The Change:
You may have noticed 2 banners on your Dashboard in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly known as Pardot) recently, and wondered what it is. There is a change to the system in regards to the field Sync Behavior on the Email Opt Out field that syncs between Account Engagement and Salesforce. See image below for details:
How does this affect my org?
Before Nov 15, 2023, all orgs are required to make a selection, or else you lose the ability to sync that data between the 2 systems. Per this Salesforce Help documentation, existing customers that DO NOT TAKE ACTION before then will cause interruption in syncing and require manual work to reconfigure. Here’s what Salesforce has to say about it in their help documentation:
“Existing customers will have until November 15, 2023 to change their sync behavior for this field to one of the supported options. If a selection is not made by this date, the prospect Opted Out field will be unmapped and stop syncing with Salesforce. This will require manual remapping and configuration to correct.”
The options for selection are as follows:
- Use Account Engagement’s value
- Use Salesforce’s value
- Use the most recently updated field value
Notice that #3 is very similar to a previous option in the system which was “Use the most recently updated record value”.
Which should you choose?
Generally speaking an organization would want Account Engagement to control the Opt Out field for your Salesforce Leads/Contacts since the preference center is located in MCAE. We want our prospects (Salesforce Leads/Contacts/Person Accounts), to have the ability to update their preferences from the Pref center Email link, and then push those updates to Salesforce accordingly!
There are some organizations who have multiple systems at play (example being using both Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement (Pardot) for different use cases). Some clients have licensing for both systems, and are using MCAE for Lead Nurturing and MCE for Customer journeys, therefore they are using Salesforce as the source of truth for Opt outs. In that scenario, the recommended setup would be to have a custom opt out field to track in MCAE, and then setup a Flow in Salesforce to update the Email Opt Out field if there’s a change to the Custom Opt out field in Account Engagement ( Pardot). For more information on how to set this up based on Salesforce’s recommendation, see this.
What are the next steps?
- Go to Account Engagement Settings > Object and Field Configuration > Prospect Fields
- Find the Opted Out field and select EDIT
- Notice that you will also see the 2 similar values in the picklist for Sync Behaviour
- Choose your setting!
**Please note- if you select the option for “Use the most recently updated field value, you must also do some additional setup in Salesforce. You will receive an error message, and you must setup Field History Tracking on the Email Opt Out field in Salesforce**
That’s all there is to it! We hope you’ve found this helpful, but we understand that some of these topics can be complex to master. If you need any assistance at all, please reach out to Plative to book some time with one of our experienced consultants. We are here to partner with you in your Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) journey! 🤝
