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Letting contacts unsubscribe

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Every newsletter you send carries an unsubscribe link, and Letterhead handles what happens next for you, in line with email regulations.

How unsubscribing works

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When someone clicks unsubscribe at the bottom of one of your newsletters, their status changes to Unsubscribed immediately. There’s no processing delay.

They stay in your audience as Unsubscribed. Keeping the record is what stops them being added back by accident; see Deleting contacts and handling data requests.

A few things to know up front:

  • A send already on its way can still arrive. A newsletter that had been handed off for delivery before the reader clicked can still land in their inbox. That’s a delivery already in flight, not a delay in the unsubscribe.
  • Readers unsubscribe the address they subscribed with. If someone gets your newsletter at more than one address, each one unsubscribes separately.
  • The link in a test email shows an error page. The person you sent the test to isn’t a subscriber, so this is expected. To check the link for real, subscribe your own address and send to a segment that contains only you.

Leaving everything in one step

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Readers who open their email preferences page can leave every newsletter your company sends them at once:

  1. On the preferences page, the reader selects Unsubscribe from everything.
  2. They’re asked to confirm. Yes, unsubscribe me from everything unsubscribes them; Cancel leaves everything as it was.
  3. The page confirms that they’ve been unsubscribed from every newsletter you send them.

What this covers:

  • It applies to the newsletters that reader receives from your company and that the preferences page lists for them. It doesn’t change anyone else’s subscriptions.
  • Their contact profile records that they chose to leave everything, and when. See Suppressions.
  • No one on your team can add them back to a newsletter by hand or by import.
  • If the reader later signs up again through one of your signup forms, that record is cleared and they’re subscribed to the newsletter they chose.

You can design the preferences page to match your brand; see Managing signup pages and subscribe forms.

When to contact us

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If a reader keeps receiving newsletters after unsubscribing with the right address, or sees an error from a real send, contact support and we’ll look into it.

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Still can’t find what you need? Contact support.