Unsubscribe management

How the unsubscribe link works

The system automatically suppresses recipients who have previously unsubscribed from a specific list, or globally from all messages.

Unsubscribe links are created by adding an unsubscribe token (placeholder) to the message content. When the message is sent the token is turned into a link which recipients can click.
When a recipient clicks the link, they are directed to a page asking them to confirm the opt-out. When they press the button they are shown a confirmation message and their email address is marked as unsubscribed.

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Update April 2024

Prior to 19 April 2024, it was possible to choose in Email Setup if a recipient would be immediately unsubscribed or have to click to confirm. This was dropped in favour of the Confirmation type. Read more in Platform updates 2024.

The email address is not deleted from the data list – this ensures that the system keeps a record of email addresses that have unsubscribed.

There are two types of unsubscribe link:

Global Unsubscribe

This will unsubscribe the email address from all existing lists in your customer space. The email address is also added to the Global Unsubscribe List, which is automatically assigned to every email sent, ensuring the recipient does not receive any emails.

Local Unsubscribe

This will unsubscribe the email address from only the list used in the email campaign. They will not be set to 'unsubscribe' in any other lists in the system. This type of unsubscribe link should only be used if you have multiple types of newsletters. For example, an e-commerce company might have a books newsletter, a music newsletter and an electronics newsletter. An email address can be subscribed to all 3 of these,  however it is better to give the recipient the opportunity to stop a particular newsletter rather than all future emails.

You should always include a global unsubscribe option if a recipient wants to unsubscribe from all further email communications with you. This is required by the terms and conditions of use.

Adding an unsubscribe link to your email

If editing the email content within Maxemail's Email Builder or HTML Editor, you can use the Link icon on the toolbar.

When designing the email outside Maxemail, you can insert the relevant unsubscribe token directly into your email content.

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Unsubscribe page customisation

The default style of the unsubscribe page and its customisation options can be seen in Customise the unsubscribe page.

Feedback loops

Maxemail has feedback loops set up with inbox providers (ISPs) where offered, so that if their customers click to report an email as spam, their email address is added to the Global Unsubscribe List. These are shown in the Reporting Breakdown as Feedback Unsubscribes.

In a similar way, Maxemail also adds industry-standard email headers, known as List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post to all marketing emails (i.e. not those marked as a service message, or Transactional Emails). Compatible ISPs which show their own unsubscribe button in their email interface use this detail to directly inform Maxemail of the recipient's request, which again is added to the Global Unsubscribe List and marked as a Feedback Unsubscribe.

Factors to bear in mind when uploading email addresses

What if I need to upload data as a new list? How can I ensure the system knows about which email addresses are unsubscribed?

In most circumstances, a new list does not need to be created but you should be appending to an existing list.

Here are some typical scenarios and how you should upload your list:

You have a monthly newsletter and you extract all subscribers from an internal database each month before uploading them.

You should:

Append the new list to the last list used for the newsletter. The system will handle the de-duplicate email addresses that are already in the list, will add new email addresses and will already have a record of unsubscribes.

You have a special promotion to a segment of a particular list. You have extracted this segment from your own internal database.

You should:

Append the segment to the list these email addresses already subscribed to in the system. In addition, you should include a profile field that identifies the segment and use the segmentation tool to select just these people.

Alternatively, if the profile information used to determine the segment is already in the system, then you can simply use the segmentation tool rather than adding another CSV file.

You have created a list from your internal database and you do not want to add this to an existing list for a particular reason.

You should:

Upload the CSV file as a new list. Download a list of unsubscribes from the reporting section and create an exclude list from these. Assign this exclude list to your campaign