How does unsubscribing from emails work in Engage: Email?

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Now that you’ve signed up for SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Engage: Email, there are a couple of things you’ll want to keep in mind as you decide on your approach for implementing an opt-out process for your recipients.

There are essentially two approaches that you may choose to take:

1. Use SAS Customer Intelligence 360’s native unsubscribe link in your emails

If a recipient receives one of your emails and decides they would like to unsubscribe from future mailings, upon click the user record within the Data Hub is updated and that contact email address will no longer be sent to.

2. Link off to your preference center

Email contact preference centers have become an Email Marketing best practice over the last several years. They allow your subscribers to self-select their segmentation and can help reduce unsubscribe rates. Using this option, you’d simply need to replace the default SAS Customer Intelligence 360 unsubscribe URL with your preference center URL. Keep in mind that this approach would require you to do the work of ensuring that any further emails aren’t sent to this recipient. This can simply be done by ensuring the contact is no longer included in any recipient list (customer table, transient file or injected events) that is sent or uploaded into SAS Customer Intelligence 360. Alternatively, you can periodically perform uploads into the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 data-hub contact preference table to add opt-out records for the email addresses they want to suppress. This second approach is probably the safest since it ensures that if the marketing user accidentally uploads a recipient who has opted out then the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 system will not send the email.

A couple of other things to keep in mind. The SAS Customer Intelligence 360 opt-out system is based on the email address rather than the identity. If an email address is shared by multiple identities, then none of those identities will receive email if the address becomes opted out in SAS Customer Intelligence 360. This is an additional protection that our system provides. Second, if you have a ‘Program ID’ as part of the send agent configuration, the suppression received is only for that ‘Program.’

Questions? Comments? Let’s start a conversation below.