Unsubscribe link in emails
The first rule when it comes to emailing is to make sure you give your contacts the option to unsubscribe from your messages. For this, we use the opt-out rule.
The configuration is done directly when creating your email. To do this, go to the left side menu > Channels > Emails > New > Whatever the email type > Launch the builder.
From the builder, it is convenient to add a sentence in the footer of your email such as “if you no longer wish to receive messages from us, click here”. Then add a link to the part of the sentence of your choice.
Here, you simply need to add a token that will generate a unique link for each contact in the format {unsubscribe_url}.
Save and close. You’re all set. Consider integrating it directly into your email themes so you do not have to add it every time!
Note: the unsubscribe link does not work for test emails, just like all the other tokens, for that matter.
Setting up your unsubscribe page
When clicking the unsubscribe link in the email, the contact will arrive on their unsubscribe page. You can configure this page based on several criteria.
Go to the configuration menu at the top right > Configuration > Email settings > Unsubscription settings. You have many options to configure here.
- You can update the text that will be automatically added if you use the {unsubscribe_text} token in the email.
- Choose the message that is displayed for a contact who clicks the unsubscribe link
- Also choose the message that is displayed for a contact who clicks the resubscription link
- You can display the contact’s preferences on the unsubscribe page. This way, the contact updates their own preferences. This is composed of several categories:
- The segments in which the contact agrees to be included (this will be useful for the next chapter on subscription list management).
- The contact frequency desired by the person.
- The possibility for the contact to pause communications.
- The contact’s categories
- As well as the contact’s preferred communication channel. This is only useful if you are, of course, using channels other than email.
Subscription list management
Let’s keep the preference center enabled and only keep the segment choice enabled. Now let’s look at how to manage the contact’s subscription list…
Thanks to this, we can use segments as subscription lists for different categories of content such as the newsletter, software updates, or events.
It is then up to me to use these segments as campaign or emailing sources in order to target the right people.
However, I do not want to display to my contacts all the segments I have on my marketing automation platform. We will therefore be able to hide the segments we do not wish to make public.
To do this, go to the left side menu > Segments > Click on the segment to modify > and choose whether the segment is public or not. If it is public, it will be displayed on the unsubscribe page; if that is not the case, it will be hidden.
After a bit of setup, I end up with my public segments on the unsubscribe page!
View unsubscribed contacts
If you want to group together all the contacts unsubscribed from all your messages, you can create a segment that will update automatically with each new unsubscribed contact. To do this, go to the left side menu > Segments > New > Give it the name “Unsubscribed contacts” for example, then in the filter tab, add the filter “email unsubscribed = yes”.
Resubscribe a contact
If a contact is unsubscribed and you want to resubscribe them, you have two options:
- The first is to go to the contact’s profile, and in the right sidebar, you will find a tag showing that the contact is unsubscribed. To resubscribe the contact, click the small cross on the tag to remove it.
- The second option is to use a form action. To do this, when you create your form, go to the “Actions” tab and add the action “remove do not contact”. This way, every contact who submits this form will be sure to receive messages, even if they were initially unsubscribed.
Conclusion
Feel free to watch and rewatch this tutorial when you start implementing subscription-list-based segmentation for your contacts. Also find all our other tutorial videos by subscribing to our YouTube channel!
