Unsubscribes

The importance of Lists

When you send a message to a list, it has an unsubscribe link at the bottom. The contents of that link are dependent on how the list was created. There are three types of lists:

1. If the list was created by specifying some criteria filters and applying them to the constituent warehouse, then we know the person's email address and xid.

2. If the list is based on an event (e.g. mailing people who attended an event) then xid coverage will be spotty; we'll mostly only have them for people that chose to log in before registering.

3. If the list was created by uploading an excel spreadsheet, we only have the data that was provided to us, which may or may not include xid.

Ideally, one way or another, we would like to have the xid for each message recipient; but AlumnIQ still works, as much as is possible, without it.

All unsubscribe requests will include the email address to which the message was sent. When someone unsubscribes with an xid, based on the list-creation techniques above, it enables unsubscribes to be more robust. We save their unsubscribe request not only with the email address from which they clicked the unsubscribe link, but also their xid; and if there is a different email address associated with their constituent record, the unsubsribe automatically takes effect for that email address as well. Any unsubscribe requests that don't include an xid will only affect the email address from which the unsubscribe link was clicked.

Subscription Categories

In order to mitigate the "blast-radius" of unsubscribes, each message sent must be categorized into a Subscription Category before it is sent. When someone unsubscribes via a link at the bottom of an email, they are unsubscribing from future emails belonging to that subscription category. For this reason, it is important to choose your message's subscription category carefully.

In addition to category-specific unsubscribe links, constituents have the option to create a Directory Profile account, where they can see the list of subscription categories and opt out of, or into, each of them.

Calculating inclusion and exclusion

To make unsubscribes work as well as we possibly can, we take the following approach:

• When recording a new subscription preference change, we record as much identifying information as is available (email, xid, iqid)

• When deciding whether or not to exclude a recipient from a message, if any one aspect matches, they get excluded

This is in part why we encourage you to use dynamic lists or include xid in your uploaded lists, so that we can more robustly track constituent email preferences.

In practice, this means that:

• If the list contains xids, and an xid matches a known unsubscribe, but the email address is different, we exclude them anyway

• If the list contains xids, the email address on the list matches the email address of an unsubscribe, but the xids are different for some reason, we exclude them anyway

• If the list contains xids, and both the xid and the email addres match an unsubscribe, the person is excluded

• If the list doesn't contain xids, but the emails match, we exclude them

• If the list xid doesn't match any unsubscribes, and the list email doesn't match any unsubscribes, the recipient is NOT excluded