Handling Email Consent in SFMC Journeys
Question:
In my Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) setup, I manage email consent by running an automation every hour that updates the status in All Subscribers based on the opt-in or opt-out information captured through the Subscription Center. When a contact unsubscribes via the Subscription Center, their status is immediately changed to Inactive in All Subscribers, which ensures they no longer receive emails.
Currently, my journeys do not include explicit checks for consent. All contacts can enter the journey, and I rely on SFMC’s built-in mechanism to prevent messages from being delivered to unsubscribed or held contacts. This makes my journeys simpler, but I am wondering whether this approach is considered a best practice. Should I explicitly add consent checks in my journeys (for example, using Contact Data or Attribute Groups with a Decision Split) before sending emails?
Answer:
Your current approach is valid and technically safe because SFMC’s send engine automatically respects the All Subscribers status. When a subscriber is marked as Unsubscribed or Held, SFMC excludes them from receiving any further emails, even if they are part of a journey audience. This simplifies journey design and avoids unnecessary branching logic.
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However, whether this is best practice depends on your compliance requirements and reporting needs. Some organizations prefer adding explicit consent checks in journeys to ensure transparency and to control journey flow. For example, you can use a Decision Split in the journey that checks a field like HasOptedIn = True before an email activity.
This approach allows you to see exactly how many contacts are being filtered out for consent reasons, which is useful for auditing and reporting.
-- Example of filtering consent at data level
SELECT SubscriberKey, EmailAddress
FROM Contact_Salesforce
WHERE HasOptedIn = 1Explanation:
This SQL query selects subscriber records from the Contact_Salesforce data extension, retrieving their SubscriberKey and EmailAddress. The WHERE HasOptedIn = 1 condition ensures that only contacts who have explicitly opted in to receive emails are included in the result set.
Summing Up
Managing email consent in SFMC can be approached in two ways: relying on the platform’s built-in exclusion of unsubscribed or held contacts, or explicitly adding consent checks in journeys. Both methods are technically safe, but the choice depends on how much visibility and control your organization needs over consent handling.
While SFMC’s default mechanism ensures efficiency and simplicity, explicit consent checks provide greater transparency for compliance, auditing, and reporting. A balanced approach may be to trust the system exclusions while also leveraging data-level checks when business or regulatory requirements demand it.
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