Best Practice for Unsubscribing Recipients

It's essential for your recipients to have a way of unsubscribing. Not only does this help you maintain relevant target audiences, but it also makes sure you're compliant with relevant marketing legislation. You should always consider how to handle unsubscribing before going live. Agillic provides a default setup for unsubscribing recipients, but other custom options are available.

In this article, you'll find information about:

•  Agillic's Best Practice on Unsubscribing
  • The Unsubscribe Event
  • Adding the Event
  • List-Unsubscribe
• Alternative Ways of Unsubscribing
  • Double Opt-Out
  • Profile Permissions Page 
  • Survey
    • A Mandatory Survey to Unsubscribe
    • An Optional Survey to Unsubscribe
  • Multiple Levels of Unsubscribing
  • Unsubscribe via Inbound SMS

Agillic's Best Practice on Unsubscribing

The Unsubscribe Event

In Agillic, you'll find two Fixed Person Data and an Event that can help you set up an unsubscribe process.

The event 'Unsubscribe' has the following side-effects:

• UNSUBSCRIBED (boolean) - will be set to 'True'.
• UNSUBSCRIBE_DATE (timestamp) - will be set to the date and time of unsubscribing. You can rename the 'Unsubscribe' Event and reconfigure it to have other Side Effects if needed.

Adding the Event

The most common way of providing an unsubscribe option is to hardcode an unsubscribe link into the footer of your email templates. You can either do this yourself if you have a template developer inhouse, or you can contact our Product Specialists for further information. 

You must attach an unsubscribe Event to the link which could link to an external page or an Agillic Portal Page with a confirmation message. If you want your recipients to fill in a survey during the unsubscribe process, you can attach the Event to the submit button of a custom application or a standard application like the questionnaire.

List-Unsubscribe

Some email clients support a feature known as list-unsubscribe. It's an optional email header added by the email client which allows recipients to unsubscribe from a specific email.

 When a recipient uses the list-unsubscribe feature in an Agillic email, by default, it will mark the recipient with the following changes:

• The Person Data UNSUBSCRIBED is set to 'True'.
• The Person Data UNSUBSCRIBE_DATE is set to the date and time of unsubscribing.

You can edit the Events triggered by list-unsubscribe. Go to the Settings module, the 'System Settings' section, and then select 'Email'.

If you choose to enable domain-based unsubscribe, there are special considerations to take into account. You can read more about domain-based unsubscribe here.

Alternative Ways of Unsubscribing

Double Opt-Out

A double opt-out campaign is where recipients must confirm they want to unsubscribe on a Web page before completing the unsubscribe process. This process can enrich your insights into why recipients unsubscribe by asking recipients to elaborate on their reasons for unsubscribing to your emails. 

In short, the double opt-out process is:

1. The recipient clicks on an unsubscribe link in an email.
2. The recipient confirms their decision on a web page.
3. The recipient is marked as unsubscribed in Agillic and will receive a confirmation message on their Profile page.

This is the recommended unsubscribe set up when using multiple different permissions. You can read more about how to create a double opt-out campaign here.

Profile Permissions Page 

If you'd like a recipient to be able to unsubscribe from certain types of communication from you, you can consider creating a Profile Permissions Page for this purpose. This could be included in a My Profile page where recipients can edit other aspects of their Person Data too.

In short, the profile permission page process is:

1. The recipient clicks an unsubscribe link in an email.
2. The recipient selects what types of communication to unsubscribe from in a web page.
3. The recipient is unsubscribed from selected communications and receives a confirmation message.

For further information on how to set this up, read our article about setting up a My Profile page.

Survey

There are two ways you can use surveys to allow recipients to unsubscribe.

1. A Mandatory Survey to Unsubscribe

If you'd like to know why a recipient is unsubscribing, you can make them fill in a survey as they do it, giving the reasons why they'd no longer like to receive communications from you.

1. The recipient clicks an unsubscribe link in an email.
2. The recipient then fills in a questionnaire about why they wish to unsubscribe.
3. The recipient is unsubscribed and receives a confirmation message.

Making a questionnaire a required part of unsubscribing can cause recipients to become impatient and use complaints instead. However, if a recipient marks an email as spam, this will not unsubscribe the recipient, but the Fixed Person Data field COMPLAINT will be set as 'True'. You can learn more about how valid recipients are measured here.

You can learn more about how to set up an unsubscribe survey here.

2. An Optional Survey to Unsubscribe

To avoid any bad feeling, you can make your unsubscribe survey optional. Of course, this means you won't receive as much data on why recipients want to unsubscribe.

1. The recipient clicks an unsubscribe link in an email.
2. The recipient is unsubscribed and receives a confirmation message along with a questionnaire.
3. The recipient can choose to fill in the questionnaire about why they chose to unsubscribe.

You can learn more about how to set up an unsubscribe survey here.

Multiple Levels of Unsubscribing

In cases where recipients can subscribe to multiple channels or types of communications, it's possible to give the recipient an overview of the subscription options.

Examples of channels:

• Email
• SMS
• App Notifications

Examples of communications:

• Newsletters
• Updates
• Local Events
• Product recommendations

While it's possible to link all channels and communication types to a single subscription data, it can be beneficial for you to split them to allow recipients to subscribe from specific campaigns. This can be done by using the Domain Based Unsubsubscribe feature.

You can read more about the Domain Based Unsubscribe feature and how to use it here.

Unsubscribe via Inbound SMS

Using inbound SMS, you can affect data like the UNSUBSCRIBE data. This allows your recipients to unsubscribe via inbound SMS if needed.

To configure this, you must set up the inbound SMS channel. You can learn more about how to set up inbound SMS here. Recipients can then use a message like 'candy stop' as the inbound unsubscribe message.

In this case, create an Event with the name 'stop' and use the Event to trigger a Flow. This would send an outbound SMS back to the recipient with a confirmation, as well as setting the Person Data change, such as UNSUBSCRIBED to 'True'.