Data Archival (Retention) Policy

Overview

Data archival is the systematic process of removing inactive or dormant user data to ensure that your marketing workspace remains lean, focusing exclusively on users who provide genuine engagement opportunities and business value.

MoEngage implements data archival to balance platform performance with global privacy standards:

• Performance & Data hygiene: MoEngage maintains a lean and high-performance environment populated exclusively by reachable and marketable users. This high-fidelity dataset ensures faster segmentation query and provides more accurate analytics, as your insights will reflect genuine user intent rather than being skewed by stagnant, non-functional records.
• Regulatory Compliance (GDPR & CCPA): The policy aligns with the GDPR principles of Storage Limitation and Data Minimization- user data should be kept only as long as there is a legitimate business purpose; once a user is no longer reachable or marketable, archiving their data reduces legal liability and protects user privacy.

Archival Frequency 

Every 14 days, MoEngage runs a process to remove inactive and unreachable users, events and devices from MoEngage services. Each entity has a separate archival policy, and upon archival, the data points are deleted permanently.

Archival criteria

User Profiles

MoEngage’s archival policy treats Anonymous and Registered (or Identified) users differently to ensure we take an approach favored by brands and marketers. Here is how we define both:

1. Registered Users : As these represent known customers with a higher potential for long-term value, these profiles are archived after a longer period of inactivity. These are the users who have an ID as an identifier and also have either an Email Id or a Mobile Number.
2. Anonymous Users : To keep your workspace lean and focused on high-intent audiences, Anonymous profiles are archived after a shorter period of inactivity. Anonymous users are the users who either:
   • Have an ID as an identifier, but do not have an Email ID, and do not have a Mobile Number
   • Do not have an ID as an identifier, do not have an Email ID, and do not have a Mobile Number

To ensure MoEngage only archives user data that lacks marketing utility, the system evaluates every user against the following three value markers:

• Reachability: TThe policy aims to retain users who are contactable. It will, over time, archive the users who are not reachable/contactable. Users are considered not reachable if they:
  • Cannot receive email- do not have an email address, or are unsubscribed from email lists.
  • Cannot receive SMS- do not have a valid mobile number.
  • Cannot receive Push- have uninstalled the app or disabled push permissions.
  • Cannot receive a WhatsApp message- do not have a valid mobile number.
• Activity: Any interaction with your app or website (i.e any standard or custom event) serves as a signal of intent. The policy distinguishes users based on their relationship with your brand to ensure the most appropriate retention lifecycle. Note that only events is considered as an activity. Any user attribute update/unset is not considered user activity.
• Campaign Engagement: The policy aims to retain users who actively interact with your communications. Interactions such as Opens or Clicks serve as engagement signals. Here is the summary of the rules that apply for archival:

Here is the summary of the rules that apply for archival:

Type	User criteria	Archival Criteria
Registered (Identified) users	Users who have a unique identifier (ID) along with either an email ID or a mobile number.	Activity: First seen > 365 days Does not have any custom/standard event tracked for last 365 days Reachability: Not reachable on any of (Email, Push, SMS) Campaign engagement: Not interacted with campaigns for the last 365 days
Anonymous (Guest) users	Users who: Have an ID as an identifier, but do not have an Email ID and do not have a Mobile Number Do not have an ID as an identifier, do not have an Email ID, and do not have a Mobile Number	Activity: First Seen is > 60 days Does not have any custom/standard event tracked for last 60 days Reachability: Not reachable on any of (Email, Push, SMS) Campaign engagement: Not interacted with campaigns for the last 60 days

Examples:

Examples

#	Identifiers & Reachability	User type (derived from attributes)	Reachability (derived from attributes)	Activity status (Any standard/custom event in last X days)	Campaign Engagement	Archived?
1.	Identifiers: ID, Email ID, Mobile no - Yes Reachability: Email, SMS, Push - Yes	Registered	Reachable	No events in last 365 days	No campaign interaction in last 365 days	No
2.	Identifiers: ID, Email ID, Mobile no - Yes Reachability: Email, SMS, Push - Yes	Registered	Reachable	No events in last 365 days	Campaign clicked in last 365 days	No
3.	Identifiers: ID - Yes, Email ID, Mobile no - No Reachability: Email, SMS, Push - No	Anonymous	Unreachable	No events in last 60 days	No campaign interaction in last 60 days	Yes
4.	Identifiers: ID - Yes, Email ID, Mobile no - No Reachability: Email, SMS, Push - No	Anonymous	Unreachable	Custom events in last 60 days	No campaign interaction in last 60 days	No
5.	Identifiers: ID, Email ID, Mobile no - No Reachability: Email, SMS, Push - No	Anonymous	Unreachable	No events in last 60 days	No campaign interaction in last 60 days	Yes
6.	Identifiers: ID, Email ID, Mobile no - No Reachability: Email, SMS, Push - No	Anonymous	Unreachable	Custom events in last 60 days	No campaign interaction in last 60 days	No

Profile retention calculator 

Still have queries, explore our profile retention calculator for specific scenarios: 

Events

By default, events remain available for 60 days. This determines how far back you can look to analyse user behaviour, e.g., “Users who purchased in the last 2 months”.

The event retention period (also referred to as Data Retention Policy - DRP) is extendable on a request basis. Please contact your dedicated MoEngage Customer Success Manager or the Support team. Note that the retention period, if increased, will only be applicable for the event retention. It will have no impact on the device/user profile retention policy, and archival will continue based on standard policies mentioned in this article.

Devices

MoEngage archives devices that have been inactive for 60 days. Removing the inactive and unreachable devices ensures that your Push campaigns are processed faster and directed only at active devices.

1. The archival process runs periodically, so the actual archival period may be slightly higher (+14 days) than the mentioned number of days.
2. The archival policy can be customised. For further assistance, contact your MoEngage Customer Success Manager (CSM) or the Support team.
3. MoEngage allows ingestion of data beyond the data retention policy (DRP), but the Segmentation service allows you to query the data only based on your DRP. The Data Storage services delete data beyond DRP periodically.

FAQs

If an archived user comes back to the platform, will MoEngage retain the user consent and subscription status?

No, once a user is archived, it is removed all MoEngage services. If the user comes back, it is treated as a fresh new user- none of the older attributes are retained.