I was wondering if anyone has a clever solution to this problem. We do email communications from our marketing department, development, and from admin (login resets, account alerts). If someone unsubscribes we want to make sure they stay out of all email communications, except for the admin type which are generally one-offs. So, ideally, I'd like to mark any unsubscribe email addresses as Inactive. The problem is that you can't do that if the email is tied to an active login. Just because the person unsubscribes doesn't mean they don't want to login and manage their account. So, I can't deactivate their login... and leaving the email address active runs the risk of sending something to them when we shouldn't. Anyone else dealing with this?
Hi Andy!
Have you considered setting up a dummy email address to use as their primary email address (perhaps create a new email type of unsubscribed for their real email)? You could leave their login email alone, but not have to worry about sending them anything unless it is intentional.
Jordan - Thanks for the quick reply. Nope, hadn't thought of that. The problem there though is we sometimes use the "Allow multiple contact points per constituent" option in Extraction Manager to get the widest audience and to support people who have multiple email accounts. I do have an email type of Unsubscribe which I'm putting on the email addresses, but there's no way in extract manager to say "only include these email types".
Hey Anh - We are using WordFly and it was setup to add an Unsubscribe attribute, and I've recently changed that to also change the email type to "Unsubscribed". My problem there is the disconnect between the attribute and the email address; people have unsubscribed their business email but left us their personal email. The attribute fails in that case unless I delete the business email (or mark it inactive if it's not tied to a login) and then delete the attribute. There's a similar mess when merging records one of which has the attribute and the other does not. The "Unsubscribe" fact needs to travel with the address, not the person.
You should be able to do a suppression of the "Unsubscribe" type in your extraction. That will exclude any of those people even when using "Allow all". You could also create an Electronic Address Purpose of "Unsubscribe" and add that to the email. That could be suppressed in an extraction also.
Thanks, Melissa - the problem there is that we have people with an unsubscribe to one address, but also a valid second email. For example, a business email that's unsubscribe and a personal email that is not. They basically are telling us that they don't want email at work, but it's fine to get them at home. The trick I'm looking for is to suppress Melissa's work email and only send to her personal email, complicated by the fact that her work email is tied to her active login. I know it sounds like a fringe case, but it happens enough to be an issue.
FWIW, I agree. WordFly uses the email address as the unique ID, and ties unsubscribes to email addresses. Tessitura seems to treat it on the constituent level, probably to comply with GDPR and other consumer protection acts. But it can be a challenge to deal with, for both companies and our patrons.