Contact Opt-In Management

Although many of your customers may want to be included in your mailings or survey invitations, it is not uncommon for some to decline. In fact, anti-spam legislation in most countries requires that you provide a way for your contacts to easily opt out of all mailings.

An effective opt-in process can also provide numerous benefits, including the following:

• Affirming contact receptiveness to your messages.
• Targeting the interests of your valued prospects and customers to provide more pertinent information without overwhelming their inboxes.
• Optimizing your contact data to improve conversion rates.
• Protecting your company reputation among ISPs.

To help track your customers’ messaging preferences, B2C Service provides two types of opt-in fields.

• Global Opt-in—is a contact database field that describes the willingness of your contacts to receive any form of bulk mailing.
• Custom opt-in fields—are contact custom fields of an opt-in data type that can be used to more precisely describe the willingness of contacts to receive bulk mailings about specific topics or products.

Opt-in fields are often made visible on the Account Settings page of the customer portal so that customers can set their own preferences for accepting bulk email. Opt-in fields are also commonly paired with unsubscribe links in mailings and survey invitations to provide contacts with a simplified means of opting out. See Insert an Unsubscribe Link.

Contacts that are globally opted in are considered fully active and willing to receive your communications. Alternately, contacts that are globally opted out should be regarded as though they have explicitly stated that they do not want to receive bulk email from your company—they should be excluded from all mailings and surveys. Global exclusions are enabled by default by the Honor Global Opt-in check box on the Audience tab of mailings and surveys. See Define the Broadcast Mailing Audience.

Exclusions based on custom opt-in fields are manually enabled by adding a filter to your segments, such as contacts.<opt-in_field_name> not equals No, or by adding a special segment to your audience as described in the following procedure.