I have a bumped into a weird scenario, which requires me to refresh my understanding of Salesforce Marketing Cloud activity tracking for Emails. To add some context, we use Salesforce Sales Cloud as well as the Marketing Cloud, but we do not use/want to use subscription status in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. These preferences are built out at the lead level in our Salesforce CRM instance. Also, all of our emails have the unsubscribe option/link which takes a customer to our website where they need to confirm that they want to unsubscribe. Does Salesforce Marketing Cloud track the unsubscribe activity as soon as they click the link? I haven't been able to replicate this by clicking on the links myself, but have seen subscribers marked as unsubscribed in the Marketing Cloud when they have unsubscribe activity as part of a certain send. This results in some cases when a customer has not unsubscribed in Salesforce CRM, but are marked as unsubscribed in the Marketing Cloud Subscribers List. Is there a way to not have them be unsubscribed in Marketing Cloud when they click the link? Also, is my understanding of the process correct?
Note: Subscribers marked as unsubscribed after a certain number of hard bounces. is a behavior that is expected and something that we do not wish to work around.
Best Answer
Could it be that the unsubscribes you see are coming from email clients like gmail? See below.
Gmail's Unsubscribe Function: What You Need to Know