Dynamics GDPR fields - why are the same GDPR fields in TWO different entities.

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Posted on by MikeBMikeBMikeB

Can someone help me understand the following, please?

In Dynamics, the "Contact" entity contains several GDPR fields including "donotbulkemail", "donotemail", "donotfax", "donotphone", "donotpostalmail" and "donotsendmm". That makes perfect sense since we email Contacts.

But these exact same fields are ALSO in the "Lead" entity.

Question: why are these exact same fields, in TWO places?

Don't they pertain only to Contacts? Since you send only emails to Contacts (not to Leads)?

Also doesn't having them on "Lead" create a potential contradiction? You could have a "Contact" which is parent to several "Leads", all with differing values for these fields. In this case the "Contact" wouldn't correctly reflect all its Leads, which is bad.

Can anyone shed any light on this, please? I’m a bit confused.

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Eiken on at

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Hi,

Segments, customer journeys, and other Dynamics 365 Marketing features require that each lead has a contact associated with it.

Therefore, in marketing emails are generally sent to the contact associated with the lead.

But, we can also create lead without contact which can create separate email activity.

For example, I create email activity on timeline in lead.

Emails will be sent to the fields on Lead.

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MikeBMikeBMikeB 98 on at

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Thanks Eiken. That makes sense.

I see your point that "Lead" and "Contact" aren't necessarily linked. They could be [if that's how you've customised it], but they're not joined by default in Dynamics. So that's why a Lead might need to save its own GDPR settings because it could be independent of any Contact record.

Appreciated.

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Megan V. Walker 1,841 Most Valuable Professional on at

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MikeBMikeBMikeB - the fields you mentioned are all old legacy fields and have existed since BEFORE D365 Marketing was around. Out of all those fields you mentioned, the ONLY one that relates to D365 Marketing is the donotbulkemail field on the Contact. From a D365 Marketing perspective, the other fields are not relevant on the Lead at all.

For Outbound Marketing, you are correct that you could only send emails to Contacts, so the donotbulkemail field was the key piece to it all. However, you can market to either Contacts OR Leads in Real-time Marketing. Real-time Marketing looks at something called Contact point consent records and is based on the email address linked to the consent record rather than a Contact or Lead record specifically. For example, if you wanted to send an email to a Lead and there is an active Contact point consent record for their email address record that is set to allow marketing communication, you can send them a record. If you wanted to send an email address to a Contact with the same email address, you could do that too.

Real-time marketing will check the Allow email and Allow bulk email fields of contact records to determine if email is allowed to be sent to the contact's email address. Both fields must be set to allow for a commercial email to be sent to a contact. Only the Allow email field must be set to allow to send transactional emails. These checks are done in addition to the real-time marketing contact point consent opt-in/opt-out checks for emails sent by real-time journeys. These checks are not performed for other entity types (for example, leads or Customer Insights profiles).

Thought it might be helpful to have a bit more information to answer your question. Manage consent for email and text messages in real-time marketing (Dynamics 365 Marketing) | Microsoft Learn

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MikeBMikeBMikeB 98 on at

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Most kind, thank you @Megan Walker.

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Megan V. Walker 1,841 Most Valuable Professional on at

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You are welcome. I realised I ommitted an important word from the first sentence.

the fields you mentioned are all old legacy fields and have existed since BEFORE D365 Marketing was around.

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