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.
ConsentInsight does not count towards your data storage limit.
Learn more in Using insight data.
Store data types in ConsentInsight
A single ConsentInsight record consists of the following fields:
Consent field | Description |
| What the contact has consented to. Use this field to record information like:
|
| The date and time that your contacts consented to the contents of the |
| The URL that contacts gave you their consent from. For example, the URL of a signup form. |
| The IP address of the device your contacts used when they gave you their consent. |
| The type of web browser that your contacts used when they gave you their consent. |
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:
Marketing preference field | Description |
| The private name of the preference - this doesn't get shown to contacts. |
| The public name of the preference - this gets displayed on preference centres, signup forms, and surveys. |
| The name of the category that the preference belongs to, if it belongs to one. |
| Indicates whether the contact is opted in or or out of the 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.
Surveys, pages, and forms: Alternatives to the consent checkbox
If you choose an alternative method to our Consent checkbox for obtaining opt-in consent on your signup form, be aware that our ConsentInsight feature will not store the consent information as it does for checkbox-based consent. This may impact your ability to meet your compliance requirements, such as maintaining records of an individual’s opt-in consent.
Our tools help you meet your consent recording obligations, but the ultimate responsibility for recording consent lies with you. We always recommend using the consent checkbox in our Pages, surveys, and forms tool to ensure compliance and minimize risk. Learn how
Upload a ConsentInsight record for 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:
When a contact opts in using a signup form or a form that includes the consent element.
By updating existing contacts using an Excel or CSV file, or updating them through the API.
If you want to upload multiple ConsentInsight records for a contact at the same time, you can do so only by using the API:
Create contact (v3)
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:
CONSENTTEXT
CONSENTURL
CONSENTDATETIME
CONSENTIP
CONSENTUSERAGENT
Values for ConsentInsight fields are limited to 1,000 characters.
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.
Learn more in View a contact’s insight data.
Understand double opt-in and consent
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.
Tips
You can remind a contact what they consented to by using Liquid to add the latest Text of a ConsentInsight record in an email campaign:
{{ contact.insight.ConsentInsight[0].Text }}
You can segment contacts by what they consented to, for example, by using the Contains filter on the consent text to find contacts who consented to different channels.