Automatically Match Email Consent Between Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Next

Consent matching keeps email consent aligned between Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Next for records that share an email address. Each time a prospect is created, updated with a new email address, added to a list, or restored from the Recycle Bin, Account Engagement resyncs consent status with Marketing Cloud Next. Matching is available from one business unit to another. Multiple business units aren’t supported.

You can match consent based on one of two match types: Public List and Opted Out Field.

A public list is a static list with the Public List option turned on, which means that it’s available in the Email Preference Center. For consent matching, the public list option matches a static public list to a new communication subscription in Marketing Cloud Next, but still takes the Opted Out field into consideration.

If you don’t have any public lists, you can use the Opted Out field option, which controls overall global email consent only.

For both match types, consent updates flow in both directions. However, this works a bit differently for each. Here’s an overview of the match types and how they handle consent updates

• The default Do Not Email field in Account Engagement doesn't track consent. Use this field to prevent sending emails to unengaged prospects.
• Moving prospects to the Recycle Bin in Account Engagement, or permanently deleting prospects from the Recycle Bin, doesn’t delete or update their email consent status in Marketing Cloud Next.
• To match consent based on public lists, your Account Engagement business unit must have fewer than 250,000 active, opted-out prospects. If you exceed the limit, you can use the Recycle Bin to reduce the number of prospects, or use the Opted Out match type instead.
• If a public list is moved to the Recycle Bin, consent matching continues and a configuration issue appears in Optimizer.
• When using the Opted Out match type, the sync behavior for the default prospect Opted Out field in Account Engagement must be set to "Use the most recently updated field value," "Use Account Engagement's value," or be unmapped to Salesforce.

It can take up to 48 hours for updates to process, but your initial copy progress appears in the status field. Don’t import new consent records to Marketing Cloud Next until the process is complete. When matching is done, the status shows Active and the user who started the process receives an email.