Planning consent management in Customer Insights – Journeys

Consent management in Customer Insights – Journeys requires several important decisions, especially if you're transitioning from Outbound Marketing to Real-Time Journeys. Before configuring consent, consider:

• Which compliance and privacy laws apply to your organization.
• How restrictive your consent model needs to be.
• Which subscription or marketing lists need to move from Outbound to Real-Time.
• Which marketing topics you plan to use and whether those topics have different audiences.
• How leads and contacts enter your system, including through forms, integrations, or manual entry.
• Whether integrations or internal processes will need to change as your consent model changes.

Thinking through these areas before configuring Real-Time consent can help prevent unintended changes to who receives your marketing communications.

Understanding privacy and marketing regulations

Several data privacy and anti-spam regulations can influence how organizations collect and manage consent. The European Union's GDPR places strong requirements around consent. Consent must be freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous, and requests for consent should use clear, understandable language. Individuals also receive significant rights related to how their personal information is collected and used. CAN-SPAM in the United States follows a different approach to commercial email. Rather than requiring explicit opt-in in every case, it emphasizes recipients' ability to easily opt out of marketing communications. California's CCPA provides California residents with rights related to their personal information, including the ability to know what information is collected, request deletion, and opt out of certain uses or sharing of their data. Canada's CASL establishes requirements around commercial electronic messages and consent. These regulations are complex, and which requirements apply will depend on factors such as where your organization operates and where your recipients are located. Make sure your organization understands the specific privacy and marketing requirements that apply to its activities.

Using double opt-in

Double opt-in adds an additional layer of confirmation when someone subscribes to marketing communications. Instead of treating a form submission as the final confirmation, double opt-in sends an additional message asking the recipient to confirm their subscription. This can help ensure that your marketing audience consists of people who actively want to receive your content. It can also help protect against situations where someone enters another person's email address into a form without that person's knowledge. A more engaged audience can lead to cleaner marketing lists and more meaningful engagement metrics.

Enabling double opt-in

A system administrator can enable double opt-in from the Customer Insights – Journeys settings. Navigate to Feature Switches, find the Compliance section, turn on the double opt-in feature, and save your changes. Once the feature is enabled, you'll also need to configure double opt-in for the appropriate compliance profiles. Open the compliance profile, navigate to its Double opt-in section, and enable the feature for that profile. Double opt-in can then be enabled for forms that use consent purposes or topics associated with that compliance profile. Existing forms are not automatically switched to double opt-in, so make sure you revisit them and enable the option where appropriate.

Customizing the double opt-in experience

When someone submits a form that uses double opt-in, Customer Insights – Journeys can automatically send the confirmation through a journey. You can customize this process to better fit your organization's requirements. For example, you could add a reminder if someone hasn't confirmed their subscription after a certain period. You can also review double opt-in analytics for forms where the feature is enabled, including confirmed and pending subscriptions.

Checking existing contact consent during your transition

Another important setting to review when moving from Outbound Marketing is Check contact consent in real-time journeys. When enabled, Real-Time Journeys can consider consent-related information stored on the Contact record alongside the contact point consent records used by Real-Time. This can be particularly useful while you're transitioning away from Outbound Marketing. Be cautious about changing this setting. Depending on your compliance profile configuration and whether your contact point consent has already been migrated, changing how consent is evaluated could result in communications being sent to people who previously opted out. Consent settings are interconnected, so consider how a change could affect the rest of your configuration before modifying it.

Choosing a compliance enforcement model

Your Real-Time consent setup begins with your compliance profiles. Within a compliance profile, consent can be organized around purposes such as:

• Commercial
• Transactional
• Tracking

For commercial communications, you'll need to select an enforcement model.

Restrictive

With a restrictive model, recipients must have the required opt-in before receiving commercial marketing communications. Without the appropriate consent, the message will not be sent.

Non-restrictive

With a non-restrictive model, commercial communications can continue unless the recipient explicitly opts out.

Disabled

When enforcement is disabled, the system doesn't check opt-in status before sending that type of message. This may be appropriate for certain transactional communications that need to reach a customer regardless of their marketing preferences, depending on your organization's requirements. Carefully consider applicable regulations and your business processes before choosing an enforcement model.

Using topics to manage specific interests

Consent can become more granular through the use of topics. Your organization may communicate about several product lines, services, offers, or areas of interest under the same broader commercial purpose. Topics can help distinguish those communications so recipients have more control over the content they want to receive. As you transition from Outbound Marketing, consider how your existing marketing and subscription lists correspond to the purposes and topics you'll create in Real-Time Journeys.

Setting up contact point consent

After establishing your compliance profile, you can begin configuring contact point consent. Navigate to Consent Center in Real-Time Journeys. You can manually create records, which can be useful when initially testing your compliance configuration with internal contacts. When transitioning from Outbound Marketing, it's a good idea to test your compliance model before importing your existing consent information. That gives you an opportunity to confirm that your rules behave as intended before applying them to a larger audience. You can then use Load consent to bring existing consent information into Real-Time. Depending on your migration requirements, this can include leads, contacts, subscription lists, or marketing lists. The process evaluates those records against the compliance configuration and establishes appropriate consent information for purposes and topics. For large or complex contact databases, plan this migration carefully and allow enough time to complete and validate it before beginning your Real-Time marketing activities.

Consider every communication channel

Consent isn't limited to email. If your organization communicates through channels such as SMS, phone calls, or custom channels, make sure the appropriate contact point consent exists for those communication methods as well. This is one reason planning your compliance profiles first is so important. Importing consent before your compliance structure is finalized can create records that don't align with your intended consent model.

Using one-click unsubscribe

Another valuable email feature in Customer Insights – Journeys is one-click unsubscribe. One-click unsubscribe makes it easier for recipients to stop receiving communications they no longer want. In addition to supporting compliance and email deliverability practices, this can improve the quality of your marketing audience by allowing disengaged recipients to leave your list easily. One-click unsubscribe does not replace the traditional unsubscribe or preference center links that may appear in your email footer. Instead, it provides an additional, email-client-friendly way for recipients to unsubscribe. Depending on the email client, the option may appear near the top of the message or through another interface provided by the email application.

How one-click unsubscribe affects consent

In Real-Time Journeys, the results of one-click unsubscribe depend on the purpose and topic associated with the email. If an email is associated only with a commercial purpose, using one-click unsubscribe can opt the recipient out of that purpose. If an email includes a specific topic, the unsubscribe can apply to that topic while leaving its parent purpose unaffected. This makes it possible for someone to stop receiving messages about one subject while remaining eligible for different communications under the broader purpose. Customer Insights – Journeys updates the recipient's contact point consent records to reflect the unsubscribe action.

A practical order for setting up consent

Because Real-Time consent contains many interconnected components, the order in which you configure them matters. A practical sequence is:

1. Configure your compliance profile first. Treat this as the foundation of your consent management strategy.
2. Review how existing contact consent will be checked. If you're changing how Real-Time handles Outbound consent fields, make that decision before importing contact point consent.
3. Plan your move to Real-Time forms. If you continue using Outbound forms after your initial consent migration, you may need to load consent again as new information is collected.
4. Load your contact point consent. Determine how existing Outbound information will be brought into Real-Time and how new records will receive the appropriate consent.
5. Configure double opt-in. Enable it when appropriate and revisit your forms to make sure they use the setting where needed.
6. Customize the double opt-in journey if necessary. Adjust the confirmation experience to support your process and brand.
7. Enable one-click unsubscribe. This can be configured independently without changing the rest of your compliance configuration.

Build consent into your marketing strategy

Consent management shouldn't be treated as an isolated technical setting. Compliance profiles, enforcement models, contact point consent, forms, double opt-in, topics, and unsubscribe functionality all affect how your organization communicates with its audience. Careful planning can help you build an approach that respects your recipients' preferences while maintaining more accurate and engaged marketing audiences. As you transition from Outbound Marketing to Real-Time Journeys, review your existing consent practices, map them to the Real-Time consent model, test your configuration, and make sure the teams and systems that create or update contacts understand the processes they'll need to follow going forward.