Compliance Profiles : The Basics
In real-time journeys, it is important to understand that consent is captured and stored at the contact point and on a per-channel basis.
What is a compliance profile?
Compliance profiles are used to manage consent and compliance and govern how consent is captured and enforced in a Customer Journey.
Like outbound marketing, users can manage their own preferences. In real-time marketing they can do this via :
A Subscription Centre
A Preference Centre
A preference page
Microsoft recommends Preference Centres to be used to enable customers to manage their communication preferences as they work with all supported entity types (leads, contacts) and can be configured to match company branding whilst enabling users to manage the consent for purposes and topics.
Side Note : One thing that is worth noting here from a testing point:
Like outbound marketing, if you want to test your “unsubscribe” link in a commercial email, you will need to send your Live email in a Live customer journey. Test sends only send the email, and opening the unsubscribe link this way will produce an error!
Compliance Profile and Topics use case
So, back to business:
Compliance profiles give marketers the ability to create specific consent settings for various line of business.
Imagine a hearing aid manufacturing company has a headquarters in London and Sweden. A different compliance profile can be used for each location to show the physical address to those recipients in the applicable regions.
Moreover, as the above locations are in Europe , marketers can enforce a restrictive model on commercial communications within the compliance profile. This means that explicit consent is required before any commercial purpose messaging can be sent to the recipient.
But we can get more granular than that!
Not only can we capture the consent purpose, but we can also add Topics to the commercial purpose. Topics are specific communications types and allow email recipients to refine their communications preferences.
Sticking with the Hearing Aid Manufacturer example they may wish to add the following topics to their commercial purpose, so that customers can select the topics that they are interested in hearing about:
Product Launch
Monthly Newsletter
Roadshow Events
When creating a message to send, marketers are required to choose a purpose (in this case commercial) and can optionally choose a topic associated. So for example, if the marketing team were creating an email about a new hearing aid that would be available next month, they would select the purpose as commercial and the topic as Product Launch.
The benefits
Recipients can then choose to opt in or out of the topics that interest them:
Topic usage means that customers are likely to be more engaged in your content
Will reduce the amount of Unsubscribers
Contact preferences offer the opportunity for contacts to hear more about other information that may be of interest to them
From a GDPR perspective, it gives Marketing teams a little more peace of mind. If a contact point doesn't have consent to send to a purpose, no messages to that purpose's topics are sent to the contact point
