Stopping unsubscribes from forward emails

[Askari]

Just wondering if anyone has ideas on how to minimise unsubscribes on forwarded emails?

I've noticed other email list management providers have an email notification after an unsubscribe where a message like the following can be added.

We have removed your email address from our list.

We're sorry to see you go.

Was this a mistake? Did you forward one of our emails to a friend, and they clicked the unsubscribe link not realising they were in fact unsubscribing you from this list? If this was a mistake, you can re-subscribe at: [SUBSCRIBE LINK HERE]

As far as I can tell, BC only has a notification for double opt-in... not on an unsubscribe.

I figure that I can add a message to the Unsubscribe page but that wont necessarily stop the person from unsubscribing the original recipient.

[Liam Dilley]

Auto responders have the double opt in options as part of them. You are referring to email campaigns when you send them out to people.
- You can edit the auto responders and use tags
- You can edit the double opt in email with tags AND you can avoid that all together with the OPTIN=true parameter on the form action
- You can put your own subscribe tag or use the url tag to render your own footer and unsubscribe: Email Campaigns | Business Catalyst Developers

It is illegal to not offer a person the ability to unsubscribe from emails in most countries so BC will always inject this option if you do not include it.

[Askari]

Thanks Liam. I may not have been clear on my post.

We are trying to maintain existing customers that want to receive our email campaigns but are being unsubscribed by other people when the email is forward to them.  e.g Person A loves to receive our email campaigns and forwards email to person B. Person B doesn't want to receive email and clicks "unsubscribe" not realising that they have actually unsubscribed person A.

[Liam Dilley]

Nothing you can do about that. The link represents the data information for BC to know who to unsubscribe when they click the link. As I said, you HAVE TO include it for legal reasons for the person it is intended for.

I forward you a mailchimp email you can unsubscribe me just as any other mail solution. If you sign me up with out a two step validation then I get the email series.

That is just how things work with emails.

You can not stop someone forwarding emails. We had a client complain that an email format broke when she forwarded it to people but HTML emails forwarding with the mail client it does things to them and different per email client - Again this is out of your hands.

I gave you the information to create your own unsubscribe link so all you can do is form a footer paragraph of text to say "If you are the initial receive of this email you can unsubscribe here. If you are a forward of this email you do not need to unsubscribe.

[Askari]

Thanks again.

I will use your suggestion of the additional descriptive text on the email footer UNSUB link. This still may not stop some people from unsubscribing which is why I like the idea where other services offer a notification after un-subscription. This gives the original subscriber the opportunity to re-subscribe. With BC, they will never know they have been removed from a campaign. 

[Liam Dilley]

Thing with that is, I have been asked for that to be turned off. Clients get complaints from their clients (the ones getting the emails) where when you unsubscribe - it is because they do not want to get emails any more.. So when they get one more they are even more annoyed.

[Askari]

Maybe having the feature as optional would be best then?

[Liam Dilley]

It would mean a re-write though in the functionality for BC. I can not see them doing that. Since there is not such movement in updates like this in BC any more I would run off the above and nothing else.