Selections Tutorial: Newsletter Selection

According to the law and netiquette, your subscribers must be able to remove themselves from your list. This tutorial shows you how you can automatically exclude those unsubscribes from your active mailing list.

For this tutorial you need a database. Create a new database if you don't have one already

A mailing list is created in three steps:

  1. Add a newsletter preference field to your database
  2. Set your unsubscribe behaviour and add unsubscribe links.
  3. Create a mailinglist, to which you will later target your mass mailings

Add the newsletter preference field to your database

If someone no longer wishes to receive your emails, he or she must be able to unsubscribe . You can choose to remove unsubscribes completely from your database. Most marketeers however prefer to keep the profile data, and only remove unsubscribes from the active mailinglist.

To differentiate between profiles that like to receive emails from you we will add a field to your database to distinguish between them. Select your database and create a new field.

  • Give your field a nice descriptive name such as newsletter
  • Make it a multiple choice field with values <empty>, "Yes" and "No".
  • Check 'Show field on overview pages' (to show this field in the profile list) and ‘The field is indexed’ (to make the selection faster)
  • Store the field

Your field is now created. Now you need to set all users in your database to yes. We recommend doing this in Publisher, where you can edit multiple profiles at once under Current view if you have your database selected. You can also edit multiple profiles with the REST API.

Unsubscribing

If a user wants to unsubscribe they can do so by clicking an unsubscribe link, which you can add to your mail with the unsubscribe function in the template editor. Please note that this only works if you have entered unsubscribe settings

Excluding unsubscribes from future mailings

Only subscribers should receive your newsletter. Unsubscribes should not, and this is the way how to accomplish that:

You are going to create a selection (this is an active filter on the information in your database) and send your future mailings to this selection. All contacts that have unsubscribed, will automatically be omitted from the selection.

  • Create a new selection
  • Name it something (preferably descriptive)
  • Store it
  • Create a new condition with "Check on field"
  • Select the field holding the newsletter preference
  • Choose ‘is equal to’ –compare with value- ‘Yes’
  • Store the condition.

You can now use this selection to send email to only those who want to receive it.

More information