Find Contacts Without Channel Addresses

Find and manage your contacts that aren’t associated with channels in Marketing Cloud Engagement. Understand the source of your contacts, and delete the ones that you don’t want.

You don’t need to contact support to activate the Contacts Without Channel Addresses extract type. Unlike other data extracts, this type outputs directly to a data extension.

Considerations:

• Contacts that aren’t associated with any channel count towards your contacts allowance.
• When configuring the data extract, the File Naming Pattern field is required. But it doesn’t control the output of data from the extract or the naming pattern of the data extension.
• Add any File Naming Pattern to the Contacts Without Channel Address extract configuration.
• Create an FTP user if one doesn’t yet exist. Otherwise, you receive an error message when starting the data extract.
• The Contacts Without Channel Address data extension is located under the root data extension folder.
• The process takes several hours to run.
• Run this extract at the Enterprise ID level.
• If you had a productive run in the last 24 hours, you can submit the request and report success. No processing occurs and the contents of the data extension where the contacts are extracted remain unchanged.

If you plan to delete these contacts, examine the contents of the data extension. If you set up data sync, the synchronized users, leads, and contacts are registered as contacts in Engagement at the time of sync. They’re assigned a channel address only when Engagement sends a message to them.

Also, account for contacts that don’t have channel addresses yet but could receive a transactional message through Journey Builder, for example. Use an endpoint address such as an email address or SMS number from the transaction that’s visible to the journey through a data extension. If no messages were sent to them yet, you can find those contacts reported in the data extension.

You can run a data extract from either Automation Studio or Email Studio. For the Extract Type, select Contacts Without Channel Addresses. The output from the data extract activity is captured in the Contacts Without Channel Addresses data extension.