Contact Delete Best Practices in Contact Builder

If you stop syncing a contact in Marketing Cloud Engagement, the contact is removed from the synchronized data extensions, but not from Contacts. To remove a contact, submit a contact delete request.

• The deletion process can't be canceled after it's started.
• Contact Delete removes contact information across the entire enterprise for Enterprise 2.0 accounts.
  • This deletion affects all business units that share ClientID value as the MID of the account that initiated the deletion.
  • If you use multiple Enterprise 2.0 accounts, perform the Contact Delete process for each account. The deletion process requires more time to remove contact information across a large number of business units.
  • Child business units can include contact records created by triggered sends, data operations such as queries or filters, or Synchronized Data Sources. Delete those records using the child business unit MID in your request.
• Use ContactKey or ContactID values to delete contacts.
• If you linked multiple SubscriberKey or ContactKey values to a contact record, perform the Contact Delete process for all values.
• To request the status for a single contact, use an API request. For large batches of deletions, the suppression status shows for contacts when the entire batch processes.
• To improve Contact Delete performance, break your requests into at least six smaller requests, and submit each request 5 minutes apart.
• Data extension data-retention policies don’t ensure regulatory compliance. Use both Contact Delete and data retention policies to help ensure full removal of data.
• We recommend setting data retention policies for a data extension when you first create it. You can apply data retention policies to new and existing data extensions. However, data extensions with more than 100 million records can’t accept retroactive data retention policies.
• You can’t reintroduce a contact that is in suppression or in the process of being deleted after the suppression period is over. During this time you can’t perform any sends, including transactional sends, to that contact.
• To more quickly remove contact information from your account, set the suppression period length to 0. Then, the delete request is immediately eligible for processing. Deletion begins when the system has identified all the related contact data.
• The deletion process yields to other account activities, such as sending, imports, automations, and query activities. These processes take precedence over deletions. As more activities run in the account, the deletions require more time.
• The deletion process scans all sendable data extensions in an account to remove the specified contact records. To improve the speed of this process, delete any unnecessary sendable data extensions in your account.
• Export any list or data extension to a backup file before you delete anything, so that you can restart the contact delete process if there’s an error.
• You can delete up to one million records.