Unsubscribing from automated emails

Every marketing email the Automated Email Marketing add-on sends includes a way for your customer to stop receiving them. This is set up for you and needs no configuration.

It matters for more than good manners. Gmail and Yahoo both expect bulk senders to offer a one-click unsubscribe, and they take it into account when deciding whether your mail reaches the inbox or the spam folder. People who can't find an unsubscribe link tend to report the message as spam instead, and that does far more damage to your future emails than one lost subscriber.

How customers unsubscribe

There are two ways, and both end up in the same place.

The link in the email. An unsubscribe link is added to the bottom of every marketing email automatically. Clicking it opens a page asking them to confirm, so nobody unsubscribes by accidentally tapping a link.

Their email app. Gmail and Yahoo show their own unsubscribe button at the top of the message, next to the sender name. Sunshine tells them where to send that request, so it works without your customer ever opening the email properly.

Putting the link where you want it

If you don't do anything, the unsubscribe link is added at the bottom of the email for you.

To control where it goes instead, use the [unsubscribe_url] tag anywhere in your email content or in your email signature. When Sunshine finds that tag it uses your version and skips adding its own, so you can word the link however you like or place it inside a footer you have already designed.

What happens to someone who unsubscribes

They stop receiving marketing emails, in two ways:

• New emails are never queued for them in the first place
• Any email already sitting in the queue for them is skipped when its send time arrives, and marked as unsubscribed in the log so you can still see it was intended

Order confirmations and other transactional email are not affected. Unsubscribing only applies to your marketing emails.

Emails that are notices, not marketing

Some automated emails aren't trying to sell anything. "Your gallery expires in three days" or "Your photos are ready" are notices about a service the customer already has. Email laws in the US, Canada, the EU, the UK, and Australia all treat those differently from marketing: they don't need an unsubscribe link, and someone who unsubscribed from your marketing should still get them.

To mark an email that way, edit it and check Notice, not marketing. For that one email:

• The unsubscribe link is not added, and the one-click unsubscribe button in Gmail and Yahoo is not offered
• It is still sent to customers who have unsubscribed

Leave the box unchecked for anything with a sales angle. Adding a discount code to an email makes it a marketing email under every one of those laws, no matter what the rest of it says. When in doubt, leave it unchecked. A reminder that also includes an unsubscribe link is always safe. A sales email without one is not.

Sunshine can't tell what your email says, so which box to check is your call, and following the email laws where you and your customers live is your responsibility.

If you placed the [unsubscribe_url] tag in the email yourself, it still works on a notice email. Only the automatic link is skipped.

This option needs the Automated Emails add-on version 3.3.1 or later.

Seeing and reversing someone's status

Open the customer in Sunshine > Customers. If they have unsubscribed, a notice on their profile says so and gives the date it happened.

There is a Resubscribe button on that same notice. Only use it when someone has actually asked you to put them back on, such as a client who unsubscribed by mistake and emailed you about it. Resubscribing somebody who didn't ask is the fastest way to get marked as spam.

Customers who have never unsubscribed show no notice at all, which is why the section only appears on some profiles.

A note on sending less

The unsubscribe rate is worth watching as feedback rather than as a number to drive down. If a particular automated email loses you more people than the others, that email is probably arriving too often, too soon, or to people who weren't expecting it. How Automated Emails work covers the timing and recipient rules you can adjust.