Sync Unsubscribed Salesforce Contacts

When an email contact unsubscribes, how can you automatically remove them from your email lists across both sales and marketing tools?

Honoring when a contact no longer wishes to receive marketing communication from you makes a huge impact on your sending reputation, email deliverability, and the cleanliness of your lists.

This automation syncs the opt-out preference from both ActiveCampaign and Salesforce, regardless of which platform records the preference first. This works to align contact preferences across your sales and marketing software.

This automation helps you:

- Honor contacts opt-in preferences
- Improve your email deliverability by removing unengaged email contacts
- Keep your email list clean
- Align customer data between sales and marketing software
- Maintain a healthy sending reputation

Before importing this automation, create a custom field for "Marketing Opt-in" in both ActiveCampaign and Salesforce with specific values for opted in and opted out.

Then use your ActiveCampaign integration for Salesforce to map these fields together to sync between platforms. If you built this out for the Salesforce Subscription and Welcome Series, then feel free to skip this first part -- you're all set.

This automation is unique in that it can be triggered by a change in contact's opt-in preferences in either platform. We segment the triggers for this automation to ensure that they aren't entering the automation more than once. We do this with the condition "has not entered automation Salesforce Unsubscribe Sync."

Here's how this automation works:

1. If the contact unsubscribes from an ActiveCampaign list, they will reach an If/Else action that checks to see if their "Marketing Opt-in" field in Salesforce is marked as "opted-out"
2. Since they unsubscribed from ActiveCampaign, this has not occurred yet and they will go down the "No" path
3. The contact's "Marketing Opt-in" custom field is updated to "Opted-out via ActiveCampaign" and this information will sync with Salesforce via custom field mapping
4. If the contact lets your sales team know their preference and the opt-out is marked in Salesforce, then the contact will enter this automation via a change to the "Marketing Opt-in" custom field in Salesforce, and they will reach the same If/Else
5. Since they already have the value of opted-out, they will move down the Yes path and be unsubscribed from the specified lists.

You can choose all lists or a specific list, such as a master list, depending on the opt-in preferences of the contact.