You want to know, in no uncertain terms, that the content you are sending to your contacts is what they agreed to when they opted in. This helps you to make sure that contacts appreciate and engage with your content, and that they do not ignore it, or worse, put it in their spam folder. Otherwise, you risk affecting your sender reputation.

Consent is both a requirement of the GDPR and best practice.

We let you to store consent information for your contacts in a free insight data collection called ConsentInsight.

Unlike billable insight data, ConsentInsight does not count towards your data storage limit.

A single ConsentInsight record consists of the following fields:

You can also store a contact's marketing preferences in combination with ConsentInsight when you collect this data either in a page and form or a signup form, or when uploading contacts in a file that contains both consent and preferences.

The contact's preferences, as given at that point, get recorded as part of the ConsentInsight record.

Subsequent updates to a contact’s marketing preferences do not change the existing ConsentInsight record.

The following fields can be included for each marketing preference:

For every ConsentInsight record, a DateTimeCreated field is automatically created and given the value of the date and time, in UTC+00:00, that the ConsentInsight record was created.

You can store multiple ConsentInsight records against one contact, but we only display the five most recent ConsentInsight records, both in-app and in the ConsentInsight JSON file when you export a contact.

You can upload a ConsentInsight record for a contact both at the time of opt-in and at any point after initial opt-in.

You can upload a ConsentInsight record:

If you want to upload multiple ConsentInsight records for a contact at the same time, you can do so only by using the following API call:

If you want to upload a ConsentInsight record by importing contacts via an Excel or CSV file, you need to map your columns names to the following consent fields:

Values for ConsentInsight fields are limited to 1,000 characters. To find out more about the restrictions for insight data values, check out the section JSON data representation.

After you've uploaded a ConsentInsight record for a contact, you can view that record by going to the Insight data tab of the Single customer view, and selecting the ConsentInsight collection from the dropdown.

Double opt-in is an important way to verify that the consent you've obtained has been given by a contact who genuinely wants to hear from you. Otherwise, you're leaving yourself vulnerable to the potential of malicious signups, spam complaints, or worse.

Best practice says that, after collecting consent from new signup in a form, you then send a double opt-in email to your new signup with a confirmation link in it. When your contact opens the email and clicks the link to confirm their opt-in, their contact record is verified as a double opt-in. This process confirms the validity of their sign-up and their giving of consent.

If you don't implement double opt-in, then you can't be sure that someone else - maybe a spam bot, for instance - isn’t signing up email addresses and giving consent to data they don't own. By implementing double opt-in, you can be sure: this is why it's best practice.