What’s New?

First of all, those of you who are currently using the Direct Unsubscribe snippet as it is now will be able to continue to do so without any changes being made. Your contacts will still be able to use your form, enter their email address, click submit, and (once their email address is appended to the Direct Unsubscribe snippet) unsubscribe.

The big change that has been made to Direct Unsubscribe is that it can now use a Bronto tracking cookie to automatically pull in the email address of the contact who clicked on a link in a message you sent from Bronto and unsubscribe that individual. This is great for people who would like to implement a truly one-click unsubscribe process that uses a custom unsubscribe landing page. The other change is that we’ve moved the feature from the unsubscribe page out to the Data Exchange area (Home tab > Settings > Data Exchange).

How To Use It

Using Direct Unsubscribe is actually pretty simple, but like any of our snippet based integrations, it can require some web programming knowledge. To get the snippet just go to the Home tab > Settings > Data Exchange and check the Direct Unsubscribe checkbox.  This will expand the box and reveal the code.  You’ll notice that the code does not include any area for email address. This is because it can now be used without using the Bronto tracking cookie. In other words, you can unsubscribe contacts even if they arrive at your unsubscribe page from a source other than a message you send via Bronto. If you would like to append the email address manually, just add the following to the very end of the snippet:

&email=email@example.com

Of course you will need to replace email@example.com with the email address of the person who wants to unsubscribe. This can be done by pulling the email address that the recipient enters into the form on your end. If you append an email address yourself, it will always take precedence over the the cookie used to identify the email address.

So that is an overview of the new and improved  Direct Unsubscribe feature, if you are currently using this feature or if you have any questions, please let us know!

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

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There are many reasons why you need to monitor the replies to your email marketing, such as:

• List Hygiene – You may be receiving unsubscribe requests, which brings me to…
• Compliance – CAN-SPAM (as well as many other nations’ laws) require you monitor replies for unsubscribes. So it’s not only a good idea, but also legally required (see a post on CAN-SPAM updates)
• An Open Channel – Your recipients may be trying to rave about your emails or give you good ideas, but you won’t know if you don’t listen.
• Because You Should – Out of common courtesy for your recipients, you should be listening to what they have to say back to you.

At Bronto, we provide a full-featured reply management tool to make this process quite easy. You can take advantage of this by checking the Enable Reply Tracking option when sending a message.

Once you have this enabled, your replies will come into Bronto instead of your inbox. You will also be able to take advantage of the tools we offer to manage those replies.

Automatically Process Unsubscribe Requests

To turn on automatic handling of unsubscribe requests, go to the Home->Settings->Replies.

Before you turn this feature on, you will want to tweak the words we look for in the subject line to identify unsubscribe requests. It’s important to make sure that you aren’t using these words in your subject lines, because if you were, every reply would be identified as an unsubscribe.

Once you have had this option on for a little bit, you can enable automatic deletion of unsubscribe replies as well. It’s a good idea to keep them around for a bit to ensure that we aren’t catching any other replies as unsubscribes.

With Bronto automatically unsubscribing contacts, you will save some time and effort, but it doesn’t mean that you no longer have to look at replies. There will always be replies that we don’t catch or that just require a personal response.

Keeping The Clutter Down

It also happens that lots of other emails end up in the replies inbox. These come mainly from two sources. The first is automated replies, these are most often ‘Out of Office’ replies. The other type is spam, which is most often caused by your recipients inboxes being harvested by spam bots (learn more about spambots).

Both of these can be a major annoyance when trying to manage replies. That’s why we made it so you can enable the deletion of Automated Replies and Spam messages.

Again it’s important to first test out our automated message identification for a short period of time. To test this out, all you have to do is perform a couple of sends, then go into your replies and look for the symbols that denote spam replies and automated replies.

Once you feel comfortable that we aren’t catching false positives, you can turn the automatic deletion on.

Walking Through The Rest

Even with all the help we provide, you will still need to go through your replies on a regular basis. You can quickly unsubscribe a contact right while you are viewing a reply. This will also delete that reply for you and move you along to the next request, thus allowing you to quickly dispatch a large number of replies in a short period of time.

I hope I have shown how important replies are as a part of email marketing. They provide a simple mechanism for your recipients to unsubscribe, get in touch with you, or even just vent. Managing them can be simple and painless if you use the tools at your disposal.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

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Active vs Inactive Contacts

Viewing a list of Active contacts, Inactive contacts, or both, is accomplished in the Contact Status Column.  The Status column indicates whether or not you are able to send messages to a particular contact. If you are able to send messages to a contact, then they will have a status of Active. Active contacts are “live” contacts that can receive messages from you. If you cannot send messages to a contact, then they are Inactive and given one of three status types described below:

• Bounce – The Bounce status indicates that you cannot send messages to this contact because they have received a hard bounce due to bad email address, or they have exceed the bounce limit for your account.
• Unconfirmed – Contacts with a status of Unconfirmed have not yet agreed to receive your messages. Remember, one of our policies is that contacts must agree to receive your messages in order for you to send to them (i.e. they were sent an opt-in invitation but have not yet agreed to receive your messages).
• Unsubscribed – Contacts with a status of Unsubscribed have either unsubscribed themselves from receiving messages from you, or were unsubscribed by you.  They can also be considered unsubscribed if they click the “This Is Spam” link in certain ISPs (such as Yahoo! or Hotmail).

Woops! Reactivating An Inactive Contact

Sometimes a contact is made Inactive by mistake.  One example of this could be someone testing the unsubscribe link during email test sends.

To reactivate an inactive contact:

1. Locate the contact using the search function on the All Contacts page, or by clicking the Inactive tab on the table on the All Contacts page.
2. Once you have located the contact you wish to reactivate, click on the email address associated with that contact.
3. On the Contact Overview page, click the Activate button to reactivate the contact. This will give the contact a status of Active.
4. An important note! You once again need to get permission to send mail to the contact via a subscription confirmation. There is no way to reactivate a large number of contacts at once. This is largely due to the seriousness of a unsubscribe request and the legality of re-subscribing someone who has unsubscribed.

Rob Slade
Client Support Specialist at Bronto

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