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Glossary / Evaluation and implementation guide

Contact Acceptance Criteria

Contact Acceptance Criteria are the entry requirements a contact record must meet before it can enter routing, scoring, or nurture: a syntactically valid and deliverable email, a role or job title, and a lawful basis for contact such as consent.

It is a gate applied at creation or import, not a cleanup step after sends fail.

The distinction from account-level quality gates matters: a contact can be complete while its account is not, and vice versa. Enforcement points include web forms, list imports, enrichment merges, and CRM syncs.

A practical example

Example: a trade show list import contains 2,000 rows. Acceptance criteria reject rows with role missing or no consent flag, routing them to a remediation queue instead of the nurture stream.

What to evaluate before investing

  • Ask whether forms and import tools can enforce required fields and block or quarantine noncompliant rows.
  • Verify consent status is captured as a distinct field the gate can evaluate, not buried in notes.
  • Check whether rejected contacts land in a review queue with a defined re-entry path.

Limitations and tradeoffs

Strict gates reduce bad sends but also slow list growth; overly loose criteria push the cost downstream into deliverability damage and compliance exposure.

Plan your next step with MeshLine

Connect this decision to your automation, organic marketing and customer lifecycle management. In a MeshLine demo, discuss your existing tools, the scope you need and how to measure the result.