Contacts And Consent Operations

Contacts are people. Treat their consent, unsubscribe state, and suppression history as operational data, not just profile fields.

Core Rule

Only send marketing email to people who have a valid reason to receive it. Bento gives you tools for tags, fields, segments, and imports, but the sending decision still depends on your consent model and applicable law.

For most teams:

• Use events for behavior.
• Use fields for profile attributes.
• Use tags for operational state.
• Use unsubscribes and suppressions for consent and safety controls.

Import Rules

When importing from another platform:

1. Export active subscribers, unsubscribers, bounces, and complaints separately.
2. Clean obvious invalid addresses before upload.
3. Import a minimal active list first: email, name, and essential tags.
4. Preserve unsubscribe and suppression state outside the active marketing list.
5. Send a small first campaign to recently engaged contacts before widening.

Consent States

Use clear internal states:

Keep these states explicit in your operational playbooks.

Unsubscribe And Resubscribe

Unsubscribes protect both the recipient and your sender reputation.

Operational rules:

• Never import unsubscribed people as active subscribers.
• Do not use transactional sends to bypass marketing opt-outs.
• If someone asks to resubscribe, use a clear confirmation path.
• Keep old unsubscribes when moving from another ESP.

If you use tags or fields to mirror consent state in your own systems, treat Bento unsubscribe state as the source of truth for Bento sends.

Suppressions

Suppressions should be preserved during migration and reviewed carefully.

Common suppression sources:

• Hard bounces.
• Spam complaints.
• Abuse reports.
• Role accounts you do not want to email.
• Internal blocklists.
• Addresses removed by compliance or support.

Do not re-add suppressed people through imports, Stripe/Shopify syncs, or webhook replays without a deliberate review.

Preference Centers

Preference centers help people reduce email volume without fully unsubscribing.

Recommended model:

• Use tags or fields for topic preferences.
• Use segments to target subscribed people with matching preferences.
• Keep unsubscribe separate from topic preference.
• Make preference changes visible on the subscriber profile.

Deletion Requests

Deletion and anonymization are different from unsubscribe.

Before submitting a deletion request:

1. Pause upstream syncs that might recreate the contact.
2. Preserve any compliance audit trail you are required to keep.
3. Decide how your own systems will prevent re-importing the same address.
4. Use the Data Deletion Requests API for programmatic requests.

Migration Checklist

• Active subscribers exported.
• Unsubscribers exported and preserved.
• Bounces and complaints exported and suppressed.
• Purchased, scraped, or stale lists excluded.
• Import mapped to Bento fields and tags.
• First send limited to recently engaged contacts.
• Support has a rollback and suppression plan.

Related docs

• Subscribers API
• Import Contacts
• Data Deletion Requests API
• Double Opt-In