Unsubscribes and bounces
What happens when somebody unsubscribes, an address does not exist, or a recipient marks your mail as spam.
Marketing mail should offer a way out, and addresses that cannot be reached should not keep being written to. Ascensie handles both on its own, and shows you what happened.
The unsubscribe link
Every layout you use for mail has to carry an unsubscribe link. A layout without one cannot be saved, and a campaign without a working link does not go out. That is deliberately not a setting you can switch off.
When a recipient follows the link, they land on a page asking them to confirm. It says what stops: marketing only. Mail about something they asked for, such as an invoice, a booking or a reply to their own message, keeps coming.
The unsubscribe only happens when they press the button, so a link fetched in advance by a mail scanner unsubscribes nobody.
Bounces and complaints
A bounce is a message that could not be delivered. A complaint is a recipient marking your mail as spam.
On a hard bounce, where the address permanently does not exist, we stop sending to that address. On a temporary bounce, such as a full mailbox, we do not: that is no reason to write somebody off. A complaint always stops sending.
The unsubscribe list
It all comes together on one screen: Marketing → Emails → Unsubscribes. It holds the addresses your workspace may not send marketing to. Every campaign skips them without anyone having to think about it.
Each row shows the address, the date and the reason:
- Unsubscribed. The recipient used the unsubscribe link.
- Bounced. The address permanently does not exist.
- Marked as spam. The recipient filed a complaint.
- Added by hand. Someone on your team put the address there.
Add address lets you add one yourself, for instance because somebody asked you to stop over the phone. Removing is possible too, but only do it if they asked: you would be undoing an unsubscribe somebody made themselves.
The list belongs to your workspace alone. Someone unsubscribing from you changes nothing about what another customer of ours may send to that same person.
Per campaign
Beside the overview, every sent campaign shows the figures for that one send: how many were accepted, delivered, bounced and came back as complaints, plus recorded opens and clicks.
The audience you see in the campaign editor is the number of recipients matching your conditions. Unsubscribes are taken off just before sending rather than in the editor, so the number in the editor keeps meaning what it says.