[SalesForce] Extracting all contacts from Marketing Cloud Contact Builder

I am looking to clean up the contacts in Contact Builder.

There are many records (about 5x the amount) than I am actually using in my Marketing Cloud Email Studio instance (All Subscribers).

We currently do not have marketing cloud connected to any external sources or a CRM.

There doesn't seem to be an "Export All" or way to create a list of all the Contacts in Contact Builder. Best practice delete instructions say to use MobilePush or Mobile studio to create a filtered list…but we don't have that module.

My plan is to export all contacts from Contact Builder, identify contacts that are not in use by any channel, don't have email addresses associated with them, and have been inactive for longer than 3 years and remove them. (Yes, I am sure I want to do this and am aware of the implications of doing so.) We are being charged for having too many contacts in Contact Builder and I need to remove an estimated 3 million records.

Is there anyway to extract all contacts from Contact Builder with the fields seen in the tool so I can make a Data Extension or list manually for removal?

Best Answer

At the moment there is no way to query All Contacts. It was available for a short time but it caused massive performance issues, so they discontinued it.

Your way to go is:

  1. Create a support ticket to extract All Contacts to a data extension. They can include the attributes that are part of the central Contacts table (system attributes).
  2. You can then use this data extension for queries to isolate contacts you want to delete.
  3. Make sure to clear the All Contacts data extension, give it a data retention policy or make it sendable if you want to completely clear out all data about the contacts you want to remove
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