Proper data management helps ensure your email marketing operations comply with privacy regulations while maintaining clean and accurate subscriber lists. The right to erasure functionality enables you to respond to data removal requests while safeguarding the integrity of your marketing database. This helps maintain subscriber trust and ensure regulatory compliance, both of which are essential for sustaining email marketing programs and protecting the brand's reputation.
You can efficiently manage both individual and bulk contact removals while ensuring complete data erasure across all systems. This streamlines your workflow for handling privacy requests while maintaining the contact data quality necessary for effective email marketing campaigns and audience segmentation.
To safeguard customers' data and to comply with EU regulations, Marketing Cloud enables users to exercise their Right to Erasure under Article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Act.
It is essential to note that the GDPR guidelines apply only to Controllers & Processors, which are firms operating in the European Union (EU) and companies outside the EU that provide products or services to people living in the EU. GDPR does not apply to individuals who are citizens of the United States of America, Canada, or any other country outside of the EU.
However, regardless of their citizenship, most organizations will respect their clients' wishes to have their data erased to avoid any uncertainty. As a data controller under GDPR, you must erase every client record from every system under your control in response to your customers' request for data erasure. It includes any information you maintain about the customer in your internal systems and in any external systems you oversee.
Deleting an Individual Contact
- You can delete a contact by accessing the contact lists in the CDP menu or by quickly navigating via the Contact Search dashboard widget.
- Upon entering the contact details and clicking submit, the contact details page will appear. Click the options menu and select Delete Contact.
- Alternatively, visit the Contacts section in the CDP menu and search for the contact to delete. Then, click on the Actions menu next to the contact name and select Delete Contact.
When you delete the contact, its record will remain for reporting purposes. The following data erasure procedures will also take place:
- The contact will be unsubscribed from all previously subscribed lists.
- If the contact is present within any journey, it will be unsubscribed.
- The contact's UID, email address, and phone number will be replaced with a pseudonymized one and added to the general Do Not Mail & SMS list and the Brand Do Not Mail & SMS list (if your account uses the Brand Management feature).
- The contact's email address will be replaced by its pseudonymized version if it was previously on the general Do Not Mail and/or the Brand Do Not Mail list.
- The contact's phone number will be replaced by its pseudonymized version if it was previously included in the general Do Not SMS and/or the Brand Do Not SMS list.
- The contact record's custom fields will be deleted.
- The contact record's standard fields (first name, last name, telephone, and fax) will be set to NULL.
- All records in any relational table relating to that contact will be deleted.
Deleting Contacts in Bulk
Marketing Cloud lets you bulk delete contacts from your accounts in a few simple steps. This proves handy whenever you receive data erasure requests from multiple clients and would like to remove these contacts simultaneously.
- To access this option, head over to the navigation panel and click on Settings.
- Now, choose Bulk Delete Contacts under the Contacts category.
- Click on the Import link.
- From the modal window that opens, upload your file (in CSV or TXT format only) containing the email addresses of users that you need to delete. Select the delimiter and the column rows where email addresses are present so the system can identify and process them. Finally, click on Import.
The email addresses imported from the file will be processed and deleted permanently from your Marketing Cloud account.