Why is "Marketing Contact" status not updating on contact records?

[VicHill]

I know that for billing purposes records might be considered a marketing or non-marketing contact for the duration of the month, regardless of what they are set as.

However, it appears that the marketing contact status does not update when I change it, making it impossible for me to accurately see from a communications (not billing) perspective, who is or is not a marketing contact at any given moment in time.

This issue has cropped up multiple times but here's the current example:

I set up a workflow to automatically set records as "non marketing contacts" if their email had hard bounced. I ran the workflow and can see in the action logs that the contacts marketing status was set as intended.

However, I go to those contact records and they are still showing as "marketing contact". I create a list to sort any contacts with hard bounces who are set as "marketing contacts" and they're still showing up as such, even though the workflow tells me their status has been successfully switched.

There are a bunch of different use cases where this inability to accurately see the real numbers of marketing vs non-marketing contacts is a problem. Am I missing something? This seems like a very flawed way it should work so I have to assume there's something I'm doing wrong. Help greatly appreciated!

[Josh]

Hi @VicHill,

Have you checked the history of that particular property to see if there is another workflow or something that is setting them back to marketing contacts after your other workflow runs? 

Josh 

[VicHill]

The contact I'm looking at says they successfully completed the workflow, but there's nothing in the activity history at all about their marketing contact status being set one way or another. There is no action in their history following that workflow.

[Josh · Accepted solution]

Hi @VicHill,

I see what you're saying now. Similar to the billing note you made in which it won't happen until the next month, the actual status on the contact won't change until the next month either. 

 

As part of your workflow, I would suggest adding people to a list called something like, "Scheduled to Be Non-Marketing" contacts. By doing this you'll at least have an idea of the contacts that are still in the system but that property hasn't changed yet.

Josh

[VicHill]

Yes, you understand the issue correctly.

It's a kinda clanky workaround to make another list for the pending contacts, but I take your point. For confirmation at least, this is how it's supposed to work? Not that there's something I'm missing?

I can see problems still with the list solution though, as not all contacts will be updated just by individual workflows that I make and can add that step into. And I assume that workaround list will need to auto-refresh on each new billing cycle when the visual status of the contacts change so that the list is always accurate, since it won't be pulling from a current-state of a property, but rather just containing people who are added to a static list. 

Any further thoughts would be appreciated!