Your Existing Consent Data Shouldn’t Have to Start From Zero

When organizations move to Customer Insights – Journeys, one question often comes up immediately: what happens to the consent preferences we already have?

Your contacts and leads may already contain years of email preferences through fields such as Email and Bulk Email. Asking every existing customer to provide consent again is not only unnecessary, but it can also create friction and potentially leave you with incomplete consent data.

The challenge is that real-time journeys use a different consent model. They rely on contact point consent records linked to compliance profiles and purposes, rather than treating the legacy consent fields on contact or lead records as the source of truth.

This is where the Load Consent feature in Customer Insights – Journeys becomes useful.

Load Consent helps organizations migrate existing consent preferences from contacts, leads, or legacy subscription lists into the new consent framework in bulk. Instead of manually recreating consent records or launching another opt-in campaign, you can use the consent data you already have to establish a compliant foundation for your real-time journeys.

In this blog, we’ll look at how Load Consent works, what it reads from your existing records, and how you can use it to migrate consent data into Customer Insights – Journeys.

Why Existing Consent Data Must Be Migrated to Customer Insights – Journeys

Real-time journeys do not use the legacy Email and Bulk Email preference fields as their primary consent source by default. They rely on contact point consent records tied to compliance profiles and purposes. For more details on compliance and the consent center, refer to our previous Blog.

That is a fundamentally different model from the legacy Bulk Email flag, which used to act as a single source of truth on the contact record itself. If you skip the consent migration step, you risk creating a gap between your historical consent data and your new real-time journey configuration. Contacts may be unable to receive communications because no contact point consent records exist, while historical opt-outs may not be reflected correctly in the new consent model.

What Load Consent Actually Does

Suppose your organization is setting up real-time journeys for the first time and wants marketing emails to respect the Bulk Email preferences already recorded on your contacts, rather than starting consent collection from zero.

At a high level, Load Consent reads existing consent signals from contacts or leads and converts them into contact point consent records against a compliance profile and purpose you choose. It’s a one-time (or repeatable) bulk operation, not a live sync, so it’s a migration tool, not an ongoing integration.

A few mechanics worth understanding before you run it:

• It only pulls from the single email field configured in your audience settings, not every email field on the record. For more details, you can refer to this doc.
• It evaluates both the Bulk Email and Email flags together. Either one set to “Do Not Allow” is enough to opt the contact point out.
• When multiple contacts or leads share the same email address, the tool won’t opt that address in unless every linked record agrees: one holdout sets the whole address to opted out.
• It can also generate tracking consent records from the contact’s tracking preference (leads don’t carry a tracking field, so this only applies to contacts).

Prerequisites

Before running Load Consent, make sure the following are in place:

Access & permissions

• Read access to contact and lead records
• Create and update permissions on contact point consent records

Setup

• A compliance profile with the purposes already created, since Load Consent needs somewhere to write the records to
• The audience configuration email field correctly set, since this determines which email address gets loaded
• If you operate across multiple business units, a plan to run Load Consent separately for each business unit/compliance profile combination

A quick note on the “Do Not Allow” dropdown fields: both contacts and leads carry two separate two-value fields that Load Consent reads directly, Do Not Allow Emails (schema name: donotemail) and Do Not Allow Bulk Emails (schema name: donotbulkemail). Each one is a simple option set of Allow or Do Not Allow, with no in-between “not set” state, which is exactly why a single field flipped to Do Not Allow is enough to opt a contact point out when the load runs.

How to Load Consent:  Navigate to the Consent Center. Go to Customer Insights – Journeys > Audience > Consent Center... Read More