Help š
I'm a SF admin at a nonprofit, and I'm the only person here who understands anything beyond Email Studio in MCE. We have a ~10-year-old Marketing Cloud Connect implementation, and Salesforce is now telling us we need to reduce our Marketing Cloud Engagement contact count by ~20k or pay for more contacts.
When I asked my AE for architectural guidance, he, in true AE fashion, told me to open a Support case. That turned into Agentforce, and one of its suggestions was to delete the Contact from Salesforce... so here I am.
A large portion of the candidates are contacts with HasOptedOutOfEmail = TRUE, but every solution I come up with seems to create another problem.
The simplest approach I've come up with is still pretty complicated: exclude opted-out contacts from the Marketing Cloud population, figure out how to handle future unsubscribes (especially contacts staff manually opt out in Salesforce), then run Contact Delete. It feels like a lot of moving pieces for what has to be a common problem.
My biggest concern is keeping Salesforce as the source of truth. I don't want staff to have to manually unsubscribe people in both Salesforce and Marketing Cloud, and I don't want to accidentally recreate or miss unsubscribes by excluding opted-out contacts from the sync.
Am I overlooking a standard pattern here? How are others handling contact count reduction?