with them that explains how to add it to the form and what security access is needed to view and interact with the communication control. After selecting the correct Compliance profile, click on the Edit link next to the Contact Point Consent record you wish to review.

Rather than continuing to send to someone whose emails has bounced (doesn’t exist etc), take matter in to your own hands and change the value to Opted Out. I suggest using the Requested By field to add in something short and succinct to indicate why you are doing this. This way it keeps everything clear and obvious to everyone internally why someone was Opted Out. If you are only storing records for emailing (and they are not a customer for example), you could also consider making the record Inactive, but figure out your own internal process before you merrily do this.

Not all updates are related to your email insights. Anyone who has worked in marketing for any length of time knows the value of auto replies from people. You send out your email, and you have a reply to email address that will get all responses that come back. So make sure this is a mailbox you have access to, then go through it every so often. It’s often a gold mine of information (among all the hooray I am on vacation emails) that tells you if mailboxes are being monitored and if people have left the organisation. So go through these and each time you come across someone who no longer works for a company, go to the Contact Point Consent area and filter the records by that email address. From here you can follow the steps above by changing the consent value and adding brief details in the Requested By field. If that person is a client, you might also want to share with their Account Manager or Sales Representative (they should thank you!).

Finally, you could even create a custom page or canvas app giving you the ability to quickly find Contact Point Consent records by email address that are Opted In or Opted Out, and from one screen update both the consent record AND any related Contacts or Leads. Looks pretty right?

I’m not saying it’s easy or a quick job, but it will help make sure you don’t get a slap on the wrists from Microsoft or keep on trying to periodically sent emails to the same addresses that keep getting added to the suppression list. So figure out what your process is going to be, schedule in time each week and stick to it. You can be comfortable knowing that at least the marketing consent data is clean and up to date each time you send out new emails.

Original Post http://meganvwalker.com/consent-management-in-customer-insights-journeys/